If you are busy in this first full week of the new year and have time to read only two pages, then make it the Letters. In a short space they illustrate well the range of issues that preoccupy doctors—and our pages: core clinical skills, the use of technology, doctors’ duties to society, improving the way services are delivered, and despair at non-evidence-based practices.

Thus Stephen Hayes urges the importance of teaching primary care doctors the key clinical skill of detecting melanomas (doi:10.1136/bmj.a3138). In doing so he bemoans the lack of teaching in dermatology received by most British undergraduates these days. That lament is …