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In time for some holiday reading, the BMJ has put together an unusual and off-beat issue that you may wish to place at the top of your reading list. The entire issue offers an interesting array of articles - all of them thought provoking, some are really funny and others are strange but true.
One article describes a new board game called 'Get Peered!' which offers a wonderful and tongue-in-cheek view of the world of academic medicine and how to move ahead in peer review. The authors say that all you need to play is "a copy of the board, dice, and your own tokens. Beer bottle tops will do nicely, if you can't bring yourself to use your Royal College cuff links or the earrings you bought on your most recent drug company trip to Monte Carlo. You will also need your Big Pharma Company fake gold pen and headed notepaper to keep a tally of the scores." They give you the board to print out, describe the rules or tell you that you can make up your own.
David L Sackett and Andrew D Oxman offer an article called "HARLOT plc: an amalgamation of the world's two oldest professions." They introduce a new concept as "Tired of being good but poor, the authors have amalgamated the world's two oldest professions in a new niche company, HARLOT plc, specialising in How to Achieve positive Results without actually Lying to Overcome the Truth" Another article offers "a comprehensive review of strategies to optimise data for corrupt managers and incompetent clinicians".
Richard Smith presents an editorial on giving advice to medical students at a new medical school and lists the best advice from members of the BMJ editorial board. He also lists "Advice from Dave Sackett, the father of evidence based medicine:
* The most powerful therapeutic tool you'll ever have is your own personality
* Half of what you'll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half,so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own
* Remember that your teachers are as full of bullshit as your parents
* You are in for more fun than you can possibly imagine"
There are many other wonderful articles including topics such as: car color and risk of car crash injury; retroactive prayer, psychiatric protection for the "battered mental patient" (by Thomas Szasz) and provocative editorials including one by Ruth Macklin entitled "Dignity is a useless concept."
Enjoy your holiday reading.
BMJ Volume 327, Issue 7429
1:07:17 AM 
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