FACTORS INFLUENCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF RESEARCH ETHICS COMMITTEES

By the time you read this (some three months after writing) things might be better – new prime minister, new emphasis; or things may be worse – continuing of the programme of denigration of GPs. I suspect that the current obsessions of Government (looking good, garnering votes, rolling out untested ideas and leaving us to clean up the mess) will be the same. Even the journals are beginning to reflect a degree of disaffection.

The paper on ordering blood tests was of particular interest to me: encapsulating two current interests – the Ulysses syndrome and the duckogram. The Ulysses syndrome mirrors the great hero’s generally pointless meanderings following the Trojan wars, taking ten years to get back to Ithaca. This is used to describe the use of increasing number of tests to explore variations in other tests (a good starting point is what do you do about a raised ESR?) so that after a few months you’ve got nowhere fast and aren’t any closer to a diagnosis (Ithaca). Your boat (patient) is suffering, though.

The duckogram is a simple concept: if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck – you don’t need to do a duckogram to prove it.

Each article is graded from 1–5

IMPORTANCE: ★ (very marginal) to ★★★★★ (essential reading)

EASE OF READING: ☻ (impenetrable) to ☻☻☻☻☻ (very clear)