Earlier this week, I saw someone put up their New Year’s resolutions from last year (NYE 2013) on social media to evaluate what they had achieved. It was, in fact, rather a lot, and got me wondering how successful I am at staying committed to change. Now I’m as blindly optimistic as the next person when […]
Category: Columnists
Richard Smith: Dying of cancer is the best death
Luis Buñuel, filmmaker, surrealist, iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary, thought a lot about death. “Sometimes,” he wrote in 1982, a year before he died at 83, “I think the quicker the better—like the death of my friend Max Aub, who died all of a sudden during a card game. But most of the time I prefer […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: CARE-ing for wounded warriors
From 4-6 December 2014, I had the good fortune to attend the 5th Annual Comprehensive Advanced Restorative Effort (C.A.R.E.) Summit at the Naval Medical Center, San Diego (NMCSD). I travelled to California and attended with representatives from the Medical Officer of the Marine Corps and the Navy Bureau of Medicine, and healthcare representatives of the […]
William Cayley: Meeting our patients in the midst of their chaos
“Not again . . . ” The mom with the troubled teen is late for their appointment . . . “Not again . . . ” The elderly widow needs me to explain, one more time, why and how to take her medications . . . “Not again . . . ” The middle aged […]
Richard Smith: Treating cardiovascular disease as well as we treat TB and HIV
Globally, about 70% of people diagnosed with tuberculosis and about 40% of those with HIV are treated, but less than 20% of those who have had heart attacks or strokes receive the treatments known to reduce further events substantially, said Anthony Rodgers at the Global Cardiovascular Clinical Trials Forum in Washington earlier this month. Even in […]
David Kerr: Rise of the medical selfie
According to Twitter, 2014 was the year of the selfie. The Oxford English dictionary defines a selfie as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.” Selfies began only a few years ago, but have reached epidemic and global proportions—and a new […]
Pritpal S Tamber: Creating health—the emerging principles
The Creating Health Collaborative was formed to understand why, despite their potential, broader definitions of health remain only a fringe of health innovation. In today’s post, I am sharing their first report (opens a PDF) and have reproduced below an edited version of what the Collaborative thought were the emerging principles for creating health. We […]
The BMJ Today: Looking for general practitioner (GP) authors
In a recent BMJ Today, I explained that The BMJ maintains an educational section called Endgames aimed at junior doctors preparing for their postgraduate examinations. What I didn’t say was that most case reports and picture quizzes published so far are aimed particularly at hospital doctors rather than primary care doctors (GP’s/family physicians). […]
William Cayley: Thanks for what?
This has been quite a year . . . but then again, what year is not? Each passing year seems to bring a fresh crop of challenges, crises, obstacles, and frustrations. Being a doctor or, perhaps especially, being a GP is not what it used to be. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether medicine is […]
Richard Smith: What is RRI and was I the wrong Richard Smith?
“I’d like to introduce Richard Smith, who is professor of philosophy at Durham University, an expert on epistemology, and chair of several European committees, who will speak on conflict of interest.” These weren’t the exact words that introduced me at the European Union’s conference on SIS-RRI (Science in Society—Responsible Research and Innovation), but they were […]