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, […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: Celebrating progress with creating a sustainable NHS
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 […]
Richard Smith: Spreading innovation in the NHS through social franchising
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 […]
Richard Smith: How medicine is destroying itself
We need to change the course of medicine from a battle that can never be won to a humane enterprise […]
Richard Smith: Time to rethink marriage
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, […]
Richard Smith: Doctors and patients heading in opposite directions
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 […]
Richard Smith: The hypocrisy of medical journals over transparency
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 […]
Richard Smith: The corruption of medical language
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 […]
Richard Smith: A Big Brother future for science publishing?
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, […]
Richard Smith: Little global progress in countering non-communicable disease
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 […]