On my way home from the centre where I work in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I drive through an area with four closely located private universities. Yesterday I was stuck in rush hour traffic. Students were swarming on their way out of class. Suddenly I could hear music behind me. […]
Category: Columnists
Richard Smith asks: Can the rich save the world?
Mathew Bishop, one of the authors of Philanthrocapitalism , last night told the audience of a Lancet debate packed into the grandeur of the Royal Society of Arts in London, that the rich—like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Carlos Slim—could save the world. […]
Julian Sheather on the day that human nature changed
At a certain point in life you start eyeing the word ‘crisis’ suspiciously. Inflationary pressures in the media devalue the linguistic coin and you could be forgiven for thinking that journalists have given up getting out of bed for anything less than a fully fledged catastrophe. But even a troglodyte like me cannot escape a […]
Julian Sheather on Bobby Baker’s diary drawings
Representations of mental illness are traditionally menaced by two kinds of distortion, distortions that seem to pull in opposing directions. The first, and far the most common, is that the mentally ill are asocial, chaotic and violent, their ungoverned minds unfitting them for ordinary human civility, their dangerous impulses requiring surveillance, confinement and control. […]
Tracey Koehlmoos on chronic disease management in Bangladesh
Maybe you have never thought about Bangladesh and do not know Dhaka from Dakar, but I do. I think about Bangladesh every day. I have lived in South Asia long enough to wrap my own sari and to think that purple and orange go together well at least some of the time. […]
Richard Smith: The polypill is about demedicalisation not medicalisation
One of the things I love about the polypill is that it upsets everybody. (Just in case there are still people who haven’t heard of the polypill, it’s one pill that contains a statin, several drugs to lower blood pressure, and possibly aspirin that if everybody over 55 started taking daily might prevent three quarters […]
Richard Smith on countering the “wicked problem” of the chronic disease pandemic
I spent two days last week in the seductive grandeur of Trinity College, Oxford, fretting about the global pandemic of chronic disease, but I left feeling optimistic—despite the pandemic raging as fiercely as ever. […]
Richard Smith says make vegetarian food the norm at formal dinners
I’ve just attended a conference on preventing chronic disease, and something that appealed to me greatly was the idea that at all formal dinners (and my how I’ve suffered from formal dinners over the years) the main choice would be vegetarian. You’d have to request meat. The idea came from Susan Jebb, Head of Nutrition […]
Liz Wager: If comment is cheap why is peer review so expensive?
As you know (since you are reading this), I blog, albeit sporadically. I do not Tweet (yet) but I’m fascinated by the frenzy of twittering and the explosion of opportunities to launch one’s opinions into cyberspace. […]
Julian Sheather on shredding Sir Fred
What is the definition of a saint? Someone who doesn’t enjoy the downfall of a banker. I know it’s not a new joke – in the original it is the downfall of a best friend, which cuts a little nearer to home – but it seems to survive the retelling. Of late I have had […]