Ten years ago editors and publishers from the BMJ produced four scenarios on how the future of scientific and medical publishing might look. After I read Des Spence’s column arguing that the BMJ pay wall should be taken down and Peter Suber’s editorial on open access. I thought that it would be fun to revisit […]
Dear prime minister, I heard you give an inspiring speech earlier this week about how Britain was “open for business,” particularly in the life sciences. But when I arrived home I found a desperate email from an Indian friend, a professor of cardiology, describing a most awful plight that the British visa system has inflicted […]
I recently attended a symposium at the Tavistock Clinic entitled Cultures of Care: Cruelty and Kindness. As the Tavistock is a psychoanalytic institution, there was a lot of focus on understanding the problem and the discussion was complex and challenging with the shameful examples of Mid-Staffordshire, Winterbourne View and the Care Quality Commission’s report on […]
Emerson may have been right when he wrote that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind, but it always sets my teeth on edge when I see a family out on a cycle excursion with the children dutifully wearing bicycle helmets and the parents gaily unencumbered. Doing as I say but not […]
Last week I witnessed how information can scare the living daylights out of doctors and managers, and made me wonder whether England’s policymakers have any clue about the real world of its National Health Service (NHS). It started at a fascinating meeting at which a tech entrepreneur was demonstrating a tool that enables localities to better understand […]
The BMJ recently had to apologise for having published a picture of a Japanese doctor called Dr Yoshitaka Fujii which turned out not to show the Dr Yoshitaka Fujii who has hit the headlines recently because of research fraud leading to the retraction of a record number of publications but his namesake. This embarrassing mistake […]
Evidence-based medicine is rarely concerned with the biological plausibility of medical interventions. This, I argue, may be a weakness, particularly when assessing the value of alternative medicine (AM). Many basic assumptions of AM fly in the face of our knowledge about nature, physics, physiology, pathophysiology or even common sense. A few examples to back up […]
After 25 years as an editor, I’ve learnt in my eight years as an ex-editor that it’s mostly miserable being at the author end of a very unequal power relationship. We read a lot about doctors aiming to be patient centered, but whoever heard of editors being author centred? The brutal truth, as a senior […]
Complaints against doctors feature communication more than anything else, which is one reason why communication skills have become universal in medical education. Unfortunately we still have some way to go—as this anecdote shows. A close friend has just been in for an operation as a day case. He’s a diabetic and has got very skilled […]
How many of us feel the culture in the NHS brings out the best in us? Judging from the majority of staff surveys, not many. I happen to think this matters enormously. Staff really are the greatest asset to any organisation, especially an organisation where caring is a fundamental part of the task. Creating the […]