Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Last week I took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union on the motion “This house needs new drugs.” The motion was proposed by the chief executive of AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceutical company that is moving its global headquarters to Cambridge and emphasising science over marketing. The Cambridge Union is designed in part to […]
One of the successes of health workers concerned with climate change has been to get climate change framed as a health issue as well as an environmental issue […]
It is comparatively easy to find funding for the randomised trials that may or may not show the effectiveness of innovations, but much harder to fund scale-up […]
We need to change the course of medicine from a battle that can never be won to a humane enterprise […]
At a meeting on the politics of marriage last week at the London School of Economics three protagonists of very different stripe—the founder of the Marriage Foundation, a feminist philosopher, and a gay rights activist—all agreed that marriage was an outdated institution that should be rethought. My wife and I, who went together to the […]
Doctors and patients are heading in opposite directions: patients increasingly have multiple conditions, while doctors are specialising not just in organ systems but in parts of organs. What are the consequences of this divergence? We have known for many years now that patients have multiple conditions. As the figure from a Scottish study shows, by […]
Medical journals generally favour transparency, but we’ve recently discovered that when there’s a trade-off between transparency and their financial interest they opt for the money. The International Committee of Medical Journals Editors, the Roman Curia of editors, wants all clinical trials to be registered and data to be shared. The BMJ is so keen on […]
A young doctor friend sends me a link to a piece he has written in the Guardian newspaper. I praise the simplicity and clarity of the language and suggest that next time he sends a piece to an academic journal he uses the same language. “But will the editors accept it?” he asks me. I’d […]
There have been big changes in science publishing in the 25 years since the appearance of the internet, but at the same time science publishing is still dominated by journals, a 17th century invention. The tipping point when true transformation begins has long been predicted and may now be close. Why do I say this? […]
In 2011 the United Nations held a high level meeting on preventing and controlling non-communicable disease (NCD) and produced a declaration on what countries should do. In 2018 it will hold another meeting to review progress, and unless there is a dramatic acceleration the meeting is likely to conclude that progress has been poor, said […]