Medicine and Science from The BMJ

The US military’s Operation “Epic Fury” highlighted the devastating cost of using artificial intelligence for rapid military planning. Thomas Adamkiewicz, associate professor at Morehouse School of Medicine, and Zulfiqar Bhutta, Robert Harding Inaugural Chair in Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, to discuss why international humanitarian law is lagging dangerously behind technology, and why we urgently need a new era of legal frameworks to govern AI use in war. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription medicines is strictly illegal everywhere in the world except for the United States and New Zealand. Deborah Cohen, investigative journalist, joins us to explain how global social media platforms are making borders porous, allowing Hollywood celebrities and high-profile influencers to broadcast drug endorsements directly into the feeds of UK citizens. Finally, Between 2020 and 2023, the UK government allocated £1.7 billion specifically intended for frontline doctor training. However, a deep-dive investigation has revealed that a staggering £400 million of that funding is completely unaccounted for - David Hutchison, paediatrics registrar, and Jonathan De Oliveira, GP trainee, join us to describe what they found. Reading List AI warfare demands a new era of humanitarian law Bad influencers: How social media imported US-style drug advertising to the UK “Black hole” of medical student funding

In this week’s episode, we challenge long-held medical narratives, starting with how the healthcare system manages life after a cancer diagnosis. While medical advancements mean more people are surviving cancer than ever before, many patients report a "cliff-edge" experience where coordinated care effectively vanishes once primary treatment ends. We are joined by Dr. Rosalind Adam, an Academic GP at the University of Aberdeen, who argues that it is time to stop viewing cancer as a discrete, one-off episode and instead integrate it into routine chronic disease management. Next, we dive into a landmark study from Sweden that is overturning the conventional notion of autism as a predominantly male condition. Historically, autism has been cited as having a 4:1 male-to-female ratio, but new data suggests this gap may be a byproduct of timing rather than biology. We speak with Dr. Caroline Fyfe, a medical epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr. Natasha Marrus, a child psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis. They discuss their analysis of 2.7 million individuals, which revealed a significant female catch-up during adolescence, showing that by age 20, the diagnosis ratio approaches 1:1. The team explores why girls are so often missed in childhood and what this shift means for the future of sex-sensitive diagnostic practices. Reading List For more details on the research discussed in this episode, you can access the full papers on bmj.com: Cancer is a chronic disease: why don’t we treat it as one? Adam R, Hogg DR, Ritchie LD, Nekhlyudov L. BMJ 2026;392:e086624. Time trends in the male to female ratio for autism incidence: population based, prospectively collected, birth cohort study. Fyfe C, et al. BMJ 2026;392:e084164. Please subscribe to the Medicine & Science podcast on your favourite platform to get the latest episodes. If you enjoy our podcast, you can leave us a review or a comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Deborah Cohen's new book "How the internet hijacked our health" explores the profound impact of the internet on our wellbeing. In this conversation with BMJ Editor, Kamran Abbasi, they discuss the ways in which online information can both empower and mislead, the role of big tech in shaping our wellbeing and the complex and disturbing ways wellness influencers are becoming more trusted than the NHS. With insights drawn from extensive research and a deep understanding of the digital landscape, Deborah Cohen sheds light on the critical issues at the intersection of technology and healthcare, and challenges anyone who consumes health information online to think differently about what they're doing.

This interview is available in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yNO47EfuEM ​‪@RichardJMurphy‬, political economist and tax campaigner, joins Kamran Abbasi, Editor in Chief of The BMJ. In the UK an ongoing dispute between resident doctors and the Labour Government saw doctors go on strike in mid-December. With Winter pressure piling on and cost-of-living on the rise, do doctors have a credible case of pay rises? And more broadly, how can the economic situation of the NHS be improved? 00:00 Introduction01:30 Doctor Pay Claims04:33 Inflation Measures07:29 Affordability Crisis09:48 Market Forces Arguments12:52 NHS Affordability15:00 Youth Unemployment19:14 Political Priorities23:10 Neoliberal Capitalism27:35 Mixed Economy Alternative32:32 Prescription for NHS

This episode is available in video form on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1cGrD47eZSk American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson joins Kamran Abbasi to discuss climate disaster, the need for political imagination, and science fiction's vision for health. Kim Stanley Robinson is the acclaimed author of a trilogy of novels, exploring the terraforming and settlement of Mars. His most recent novel, 'Ministry for the Future', was published in 2020. 'Ministry for the Future' sets out a vision for real solutions to our climate crisis, covering global finance, the animal kingdom, rising sea levels, energy production and much more. The book imagines a Ministry that begins its work in 2025. Five years after publication, with 2025 past and gone, The BMJ spoke to Robinson to explore how closely the novel's vision for the future has reflected reality. 01:00 BMJ's New Climate Change Initiative01:21 Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future04:02 The Role of Political Violence in Climate Action10:50 The Concept of the Carbon Coin12:51 The Importance of Global Collaboration27:32 The Role of Medicine in Climate Change32:33 Youth and Climate Activism37:53 Hope and Despair in Climate Action41:29 Conclusion and Future Works Read more about The BMJ's climate coverage in the latest issue: https://www.bmj.com/content/392/8479