From Medicine Balls Private Eye, number 1678, 26th June / 8th of July 2026; page 16.

NHS online plans to see 8.5 million patients in three years but will it steal staff away from hospitals? NHS online’s first chair is John Browett, a former Tesco.com, Dixon’s and Dunelm chief executive and ex Apple retail head. He was poached from Dixon’s by Apple in 2012 but was sacked shortly afterwards, with Bloomberg attributing this to his oversight of a “morale-sapping” culture.

Note the model: retail, not medicine or even engineering. A few lines later we learn:

Patients will be able to access online care…

From next year tech-savvy patients will apparently be able to access online appointments from specialists around the country directly through the NHS app. Any tests, scans or procedures will then happen at healthcare sites closer to patients’ homes while clinicians will be able to review notes remotely.

Patients will apparently always have the option of face-to-face appointments (if they’re prepared to wait longer), and the scheme is going to be piloted for specific conditions first.

According to the government press release, “Women’s health issues, including severe menopause symptoms and menstrual problems that can be a sign of endometriosis or fibroids, will be among the conditions available for online referrals. Prostate problems like prostate enlargement and a raised prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level will also be covered by the service, along with eye conditions including cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration. NHS online will also provide support for other painful and distressing conditions such as iron deficiency anaemia and inflammatory bowel disease.”

Read that again: iron deficiency anaemia??? It is hard to imagine that anybody with a medical degree could write such rubbish. Interesting to know if they will do the same for dentistry.

Three patients link.

Here is a nice link to the “Three patients” article I wrote a few years back.

This week’s Economist.

Steven Shapin · Barrel of Greenbacks: Luis Alvarez and the Bomb

A review by Steven Shapin of Collisions: A physicist’s journey from Hiroshima to the death of the dinosaurs. Author: Alec Nevala-Lee.

The Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, transmuted pure theory into mass slaughter, and it changed everything for the scientists who did the work.

Oppenheimer was called the Father of the Bomb, but Alvarez was the scientist in the delivery room. At the moment the bomb was released over Hiroshima, Alvarez was fully occupied watching the oscilloscope screen that recorded data from the gauges slung under parachutes. Minutes later, he ‘looked in vain for the city that had been our target’, seeing no man-made structures on the ground. He worried that the Enola Gay bombardier had missed, but the crew on the observation plane reassured him that Hiroshima had been annihilated: ‘It was a beautiful job of bombing.’

Why Ebola came back — and a warning for the next pandemic

Speed is another blessing of modern life for viruses. A pathogen jumping into a human in Jakarta at midday can be in New York by tea time. 

FT LInk

Our world is actually analogue if you look at it from high enough.

A comment from DavidOxford in FT. He also added:

Some coding jobs may be eaten by AI but there has been for years, a world shortage of analogue and radio frequency electrical engineers and quite likely this will continue

For dermatology, analogue still rules. And I believe you can make an argument that this will be true for much of medicine.

Pope Leo calls for leaders to reject polarisation as he begins Spanish tour | Pope Leo XIV | The Guardian

If they were confronted with the question: do they want to see Bad Bunny or do they want to see the pope, I think many will go to see Bad Bunny,” he said on his flight from Rome, before adding: “But I think there will also be a few here to see the pope.”

Indeed. I was there in Rome earlier this year.

Beyond all the grant chasing, bitching and annoying hype merchants, every now and then, I just sit back and smile at scientific discovery— the automated escalator that turns out new knowledge. This is from the ever excellent Fermat’s Library.

This week’s paper is “Age of Meteorites and the Earth” (1956) by Clair Patterson.For most of history, no one knew how old the Earth was – estimates ranged from a few thousand years to a few billion, with no reliable way to choose between them. Then a 34-year-old Caltech geochemist settled it in eight pages. Rather than date the Earth directly, Patterson dated five meteorites and showed our planet belonged to the same family.

The number he got, 4.55 billion years, has barely moved in seventy years.

(The paper is here: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/age-of-meteorites-and-the-earth)

from The Economist

What do you do with your past? She was only 17 when the war ended but she already had so much past; she had already seen so much. Like that boy in the camp. He had been tied to a tree then SS soldiers had shot at him. They shot his foot, his arm, his hands, an ear. A little boy, used as target practice. Then there was the girl who tried to escape. The soldiers had shot her then hung her body in the middle of the camp as an example. And there was the pregnant woman: when she went into labour, the SS tied her legs together. She had never seen agony like hers.

The dangerous delusion of modern warfare

The Economist

Entrepreneurs weave FPV-derived [first party view] video depicting the terrified or resigned faces of cornered Russian and Ukrainian soldiers into snuff movies set to heavy metal. Combat increasingly resembles bespoke remote-controlled execution. In one FPV video highlighted by the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, a Russian soldier approached by a Ukrainian drone gestures towards his nearby comrade lying in a ditch: kill him instead. The drone pauses imperiously. It drops a grenade on the second soldier, decapitating him. Then it returns to the first soldier and does the same to him.

A few lines later we read …

The age of nuclear-arms-control agreements has come to an end.