The NHS, like other health systems, is facing huge financial pressure. Bold thinking is needed, and the King’s Fund, a British health think tank, has commissioned a series of articles asking authors to explore radical questions of “What if . . .” All of the articles can be accessed at The NHS if—essays on the future […]
Drawing on a variety of demonstrated correlations between happiness (or “wellbeing”) and health, John Appleby recently argued that “improving individual, and hence national, wellbeing might best be achieved through improving people’s health.” While I appreciate any suggestion of policies or interventions that might boost health, I also think it worth considering whether the argument may […]
Deborah Cohen recently reported in The BMJ that George Freeman, the UK sciences minister, whose responsibilities include the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), wrote to the EU’s research, science, and innovation commissioner, Carlos Moedas, last year urging him to “tackle the increasingly precautionary […]
In their influential book Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception two Nobel prize winners, George A Akerlof and Robert J Shiller, describe how businesses profit from exploiting human weakness. Politicians do the same and so, I suggest, do doctors. (I was about to assume that all BMJ readers know about phishing, but […]
Journals, like the mass media, have a major part to play in exposing scientific fraud and other kinds of misconduct. In contrast, as I’ve argued many times, there are better ways now to disseminate science. Yet sadly and ironically, exposing fraud is risky and expensive, whereas publishing science is often highly profitable. The incentives are all wrong. […]
Recently, Trish Groves reported in The BMJ that some conference organisers would like to ban the use of Twitter and other social media at conferences. The main concern seems to be the transmission of pictures of speakers’ slides, which may contain otherwise unpublished data. I say “otherwise” because many do not seem to realise that […]
Ask doctors for the causes of heart failure or any disease, and answers will pour from them. Ask them about the causes of health or wellbeing, and they will go blank. Doctors are trained to think about disease not health. Sir Harry Burns, formerly chief medical officer for Scotland, asks doctors about the causes of […]
What inspires me? People who think differently, public spaces that are beautiful, art in unexpected moments. So when an enormous blue painting of a sleeping baby appeared on an outside wall by the cafe of the Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2015, I took notice. This video tells the story. The work was […]
Why does prevention always come behind treatment of disease? Derek Yach, the chief health officer of Vitality, put this question to many people, and these are the answers he got from Don Berwick, formerly head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and a familiar figure […]
Anglo-Saxon spelling was consistent, but when Old English and French collided after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, inconsistencies in English spelling arose that lasted until the printing press and dictionaries gradually forced greater regularity, if not always rationality. Samuel Johnson, in his influential dictionary of 1755, preferred the etymologically incorrect variant -our for […]