This week I attended a Health 2.0 London event on mobile sensors. The title of the event asked if they were key to remote patient monitoring. I think the answer is an obvious yes; without them it’s not going to be possible. But I’m not sure the event was asking the right question. For me, […]
Category: Columnists
Richard Smith: Case reports in 16th century Europe and China
There is a huge theoretical body of knowledge about the history of the novel, but almost nothing on the history of the medical case report. Gianna Pomata from Johns Hopkins University would like to change that and is writing a book on the history of the medical case report. Last week she gave a talk […]
Julian Sheather: Do younger doctors take more time off sick?
I’ve been doing some work recently with a GP trainer. I’m not a good judge of these things, but I would put him in his mid-fifties. He strikes me as the sort of committed, diligent, unassuming doctor who has helped form the backbone of post War British primary care. Committed to the NHS, possessed of […]
Richard Smith: Is the New England Journal of Medicine anti-science?
About once a year a furious researcher writes to me complaining that the New England Journal of Medicine won’t publish a letter that strongly criticises, even demolishes, an article the journal has published. They write to me out of frustration, not because I have any influence over the Bostonian paragon, but because I’ve dared to […]
Desmond O’Neill: A tale of three cities—geriatric medicine in Australia
Some minds improve by travel, wrote the nineteenth century poet and humorist, Thomas Hood: others, rather, resemble copper wire, or brass, which get the narrower by going farther. And so it was with the spirit of keen metallurgical inquiry that I stress tested this theorem on a recent ten day visiting professorship with the Australian […]
Richard Smith: Menstrual regulation and the sacra rosa—escaping religious rigidity
Countries that are strongly Muslim or Roman Catholic find abortion unacceptable, but Bangladesh, a Muslim country, has found a clever way of helping women who might be pregnant and don’t want to be. In Bangladesh induced abortion is illegal unless a woman’s life is threatened. But a woman who has missed a period may in […]
Liz Wager: Trouble with retractions
Retracting unreliable publications can cause headaches for journal editors and a recent case illustrates why they can be so tricky. According to reports in the BMJ and Nature, the drug company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has requested the retraction of an article published in Nature Medicine in 2010 describing cell biology experiments funded by the company and […]
James Raftery: Value based pricing—terms of reference given by the Department of Health to NICE
On 20 June the Department of Health announced that: “Expert body given responsibility to look at the benefits medicines bring to wider society.” The terms of reference are not on either the Department of Health’s nor NICE’s websites, but I requested and got a copy. Here is what they say: “ The methods for value […]
David Lock: Suicide, refusing treatment, and consent in the dying process
This is an anonymised story about how a doctor’s misunderstanding of the law around managing the death of a patient with capacity appears to have caused unnecessary suffering. It is a salutary tale about the need for doctors to understand the subtleties of the law on consent to treatment and, in difficult cases, the need […]
Tiago Villanueva: Why does Brazil want to recruit doctors from Spain and Portugal?
I recently met up with a Portuguese friend who works as a researcher and doctor in New York. She has an immense passion for Brazil and told me she would love to work there if she gets the opportunity to. Portuguese media have recently been flooded with reports that Brazil is considering recruiting doctors from […]