• Medical Education
• Medical Journalism

We wage a perpetual battle about what not to read. There are so many factors which stop us from reading as much as we feel we ought to, but I would put highest amongst these the sheer volume that we could actually read. I was recently in a talk by Professor Neal Maskrey who quoted some work looking at the reading requirements generated by a ward round. The researchers reckoned that the time needed to read simply to keep up to date with the guidelines on the conditions encountered on the round was easily an order of magnitude greater than the time needed to see the patients. There are some flaws in this of course—we don't factor the time spent at medical school into the time it takes us to understand the average patient's condition on a round, in the same way …