I’ve just been thrown out of the Royal College of Physicians, which has moderately excited me—probably just as much as when I became a fellow. My sin is not paying my fees. So it’s reasonable to expel me, but was it reasonable to charge me in the first place? Let me plead my case. It’s […]
The differences between rural and urban China are stark. Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities are filled with new buildings, best illustrated by those built for the Olympics, whereas rural China has as many as 300 million people living on under a dollar a day, more than any other country. Indeed, China can be described […]
I have been watching the French crime series Spiral (Engrenages) . The title refers to the way an investigation into a prostitute’s murder – she is dumped naked on a refuse heap – coils through the many layers of French society from its violent streets to its ruthless bureaux of power. At one point a […]
The BMJ has now called for applications for the Clegg Scholarship 2010. So, I think this might be the right time to talk about my own experiences as a Clegg Scholar and how I have fared since then. If you ask me to name one thing that Clegg Scholarship is all about, I can’t. I […]
Last week I was privileged to hear a brilliant talk—by Nicholas Janni—on what Henry V or rather Shakespeare has to teach us about leadership. Prince Harry was, as most people know, a dissolute youth, hanging out with drunks, pimps, whores, and undesirables with the great Falstaff chief among them. But when his father, Henry IV, […]
Ineffectively communicated clinical information has been estimated to be responsible for up to 10% of all preventable medical errors. Stanton et al, in their recent book on clinical leadership, reveal that 70% of information is communicated non-verbally. […]
Plagues create business opportunities and the worried well in any era present a commercial opportunity. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death and the Great Plague saw brisk sales in fumigators, herbal remedies, and the plague suit – predecessor of the DuPont TK555T HazMat suit, and equally unsettling for nervous patients. Quacks (from the old […]
I’m just back from Washington DC, where we held the first US meeting of COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics). Engraved onto the building housing part of the National Academy of Sciences is a quote from Einstein which could serve as the COPE motto if we had one. It reads: “The right to search for […]
The budget of Britain’s Health Technology Assessment programme has grown from £13m in 2006 to £88m in 2010, and it has conducted a swathe of trials on new technologies, published dozens of papers, and supported a study that won the BMJ paper of the year. But could it do even better? This was the question addressed […]
Last week’s conference to launch Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy left me thinking that priorities in global health may be very wrong. David Molyneaux from Liverpool said that an alien observing earth for the first time would think that it had only three diseases: AIDS, TB, and malaria. He is one of the “three dinosaurs […]