Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
How would you feel if your patient said to you: “I want you to be my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we go?” Or how would you respond to: “I would like to discuss my prostate with you not as a diseased organ but as a philosopher’s […]
This is a shameless plug for a charity comedy night on 31 May where we have the two great doctor comics, Harry Hill and Phil Hammond, Ian Roberts (the laughing professor), my brother, Arthur Smith, and other excellent comics. The charity is the Klevis Kola Foundation (KKF), which was founded by medical students and provides […]
Taxi drivers rank alongside hairdressers as sources of deep information about communities, and the one who drove me on Sunday morning from Padstow on the Cornish Coast to Bodmin Parkway confirmed for me that it’s a bad idea to move to the seaside when you retire. “A lot of my business is driving people to […]
There were no dissenters from the view at last week’s Cambridge Health Network meeting that London has chronic overcapacity in its acute hospitals. It’s been the case for decades. One reason for the continuing failure to reform lies in the story of one woman that all three local candidates in her constituency in the last […]
Teaching, it seems to me, is much the same as stand-up comedy. One is much scarier than the other, but which is the scariest depends on who you are. I was left thinking about the connection after a recent bad experience of teaching. I do a lot of teaching these days, most of it unpaid and […]
It’s impossible not to be impressed by Devi Shetty, heart surgeon and the “the Henry Ford of healthcare.” We can be impressed by his surgical skill and his refusal to turn away the poor. But perhaps even more impressive is his entrepreneurship and his vision of making healthcare affordable for everybody. […]
I am the chief medical officer of our family. I am the bridge between my family members, some of them eccentric and one of them demented, and an unforgiving health system. Many doctors—indeed, anybody familiar with the strange language and rigidities of health systems—fulfil the same role, and it gives us some useful bottom up […]
I’ve worried that disclosing conflicts of interest may be counterproductive ever since we did an experiment that showed that readers of articles with declared conflicts discounted not only the believability of the results, but every aspect of the paper, including its importance and originality. Now my worries are increased by a paper in JAMA and […]
Tackling the global pandemic problem of non-communicable disease (NCDs) is a complex problem that needs clockware and swarmware. I imagine that most BMJ readers have no idea what that sentence means, but read a few more paragraphs and you may learn something useful. Problems, said Sian Williams, executive officer of the International Primary Care Research […]
“Doctors are not interested in health” is one of my many wild generalisations. My evidence is my experience, a 40 year collection of anecdotes, and the observation that a thousand page medical textbook usually comprises five desultory pages on health and 995 pages detailing disease. Now I have further evidence. I’ve just attended the World […]