The decision by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in May, after a provisional refusal in February, to recommend abaritarone acetate for metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer in adult men whose disease has progressed on or after a docetaxel-based chemotherapy regimen has been hailed by most of the news media as a […]
Category: Columnists
Richard Smith: Your chance to do good and have fun in one night
This is a shameless plug for a charity comedy night on 31 May where we have the two great doctor comics, Harry Hill and Phil Hammond, Ian Roberts (the laughing professor), my brother, Arthur Smith, and other excellent comics. The charity is the Klevis Kola Foundation (KKF), which was founded by medical students and provides […]
Martin McShane: Win, win, win?
In the last week, I have managed to catch up with two old friends who are the sort of GPs who I would be delighted to look after me or my family. As I listened to them both, I empathised with the pressures general practitioners face. On top of the burden of more and more […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Put that french fry down!
Last week, a concerned community member was investigating the type of oil used for frying at the American Club in Jakarta. It turns out that the club had been using a solidified palm oil for frying. I happened to be standing there at the moment of discovery. My public health adviser instincts kicked into gear: […]
Edzard Ernst: Thousands of patients cannot be wrong or can they?
The subject of alternative medicine (AM) is littered with surveys, and it almost seems as though a new one crops up every other day. Typically these surveys assess how many patients use AM. The resulting prevalence figures show an extremely wide range. One reason for this huge variability is that most of these surveys are […]
Richard Smith: Why I won’t be retiring to the seaside
Taxi drivers rank alongside hairdressers as sources of deep information about communities, and the one who drove me on Sunday morning from Padstow on the Cornish Coast to Bodmin Parkway confirmed for me that it’s a bad idea to move to the seaside when you retire. “A lot of my business is driving people to […]
Richard Smith: Will economic problems finally fix London healthcare?
There were no dissenters from the view at last week’s Cambridge Health Network meeting that London has chronic overcapacity in its acute hospitals. It’s been the case for decades. One reason for the continuing failure to reform lies in the story of one woman that all three local candidates in her constituency in the last […]
David Kerr: Medical underwear
Could the e-bra save the NHS? Recently researchers at the University of Arkansas announced that they had developed a remote monitoring system that could be integrated with an individual’s underwear. The “e-bra” consists of a series of nanostructured, textile sensors integrated into clothing using a wireless module that communicates wirelessly with a smartphone, which then […]
Richard Smith: Teaching is stand-up comedy
Teaching, it seems to me, is much the same as stand-up comedy. One is much scarier than the other, but which is the scariest depends on who you are. I was left thinking about the connection after a recent bad experience of teaching. I do a lot of teaching these days, most of it unpaid and […]
Richard Smith: Can Devi Shetty make healthcare affordable across the globe?
It’s impossible not to be impressed by Devi Shetty, heart surgeon and the “the Henry Ford of healthcare.” We can be impressed by his surgical skill and his refusal to turn away the poor. But perhaps even more impressive is his entrepreneurship and his vision of making healthcare affordable for everybody. […]