Seeking lightbulb moments

Decades of improvements in mortality are coming undone as public health funding is eroded and trust in evidence based treatment is undermined. At the same time, commercial interests are pushing people away from healthy lifestyles, as companies work to ensure that government policies don’t undermine their business models (doi:10.1136/bmj.r487).1 And millions of the most powerless people in the world will be harmed in the wake of the US’s sudden withdrawal of foreign aid (doi:10.1136/bmj.r518).2

Can some of the new ideas and technological advances discussed in this week’s articles on bmj.com help us turn the tide and progress towards a new age of enlightenment? Should we, for instance, do away with the ancient practice of cadaveric dissection and embrace modern training tools—or will we then miss an essential aspect of the way in which students learn human anatomy (doi:10.1136/bmj.q2829)?3

In other areas of medicine, the advantages of new tools and techniques may be more clear cut. Karel Moons and colleagues put forward a tool to assess the quality, risk of bias, and applicability of prediction models that use regression or artificial intelligence methods (doi:10.1136/bmj-2024-082505).4 Carole Lunny and her team have developed a way of assessing the risk of bias within the individual network meta-analyses conducted as part of a systematic review (doi:10.1136/bmj-2024-079839).5 And Timothy Feeney and colleagues explain how directed acyclic graphs can help communicate a clinical research study’s strengths or limitations (doi:10.1136/bmj-2023-078226).6

In a clinical setting, modern surveillance devices offer an opportunity to help deal with abusive incidents, as body cameras can provide evidence to support meaningful action in response (doi:10.1136/bmj.r529).7 Adopting renewable energy technologies, such as solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal, will not only reduce air pollution but may also improve health (doi:10.1136/bmj-2025-084352).8 And advances in evaluating data on safety signals provide a chance to improve the active surveillance of medical devices, enhancing patient safety and reducing healthcare costs (doi:10.1136/bmj.r484).9

Yet new tools and devices don’t necessarily solve problems, and they may even bring new complications. Alexander Mafi and Samantha Holmes point to the environmental burden of the artificial intelligence technologies that are so often touted as a solution to problems in healthcare (doi:10.1136/bmj.r505).10

In the end, introducing new technologies in healthcare often needs old fashioned knowledge and expertise. It must be founded on the same appraisal skills and critical thinking that we would apply when introducing any new treatment or service change. Otherwise, we risk simply replacing one set of challenges with another, reaching again for the technological toolbox to solve our problems.