Émilie du Châtelet, the French aristocrat, philosopher, lover of Voltaire, and interpreter of Newton, had highly original (and possibly even correct) ideas on the route to happiness. Those who are tired of the drab and soulless maxims of today’s self-help guides might like to try her more exciting advice. Something that conflicts immediately with today’s […]
I doubt few areas of medical practice are more ethically charged than the forced treatment of people with mental disorders. Recently a colleague forwarded me some comments made in March this year by Juan Mendez, the special rapporteur on torture, regarding mental illness. (For anyone unfamiliar with the United Nations human rights structures, a special […]
Amongst the issues in the in-tray of CCGs, the issue of funding for assisted conception (typically either intrauterine insemination or IVF) for lesbian couples is not highest on the agenda, but it is an interesting and difficult problem, and different PCTs came up with different solutions. The problem is easy to state, but is a […]
A woman I hardly know and I are sat in a café in a country far from Britain, and the conversation turns to death. She tells me of two deaths in her family in the NHS. The first is remarkable. An elderly woman, my companion’s mother, is waiting in a hospital for news of her […]
Regular readers of my blog will know that this week is TEDMED, the US based event that looks—with a multidisciplinary lens—at the future of health and medicine. I’m TEDMED’s clinical editor, one of the four person core editorial team that recommends topics and speakers to the curator, the ever curious Jay Walker. I thought I’d […]
Organ donation presents a unique problem for those concerned with the rationing of medical treatment. Unlike almost any other area of medical care, the constraint on supply of NHS medical treatment is not money to fund services, but the supply of donated organs. The NHS will provide all the funds needed to undertake transplant operations, […]
On a tour of WHO headquarters, in Geneva, I wandered past a vast cellar of shrink wrapped unused and unread guidelines. It occurred to me that, given around 7% of clinical “facts” become outdated each year, these guidelines were rapidly passing, or already past, their “use by” date [1]. While glossy journals, 500 page systematic […]
My early years at the BMJ were very bound up with Margaret Thatcher. I started as an assistant editor a month before she became prime minister in 1979 and was appointed editor just before she was dethroned as prime minister in 1990. Whatever I write about her will evoke fury in some quarter, and despite […]
The response of the government to the House of Common’s health committee’s report on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has provided clarification both on value based pricing and NICE. The committee’s report, published in January 2013, expressed concern that arrangements for value based pricing due to be introduced in January 2014 […]
“Email is not work. It’s a distraction.” So said a fierce, bearded lecturer at a talk I attended recently. Is he right? I have every reason to think him wrong because I tend to start every day by answering my emails—after looking at the BBC News website, Twitter, and Facebook, always in that order. I […]