Pankaj Desai's Blogs

HEALTH VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN      I got an idea to create this write-up on an area where I see violence against women. It is not necessary to overstress the fact that violence need not only be physical. It can be mental, emotional, and sexual and now I wish to introduce this concept of health violence. Health Violence: What is that?      Our traditional perception of violence is use of force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing. For us violence is usually physical, mental or emotional. However there are other forms of violence also in any given society. I am introducing here a concept of violence not found in traditional paradigms. It is the concept of health violence. Briefly, it can be any act on the part of the society in general and family members and “friends” in particular which can violate health of a human being is health violence. In reference to health violence against women, this seems to be very big challenge to t...

Micronutrient Supplementation in Pregnancy: How much rational? Introduction:                 It is strange but true that in many aspects of clinical practice, the decision-making on prescribing a drug is based on the information provided by pharmaceutical companies and their representatives who are ubiquitously surrounding us. Micro-nutrient supplementation in pregnancy is one such aspect where many a times, the pharmaceutical companies have a tendency to overhype an agent. Their overhype tends to get potentiated by our laziness in keeping our information updated. Ultimately this brings us dangerously close to being irrational in prescribing these agents. The purpose of this write-up is to make one sensitive to the current evidence based thinking in prescribing different micronutrient in clinical practice of obstetrics. Vitamin A supplementation during pregnancy:     ...

My top 5 reasons for rejecting a manuscript My hundredth paper just got published in a peer-reviewed journal the other day. Having been on editorial board and peer-reviewed for many journals myself for nearly two decades now and having reviewed hundreds of papers for both international as well as national journals,  I felt it is time to go through all papers that I have rejected in this avatar of mine. I have preserved all papers that I have reviewed. Having had studied them carefully I have crystallized the reasons of rejection and am sharing top 5 of them with you. Should you have any queries on this you are most welcome to email me. You can also contact me through my website www.drpankajdesai.com . It is possible that you may find understanding this matter difficult, but then writing and reviewing a top-class research paper is a highly technical matter. Can’t make it any easier! 1. Matched cohort hidden as a case-control study: This happens quite often with papers submitted...