Near universal consensus then that we are in the grip of a public health disaster. Daily the evidence mounts: obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, our very lives are killing us. And how insurmountable the problems seem, how high the hurdles. Massive corporations – the food, tobacco and drinks manufacturers – are ranged against us, saturating our […]
Can a doctor ask a patient anything? In the Netherlands the answer seems to be “yes.” Doctors tend not to think so, but at a meeting between doctors and patients in the Netherlands the doctors found that the questions they thought impossible to ask, the patients were happy to answer. Unfortunately the meeting wasn’t written […]
One of the pleasures of being a doctor, albeit one who doesn’t see patients, is that you get to chat to other doctors, real ones, about the tricky decisions they have to make. I’ve had two such sets of conversations in the past week that have stuck in my mind. […]
Difficult cases may make bad law, but they can also be a powerful stimulus for thought. A problem may be a candle, as the French writer Paul Valéry put it, but an insurmountable problem is a sun. The Hastings Center, a leading US bioethics think tank, recently posted a legal case that asks ferociously difficult […]
These days I spend lots of time in low and middle income countries, and as I think more about their health problems and less about the endless reorganisations of the NHS, I begin to see the world very differently. Recently I was asked to give the Redfern Oration to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, […]
Change is afoot in Bangladesh in terms of smoking and may represent a missed opportunity to prevent women from smoking. According to the WHO report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 2008, nearly two-thirds of the world’s smokers live in 10 countries including Bangladesh. Tobacco use is common among men across all sectors. 60% of men […]
With considerable media fanfare the BMA has declared its opposition to the NHS providing homeopathic remedies. Not entirely a surprise, given the BMA’s explicit support for evidence-based medicine. The consensus seems to be that in so far as homeopathy works it works because of the placebo effect. In brief, patients who anticipate benefits from a […]
Are you brave enough to feed back when you see poor behaviour? I wish I was—because feedback can lead to improvement, whereas silence allows the poor behaviour to continue. I’ve been thinking about feedback after talking to some medical students, but let me begin with my own failures. I go regularly with my mother on […]
Why has the NHS been so much slower to use information technology than other sectors and what might be done to encourage it to speed up? These were questions addressed yesterday at an NHS Confederation seminar, but we were urged to talk opportunity not barriers and to avoid answers like change the culture and the […]
One of the great pleasures of living in London is that a friend can email you (in this case from Salamanca) and say: “Hey, did you know Clay Shirky, a world famous internet guru, is speaking at LSE in 60 minutes?—and you can drop everything, go, and be thrilled. I knew about Shirky from having […]