A Certificate Is Not a Competency..!

India has mastered the expansion of medical education. The harder challenge is making sure skill, judgment and supervision expand with it.

Seats Can Be Created. Experience Cannot.

A certificate answers a surprisingly narrow question:
Did this person satisfy the requirements of the programme?

The question a patient actually cares about is different:
Can this person recognise what is happening to me and respond safely when the textbook stops being helpful?

That difference is where competence lives....!

Social media algorithms do no always reflect our values

A new analysis of Twitter/X finds that posts from accounts that people follow reflect users’ values—but that there is a misalignment between users’ values and the content the algorithm amplifies (in the "For You" feed).

This is a big problem because the algorithms are feeding us content we don't want and yet they are hard--or sometimes impossible--to change. We have found that most people want greater control and transparency over what they see on social media: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2610388123

A slightly mischievous question crossed my mind recently: what exactly is so “scientific” about political science and sociology?

I’m no expert in either—just a pediatrician and medical teacher wandering outside his academic territory, looking at these disciplines through the lens of evidence, reproducibility and the glorious unpredictability of human beings.

The result is this short, tongue-in-cheek reflection. Shared with curiosity, skepticism and due humility. 🙂

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Health AI platforms are becoming important gateways to medical knowledge. By answering clinical questions and synthesizing published evidence, tools such as OpenEvidence could improve access to information—but they may also concentrate control in a small number of technology companies.

Adults who could successfully stand on one leg for 10 seconds had an 46% lower risk of dying from any cause compared with those who couldn’t complete the test.

I find this fascinating because it shows how much information can be captured by a very simple measure of physical function.

It’s another reminder that balance is probably a meaningful marker of overall health and resilience, especially as we get older.