In any one year one in four people in the United Kingdom have their thyroid function checked.

This grammatically erroneous and factually absurd statement from a 2009 BMJ paper remains uncorrected, as highlighted by this interesting paper about journals’ error handling in JRSM. It strikes me as alarming that the Guardian appears to have a more open and robust approach to highlighting and correcting errors than our leading medical journal; but then I guess correcting mistakes in emerging research fields is a trickier issue than correcting journalistic errors.

More irritatingly – how come other people can get such obvious slips though peer review, yet peer reviewers pick up on every dodgy comma in my work?

The happiest moment of my year is about three hours before the first race at Cheltenham.

So wrote Charlie Brooks in a Telegraph article on Sunday. This morning, he and his wife Rebecca Brooks were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice… just hours before the first race at Cheltenham.

We found evidence of a reduced risk of death occurring among patients already in hospital on weekend days versus week days.

Given all the attention Dr Foster got for their finding that death rates in NHS hospitals were higher at weekends, it’s interesting that this huge study essentially suggests the opposite (though the full paper is worth reading, and is less encouraging than this single comparison might suggest).

A couple of years from now, Britain’s record companies expect to be generating half their revenues from digital.

I nearly choked on my cornflakes when I read this sentence in Dan Sabbagh’s Guardian article this morning. I’m totally amazed that digital revenues don’t already account for way over half of record companies’ revenues, but apparently 90% of Susan Boyle’s records – to cite just one example – are sold on physical CD.

I haven’t had a physical CD player in my house for some years now. Sure, I can play via a computer’s optical drive, or the CD player in my car, but I rarely do. I’m amazed that physical formats remain so popular.

Let the prayers remain in the agendas and let those who do not want them opt to sit out, because in doing so you are not being presumptuous about people’s faith and viewing your own particular beliefs as more important than others.

According to Ms Bisset of Southport, having Christian prayers formally included on council meeting agendas is the best way to avoid favouring one religion.

That’s an interesting logical leap, to say the least.

This is (slightly modified) from a blog post by Marco Arment, writing about the entertainment industry:

Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach to take. It’s unrealistic and naïve to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is easier, faster and cheaper for so many of them. The pragmatic approach is to address the demand.

I came across this quote via Jonathan Rothwell’s blog post, and, in truth, I’m fairly ambivalent about the entertainment industry.

Yet the sentiment of the quote (perhaps better expressed in the full article) – the importance of marrying the “right” with the “pragmatic” – is applicable in so many areas of life, not least public health. And yet, it strikes me as an often forgotten, or perhaps often ignored, tenet.

It’s easy to say “lose weight”, “drink less”, or “stop smoking”, and we all know that such messages are right. But all have a multitude of maintaining habitual behaviours and causal factors, and maintaining the status quo is all-to-often “easier, faster and cheaper”. The secret of great public health interventions is to turn the “right” choice into the “pragmatic” choice – and, in truth, we’re not always great at doing that.

Marrying “right” with “pragmatic” can be hard, and requires seeing a problem from multiple points of view. It’s easier to concentrate on the “right”, but it rarely works. We all need to get better at making out solutions pragmatic, even if it means approaching problems in unfamiliar, unusual ways.

Here endeth the lesson.

I am a dog lover and had many as pets over the years and I ask the question to irresponsible dog owners: why can’t you clean up after your dog?

This teaser was posed by Mrs Sharon Hawkins in a letter to the Southport Visiter. I’m not a dog downer, but I suspect that the irresponsible behaviour of irresponsible dog owners may reasonably be attributed to their irresponsibility. Any other theories would, however, be welcomed.

I tweeted about this Times article yesterday – it’s really brilliant, like the plot of an off-beat West Wing episode.

Julian Glover (formerly of The Guardian) writes the following for Mr Lansley:

As I grew up, the NHS wasn’t some remote organisation. It was what we knew, what we cared about and what we wanted to make work. And that is every bit as true today. As a son, as a father, and as a patient, I know what it is to have the NHS at your side.

It is returned from Lansley’s office as:

Outcomes depend on integration across services. Opportunity of NHS/public health/and local authorities together. Like they do in Sheffield … Not structural integration but integration around families and children. Marmot (universal proportionalism) – early intervention.

Go and read the full thing, it’s fantastic.

The first argument against the Bill is that we don’t need legislation. Those who articulate this argument all of a sudden should be asked why, then, do they oppose it?

Because it isn’t needed, perhaps? This utterly bizarre defence of the Health and Social Care Bill by Baroness Warsi is car-crash online commentary. It’s poorly informed and logically flawed.

With friends like these, does the Health and Social Care Bill even need enemies?

For all the undeserved flak it has received, Love Never Dies is one of the greatest of all Lloyd Webber’s musicals… the original cast recording sends shivers down my spine whenever I listen to it.

Charles Spencer was always a fan, but seeing an ever-increasing number of positive reviews of the Australian production of Love Never Dies, like Charles’s in the Telegraph today, fills me with happiness. It’s a breathtakingly brilliant musical, phenomenally under-rated and under-estimated. I’ll be amazed if it doesn’t return to London to rave reviews before the decade’s out.