“All problems are ultimately linguistic problems,” says Muir Gray, once NHS chief knowledge officer, misquoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But I don’t think that he misquoted him badly, and that Wittgenstein did say something along those lines. I thought of Muir and Wittgenstein, a powerful couple, as I read a piece in the Guardian about […]
It’s the season for graduation ceremonies. Proud parents and partners, relieved graduates, and a lump in everyone’s throat as that enormous rite of passage is eased by impressive ceremony, thoughtful words, cheap university wine in plastic glasses, and finally by long, late, cheerful family lunches. My generation began their medical careers in a different world, […]
Is it nearly over? Putting the final touches to my portfolio seems all wrong somehow. The outcome of my time at the NHS Leadership Academy depends on this submission, and while it’s now due, I feel I’ve only just started. Come to think of it, this experience has been one of the key features of […]
In Britain we have had a row over whether a judge, Elizabeth Butler Sloss, should chair an inquiry into child abuse. Everybody agrees that she has the necessary skills and unquestionable integrity, but she has a conflict of interest: her long dead brother was in the government and may have been involved in covering up […]
Regenerative medicine. I did not know it existed until I began working with the Marine Corps. Even writing “regenerative medicine” reminds me that I am not in Bangladesh anymore, trying to produce miracles by scaling up a 20 cent zinc intervention aimed at every child under the age of 5 with diarrhea, or figuring out […]
After being one year out of clinical practice, and working full time in medical editing at The BMJ, I decided to take some time off from work and return this week to the trenches of the healthcare system as a locum GP in my native Portugal, where I remain licensed to practice. I personally feel […]
The church at the House of St Barnabas was standing room only to hear Professor Robert Lustig, a paediatric endocrinologist from San Francisco, castigate our current attempts to counter the global pandemic of NCD. (I judge that we’ve reached the stage where NCD, like AIDS, no longer needs to be spelt out.) Lustig, who has […]
A few years ago, I mused on Frank Wells’ observation that he’d never come across a female research fraudster. But now the RIKEN Institute in Japan has found Haruko Obokata guilty of misconduct for manipulating stem cell images, and this isn’t an isolated case. A quick look at the US Office of Research Integrity’s (ORI) […]
“I just hate this sort of thing.” When I overheard that at a recent funeral, as we waited in line to greet the bereaved family, I thought to myself, “How sad . . . and how true.” Sad, because times of grief are when others need us most, but also true, because most of us find […]
Health services have become archipelagos. There are great islands like primary care and secondary care, acute and community, or public health and clinical practice, and each one is surrounded by deep water with the occasional ferryboat or swimmer going between them. Any tension between public health and clinical practice is artificial; a population perspective and a […]