Blogs@BJUI

The current article by Sun et al. [1] representing a number of institutions involved in prostate cancer treatment provision is thought-provoking and hypothesis-generating. The authors contention when mining Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results data for 67 000 men who had localized prostate cancer between 1988 and 2005 is that those with a life expectancy >10 years had less likelihood of prostate cancer death when treated with surgery rather than by radiotherapy or being left to observation.…

There are many terrifying anecdotes relating to the use of ketamine and the damage that sustained daily use may cause to the urinary tract. These include those reported in the medical literature and through the wider media. Reports of ketamine-related deaths, memory loss, hepatobiliary damage, ureteric obstruction with renal failure and profound bladder pain. Use is recorded in teenagers with the ability for a child to demonstrate symptoms to their peers becoming a badge of honour. At UCLH we are…

A few years ago Barrack Obama, the President of the USA, is supposed to have said on Valentine's Day – “Gentlemen – do not forget!” He was apparently speaking “from experience”. Not remembering that important day can have catastrophic consequences for many men. On that occasion, PSA stood for public service announcement. The headline, however, could easily have been mistaken for Prostate Specific Antigen. One could argue whether the PSA test is as important to men as Valentine's…

Dr Indy Gill, as everyone knows, has always been a pioneer of minimally invasive surgery, and has continued to push the boundaries of this over the past 20 years. Some of this progress has been seriously exciting, both for us mere mortals who have visited his operating room or viewed his live surgery, and also for Dr Gill as he has continued to reinvent what is possible.   Tackling a Level II/III caval thrombus using robotic surgery, exploring nephron-sparing surgery with anatomically extreme tumours,…

Last year in September, a Brazilian multi-millionaire Count Scarpa, announced to his followers on Facebook that he would bury his most favorite car, a black Flying Spur Bentley costing half a million Dollars, in his backyard! He expressed his intention to be buried next to the Bentley when he died. He explained that this desire arose after he had watched a documentary on the Egyptian Pharaohs and how they buried themselves with their beloved items, so that they can be used during the afterlife.…

A decade has passed since the publication of the first series of robot-assisted radical cystectomies in the BJUI by Menon et al. [1]. New technologies are fascinating, and many surgeons who aspire to leave a mark in history take the lead in pioneering new procedures. Others follow without waiting for any evidence to justify the adoption of new procedures. In this race, the opinion of the most important stakeholder, the patient, gets ignored. Although their study has many methodological…

February 2014 twitter-based international urology journal club #urojc continued with the theme of prostate cancer. This time the discussion was based around the complications arising from radical treatment, and the paper was available open access courtesy of Lancet Oncology. Nam et al [1] reported on a population based retrospective cohort study of men who underwent surgery or radiotherapy alone for prostate cancer in Ontario, Canada between 2002 to 2009. Instead of the traditional outcomes that…

Cast your mind back to college physics and recall that an interface is a boundary between two phases of matter, for example gas and liquid. The interface is where interaction occurs between the disparate parts, there may be an exchange of molecules, or a conversion of molecules from one state to the other such as evaporation. Information, such as light or sound is always upset when it reaches an interface and some of the message may be bounced off while some is transmitted across the interface to…

We all would agree that once in a while, during the course of an operation, we feel uneasy because of that little monster of a device...your cell phone starts ringing. The urge to pick up and answer the call often becomes insurmountable. We have all committed this “cardinal sin” of answering a call during surgery. A recent survey conducted in India showed that a “whopping 90% nurses and 50% technicians interviewed for the survey admitted to answering calls during surgery”. 10% of the doctors…