Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
The Southbank Centre, London’s art centre on the South Bank of the Thames, is holding a festival of death. The aim is “to look death in the eye…to confront mortality head-on through music, theatre, literature, and debate.” […]
The Lancet, the leading journal for global health, has mentioned feminism only twice in its 189 years . The BMJ hasn’t mentioned it at all. So that looks like some evidence that feminism has had no impact on global health, but all three speakers at a meeting at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical […]
One of the experiences that has made me think the most in the past week was having my shoes shined in Queretaro, Mexico. It was the lavish care, almost love, that the shoeshiner put into his task that made me think. I was seated in a high, metal chair in bright sunshine in one of […]
I’m standing looking at a twenty foot high fence that at night is lit as brightly as daylight. It snakes away over dry hills to both east and west like a vulgar, modern version of the Great Wall of China. I’m in Nogales, a town in both Arizona and Mexico that is sliced in half […]
One of the worries about medical students is that they are not well connected to the real world. The come mostly from privileged backgrounds, enter the monastery of the medical school at 18, and spend the next 10 years focusing on passing exams and learning basic clinical skills. It’s not surprising that many come to […]
Does it make sense for the state to pay tens of thousands of pounds for a drug that might keep a patient with cancer alive for another six weeks and leave frail elderly people alone and lonely? Is it the right use of resources to keep a 23 week old fetus alive and probably severely […]
In healthcare we are much concerned about privacy, but Sainsbury’s, the supermarket chain, knows how much toilet paper I’ve bought in the past 20 years, how many chocolate éclairs I eat a month, that I love smoked fish, whether I eat white or brown bread, and much more. It could probably do a better job […]
Opening up NHS data to all will bring jobs, economic growth, innovation, a better health service, reduced health costs, and a new age in science. That was the heady message heard by a long dinner table of the good and the great in the House of Commons last week. Most of them seemed to be […]
Death is becoming fashionable. London’s Southbank is planning a two day festival of death, the BMJ has a Christmas editorial urging us to think of death as a friend rather than an enemy, and last week the Centre for Humanities and Health at King’s College London held a death workshop where philosophers and doctors worked […]
The golden phrase for countering non-communicable disease (NCD) is that we need a “whole of government and whole of society approach.” An important step on that path is obviously for all parties to talk together, and that’s why the International Diabetes Federation for the first time started its biannual conference with a “global diabetes forum,” […]