The infant’s eyes are huge, the profile of its tiny cheek bisected by a naso-gastric tube and its ugly adhesive patch. Peering from the corner of the billboard, the image aches with vulnerability and fear, a message reinforced by the slogan—Sick Children Are Out Of Time. Arising from a recent major publicity campaign by a […]
Category: Columnists
Richard Smith: Managing infertility in Kenya
Ivan Illich, the great critic of modern medicine, argued that it had displaced well the traditional cultural mechanisms for managing pain, sickness, and death with a false promise of eliminating all three. This is an abstract idea, but at a party in Cape Town last night I encountered an easily understood example. My Kenyan friends […]
Tiago Villanueva: An overview of medical employment in Europe
Does the name Grzegorz Chodkowski ring a bell with you? It didn’t with me until recently. Chodkowski is a Polish doctor who has worked in the UK, and who created an organisation called Medpharm Careers, which claims to be “Europe’s largest international medical jobs fair.” He and his staff came to Lisbon on 31 March, […]
Richard Smith: Confusing animals and people
My Kenyan friend thinks that Americans are mad. He worked for a while in an American hospital, and one day a colleague disappeared for a few hours. When he came back in the afternoon he said that he’d been to his father’s funeral. “He didn’t even seem sad,” said my friend. “In Kenya when a […]
Martin McShane: Large scale change
Over the last few weeks my reading and listening has made me consider whether we are at a crossroads in understanding and agreeing the purpose and nature of healthcare. Let me start with this quote from the evaluation of the 16 integrated care pilots that were supported by the Department of Health: “Over the past […]
Richard Smith: Time for medicine to move from “why questions” to “how questions”
A famous paper published in 1993 by Alan Berg of the World Bank asked why the world had done poorly at feeding everybody. Berg had two answers: nutritionists do the wrong kind of research and train people in the wrong way. I heard of Berg’s paper from Maria Isabel Ortega Velez, a Mexican nutritionist, at […]
Richard Smith: More than a food bank
Food banks in the United States are busy. The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, which I visited last week as part of the University of Arizona’s conference on global health leadership, is helping more than 225 500 people every month. The numbers have grown dramatically with the recession. Some 16% of people in Southern […]
Tiago Villanueva: Taking a renewed look at shoulder injuries
I did something very unusual for a GP last weekend, which was to attend a conference on a highly specific topic, namely shoulder injuries. GP’s in Europe usually have a well defined mainstream circuit of national and international conferences, but this event was completely outside my comfort zone. None of the speakers were primary care […]
Richard Smith: A people—to fade or flourish?
The symbol of the Tohono O’odham, a native American tribe, is a man in a maze (see below). All of us, they believe, are born into a maze. We have to make our journey through the maze to try and reach the centre of peace and serenity. Often we are lost, and when we are […]
David Kerr: The French Connection—one solution to social care?
Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternative wrote the French actor and singer, Maurice Chevalier. In the UK this week, the government announced a forthcoming White paper on social care will be published in June detailing a new system for looking after the elderly in care homes and through improved home […]