Blogs@BJUI

The Simon Foundation for Continence was founded in 1982 by Cheryle Gartley to bring the subject into the open, remove the stigma surrounding incontinence and provide help and hope to the individuals. their families and their healthcare professionals. As President, Cheryle invited Roger Feneley, Calvin Kunin and David Stickler to the Foundations’ third conference in the series entitled Innovating  for Continence: The Engineering Challenge in 2011, to talk about catheter drainage of the bladder. …

In this issue of BJUI, Borque et al. discuss a subject that is now very close to my heart. Aged 48 years, I am 6 weeks post radical prostatectomy for a Gleason 3 + 4 prostate adenocarcinoma measuring ~2 mL in volume, with a PSA level of 2.54 ng/mL. Histology reassures me it is organ confined and seminal vesicle negative. My father and his brother both died aged 63 years of Gleason 10 prostate cancer and my brother is awaiting his radical prostatectomy in a few weeks. I have two sons, one…

One of the most exciting challenges in magazine design is updating the look of a medical journal. In the past, academic publications did not discernibly change their look, even with editorial changes. A recognised font and layout was perhaps seen to imbue trust and respect, which are important to the integrity of the journal. However, just as editorial content and practice evolves there is great potential in pushing forward design and layout in academic text for both the reader and the editorial…

Or Let’s Paws for a Second! Or Lets paws for a second before we all start howling about nothing!   Recently while driving to a Day Surgery list at Heatherwood hospital in Ascot, I happened to listen to BBC Radio 4. There was a report regarding high accuracy for the detection of stomach cancer by a simple breath test. This reminded me of a study published some time ago in European Urology on the ability of a dog to detect prostate cancer by smelling a sample of urine. For a skeptic…

For as long as I have been operating independently, music has been an essential part of my operating theatre environment. If there is no music playing in the background, it is to me as if there is a missing component of the “time out” check list that is carried out by surgical teams prior to each procedure. For many years, I was trapped in the 70s and 80s with my choice of music. Bowie, Stones, R.E.M. and Pink Floyd were some of the artists that were on high rotation. It provided education…

Robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (RARP) has become the technique of choice for clinically localised prostate cancer. However, marked inter-surgeon heterogeneity and an obvious lack of standardisation exist for the indications and technique of the procedure. In this issue of the BJUI, Ficarra et al. conducted a multinational survey seeking opinion from 145 robotic surgeons about individual practices during RARP. These opinions can be compared against the benchmark set by the Pasadena Consensus…

Stone disease and osteopaenia are both common conditions, and reduced bone mineral density (BMD) is an increasingly recognized complication in stone formers; indeed, in a previous paper in BJUI, Arrabal-Polo et al. reported that patients with recurrent stones have lower BMD compared with controls or patients with just a single episode of urolithiasis. Although the exact pathogenesis of bone loss in stone disease is yet to be determined, the conceptually obvious relationship with hypercalciuria…

Although I enjoyed reading Jim Duthie’s Blog Post ‘Surgery Isn’t Normal’, I would argue that no profession, particularly those constituting a high degree of specialization, are normal. Let me set the scene from a research scientist’s perspective… It was late on a Tuesday night three years ago, and being a poor PhD student at the time (PhD scholarships pay below poverty level), I was completing my part-time work in the histology department to help make the rent. My research laboratory…

There was a time when doctors were reluctant to tell patients the truth about a diagnosis of cancer, and even more unwilling to discuss any illness from which they themselves suffered.  John Anderson broke the mould last year when he made a public announcement about his newly diagnosed liver metastases, which subsequently turned out to be the result of secondary spread of adenocarcinoma of the prostate. John was President Elect of the British Association of Urological Surgeons (BAUS) at the…