Since 2011, I’ve worked as a locum GP in Portugal’s national health service, where patients pay five euros for each appointment with a GP. Many people are exempt from paying, for exemple pregnant women, children up to 12 years of age, unemployed people receiving benefits, and patients who have had transplants. The co-payment to see […]
Category: Columnists
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Quacks, mountebanks, and charlatans
The common pejorative names for peddlers of ineffective medicines relate to advertising. A quack, wrote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, is “a murderer without a license”. The origin of “quack”, originally “quacksalver”, is unclear. One explanation is that they “quacked” or boasted about their salves. This has a feeling of folk etymology about it, […]
Richard Smith: Learning from ruins
Whenever I wander through ruins I imagine people centuries hence picking through the ruins of my world and wondering about the people who lived there. We can learn from ruins, and as I walked through those of the Mayan city of Chichen Itza last week I learnt not only about the Mayan world but also […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Medical anniversaries in 2016
A happy New Year to both my readers. And what a cornucopia of anniversaries we can celebrate this year. Take your pick. The topics are diverse (see also the pictures below): anatomy (Mondino de Luzzi); physiology (Realdo Colombo, William Harvey, and Caleb Parry); pharmacology (glossopetrae, penicillin, and post-coital contraception); genetics (Fortunio Liceti, Gregor Mendel, and […]
William Cayley: Christmas thoughts
The Christmas holidays annually are a time for jolliness, cheer, and fun—from “Ugly Sweater” events to “White Elephant” gifts, and even The BMJ Christmas issue. It’s all in good fun, it can be especially helpful at this (often grey and gloomy) time of year, and it all seems to somehow make sense when one thinks of […]
Desmond O’Neill on Star Wars: The Force Awakens—and matures
Exams and the pre Christmas rush notwithstanding, a triple-line party whip was in force within the family for the midnight first screening of Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Sitting in the back row of a packed, expectant, and goodnatured cinema, I was struck by the number of contemporaries also attending with adult and teen children. […]
Richard Smith: Why are we doing so badly with hypertension?
Forty years ago at medical school I learnt the “rule of halves” that states that among those with a chronic disease, like hypertension, half are diagnosed, half of those diagnosed are treated, and half of those treated are treated adequately. Last week I learnt at a meeting organised by Public Health England that England has […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Magazines
Magazines have a long and distinguished history. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a magazine as “a periodical publication containing articles by various writers; esp. one with stories, articles on general subjects, etc., and illustrated with pictures, or a similar publication prepared for a special interest readership.” A periodical is “a magazine or journal issued at […]
Richard Smith: QMUL and King’s college should release data from the PACE trial
Several times when I was the editor of The BMJ the journal was declared the worst medical journal in the world by an ME association. Sometimes we shared the award with The Lancet. At another time my wife was telephoned and told that if I didn’t take a different line on ME (which is better known […]
Richard Smith: Does it take a “bad” patient to make a good doctor?
Trying to define a good doctor is as elusive a task as trying to define a good life or a good death. Like good lives and deaths, good doctors will come in many forms, and I search for them constantly as I read. Most doctors in novels are “bad”—fools, crooks, sadists, and cold fish. But […]