The Lancet, the leading journal for global health, has mentioned feminism only twice in its 189 years . The BMJ hasn’t mentioned it at all. So that looks like some evidence that feminism has had no impact on global health, but all three speakers at a meeting at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical […]
“We have nothing as bad as America’s worst, and nothing as good as America’s best,” wise words said to me by someone many years ago, and this principle has stood the test of time. There are certainly many dreadful things in American healthcare, but there are also wonderful services and excellent innovation with a rigorous […]
One of the experiences that has made me think the most in the past week was having my shoes shined in Queretaro, Mexico. It was the lavish care, almost love, that the shoeshiner put into his task that made me think. I was seated in a high, metal chair in bright sunshine in one of […]
Almost every home in the country has one and unlike the background population they have tended to become slimmer and slimmer over recent years. The television set has managed to hold onto its place as the epicentre of home entertainment, despite the assault from the personal computer and the ubiquitous iPod, iPhone, and iPads. One […]
I’m standing looking at a twenty foot high fence that at night is lit as brightly as daylight. It snakes away over dry hills to both east and west like a vulgar, modern version of the Great Wall of China. I’m in Nogales, a town in both Arizona and Mexico that is sliced in half […]
Martin Luther King day provides an opportunity to reflect on the civil rights movement as well as the broader issue of inequalities that face every nation. Because King’s “I have a dream” speech is so ubiquitously placed in two generations of middle and high school education, it is hard for many people my age or […]
So, the silicone’s hit the fan. The use of industrial-grade silicone intended for mattresses, the possible fraud in hiding information from inspectors at production stage, and the failure in quality control in the regulatory phase, are particularly outrageous. However, the rapidly expanding private sector provision of breast implants for cosmetic reasons, by an “industry” that has been […]
Yesterday I took part in a joint BMJ/COPE meeting on research misconduct. The discussion set me thinking about factors that create and sustain healthy research environments. When we talk about misconduct, we often think of the cases that hit the headlines (such as Hwang Woo-suk or Scott Reuben). If we use these examples to suggest […]
I was fortunate to be able to listen to Danna Safran from Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Massachusetts at a recent King’s Fund conference. She was talking about the alternative quality contract (AQC). Double digit inflation in healthcare costs and a mandate for every individual to have insurance in Massachusetts drove BCBS to think […]
“All of a sudden a big mealie pudden came flying through the air.” This is the opening line of a Glaswegian song, which only gets worse, about an assault by a mealie pudden, a sort of second class black pudding with the blood removed. On the 24 November at 11 o’clock, I experienced severe central […]