Abstract
As I sit to write editorial for this issue of Scottish Medical Journal, the Scottish Government has allowed us to move into second phase of lockdown enforced earlier in March, 2020 due to SAR-2 Covid-19 pandemic. The virus has spread fast and caused huge socio-political changes across the globe, not even the best in business expected 6 months back. The impact of this has been huge ranging from personal to professional and in almost every sphere of life.
Learning by example or from peers would continue to remain one of the major contributors to our professional developments, however the pandemic has reminded us many realities and focused our attention to many questions. Firstly, why some poor countries such as Liberia with population of 4.8 million had just 34 deaths. That has possibly delinked a myth held by a few that only rich countries can enjoy a better healthcare delivery. Similarly, New Zealand with similar size of population had 22 covid-19 related deaths. Is it strategy, timing, culture to respond to a challnege or ability and will to strictly adhere to administrative directives which counts equally or more than just our commitment to spend extra money to improve our healthcare? Secondly, the situation has shown us that there are sections of society where disease behaviour and its impact would be more than rest such as ethnic minorities in the UK and people of Afro-Caribbean origin. This has again turned our attention to racism, discrimination and social inequalities and finally, retraction of research papers from prestigious NEJM and Lancet due to lack of authentic data has provided a reminder to editors, peer reviewers, authors and publishers to have an extra layer of scrutiny in the future.
In this issue of SMJ, Atrah Hasan 1 provides a background to cytokine storm and strategy to deal with. Krysztofiak et al. 2 report experience of non-invasive CT scan in assessing bypass graft condition and Demir Gündoğmuş et al. 3 describe coronary intervention in elderly population. These publications enhance our understanding of cardiovascular disease which remains one of the major killers in Scotland and world over. There is a Scottish audit on knee arthroplasty reported by Brown et al. 4 and a high quality meta-analysis by Wang 5 and colleagues; again, placing these together in this issue should give us some reference to reflective clinical practice and quality assessment of data in secondary research (research using reported data from clinical studies). Adverse events following intervention including surgery do not get as much attentions as drug errors, Macmillan and colleagues 6 report a diaphragmatic hernia following cryoablation of liver lesion. This should be an interest to those who practice image guided biopsies 7 and treatment of intra-abdominal conditions.