Richard Smith's editorial lineage goes back 25 years, and mine a bit longer, to the clinical editorship of World Medicine in the early 1980s — nothing like a bit of badinage between two old hacks.
We are aware of the demographic asymmetry in the editorial board and do our best by advertising nationally for new members — but as for sacking my splendid colleagues, this isn't the BMJ!
Diagnostic safety-netting was a term coined by Roger Neighbour in his seminal Inner Consultation1 and is a useful neologism which is firmly embedded in describing the diagnostic processes of primary care.2
Calum Paton can comment for himself about the neo-Liberal consensus and power vis a vis responsibility, but tighter editing by me would have stopped short at changing this sentence — general practice unfortunately has a long record of the exercise of power through claims to autonomy and clinical freedom without fiscal responsibility.
And finally all those terms missing from the cloud are very much on our minds, and all will appear in the titles of articles and papers to be published in the next few months.
REFERENCES
- 1.Neighbour R. The inner consultation. 2nd edn. Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing; 2004. [Google Scholar]
- 2.Almond S, Mant D, Thompson M. Diagnostic safety-netting. Br J Gen Pract. 2009;59(568):872–874. doi: 10.3399/bjgp09X472971. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]