When I teach young doctors in Amsterdam about responding to NCD (non-communicable disease) in low and middle income countries, I ask them how they would allocate 100 units of resource. I give them four buckets. One bucket is for treating people with established disease: patients with heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. […]
When Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, was buying his Sunday papers a few weeks ago he encountered an elderly woman complaining that her newspaper didn’t contain the television section. It did, as the newsagent pointed out to her before asking her, “Would you like me to walk you home?” Stevens was struck that […]
It might be cool, but will it make a difference to health? This is still the unanswered question after the launch of the latest must-have device from Apple, 30 years after the launch of the original Mackintosh computer in the same building in California. Due to be released next year at a starting price of […]
In the UK, the Department of Health is the “parent,” or sponsoring department, for the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). That seems reasonable. It would be surprising if the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) were given the job, and yet something like this has just happened in the new European Commission […]
A few weeks ago, I had to take parenteral antibiotics for a condition that was not improving with oral antibiotics. Moreover, in my native Portugal it is still common, for example, to prescribe parenteral penicillin for bacterial tonsillitis since for some reason oral penicillin is not available there. […]
It did not feel like the end when I submitted my portfolio for the NHS Leadership Academy, and sure enough it was not. I’ve been asked to make amendments, and there is also the submission of my closing statement to do, the final piece of written work on the journey. Any celebratory talk had been […]
To most doctors psoriasis is a disease to be fought, contained, and even cured, but is this far too narrow a view? John Updike, one of the greatest writers in English of the past century, had psoriasis for almost all his life, and he writes in Self-Consciousness: “Psoriasis is my health. Its suppression constitutes a […]
As previously mentioned, the European Medicines Agency pulled back on its transparency policy when it published a new draft for consultation in May this year. The European Ombudsman and Glenis Willmott MEP were among many who expressed concern or criticised the new draft policy. A final decision by the management board of the agency has been […]
Although it may seem harsh, I believe that scientists should be held to a higher standard of honesty than the average person. The consequence is that they will be punished more severely for dishonesty—for example, by being banned from research for life. The main reason for this is that science depends wholly on trust. If, […]
There is a long tradition in medicine of accepting a degree of mismatch between labels and the functions that they address. A classic example is the stethoscope, through which few of us peer, but which only a terminal pedant would now agitate to be renamed a stethophone. Recent debate over the redesignation of dementia as “major […]