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Dave Curtis

Honorary Professor at UCL Genetics Institute

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Dave Curtis

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Nailing Hunt's lies

January 12, 2016

Here is the soundbite which Hunt has been repeating ad nauseam: "And at the moment we have an NHS where if you have a stroke at the weekends, you're 20% more likely to die. That can't be acceptable." Sounds quite impressive? I tweeted him to ask for evidence and got no reply so I decided to look for my own. It wasn't hard to find. I'll deal with the best and most recent example. The headline finding from this paper is that patients admitted at weekends with a stroke diagnosis have an increased 7-day mortality of 19%, apparently just as Hunt claims: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487251/ The 7-day mortality for week-end admissions is 12.9% and for week-day admissions is 11.1% and if you factor in comorbidities etc. this gives you an adjusted mortality odds ratio of 1.19. Just as Hunt says. But let's look more closely. At some numbers buried in the text of the paper and not even given a p value, even though they are probably the most st...

Sex and gender

December 24, 2019

This post is just here because I find myself having to make the same arguments again and again on twitter so in future I'm just going to link to this. Do I know what I'm talking about? I was a psychiatrist in the National Health Service for thirty years. That means I qualified as a medical doctor and then had post-graduate training, which naturally included some material on human development and sex and gender. I also have two doctoral degrees in human genetics, an MD and a PhD, and have been an author on hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, mostly on human genetics. Because of my research in genetics I am an Honorary Professor at two different London universities. My bio is here: http://www.davecurtis.net/dcurtis.html and the publications can be viewed here: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=Vrr4Ig0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate Do I do research in sexual development in humans? No. Do I understand it? Yes. I've read the stuff that ...

SITUATIONAL JUDGEMENT TEST - example ranking question

February 28, 2013

Example Ranking Question You are in charge of a large national organisation responsible for assessing the abilities of all the country's newly qualified doctors and matching them to appropriate employment. Shortly before distributing the results and final allocations you become aware that there is a problem with the marking system which you have outsourced. Rank in order the following actions in response to this situation (1= Most appropriate; 5= Least appropriate) A. Cross your fingers and hope it will all be OK. Probably nobody will mind too much. B. Send out the incorrect marks and allocations then follow with an email saying you will get medical schools to check all the papers and have another go at it. C. As above but attempt to shift some of the blame onto one of the candidates by implying that their smudgy pencil confused the marking machine so really it's all their fault. D. Admit that things may not have been perfect but undertake to try to do better ...