BMJ  2005;330:361 (12 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7487.361-a

Letter

Academic medicine: who is it for?

Five rescue remedies for academic medicine

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—The big problem for academic medicine is irrelevance. Sewankambo and others rightly call for relevant research—for irrelevance creeps in at every stage of research and teaching, from identifying health problems, conceptualising them, designing ethical research projects, securing funding, and interpreting findings.^{1 2}

When the outcome filters back to clinicians and would-be clinicians it is stamped with the hallmarks of ambitious politicians and academics, the avarice of shareholders and corporations, the tired ideas of bastioned, venerable institutions, the bureaucratic dead hand of committees, and the blindness of science. Then comes the righteous indignation that Luddite clinicians ignore these expensive, erudite fruits and that students fall asleep.

The brutal fact is that academic medicine's understanding will always lag behind the doing of good clinical practice, just as literary scholarship follows good creative writing and natural science follows nature. Even transformative technical innovations betray a mechanistic view of humanity that often misses . . . [Full text of this article]

St Augustine's Practice, Keynsham, Bristol BS31 2BN william.house@gp-L81045.nhs.uk

School of Integrated Health, Euston Building, University of Westminster, London W1W 6UW

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