Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
A friend is frightened by reading the headline “Chemotherapy may spread cancer and trigger more aggressive tumours, warn scientists” in the Daily Telegraph. A close friend of hers has had breast cancer successfully treated, but reading the headline, writes my friend, “fires me back to the very physical response I had [when her friend was […]
I’m standing with Devi Shetty, a cardiac thoracic surgeon in his surgical gear, between two paediatric intensive care units with around 40 cots. All the cots are full apart from those ready for children who are undergoing surgery. The units are tremendously busy, full of activity, but at the same time calm. I remarked on […]
Medical students arrive at medical school hungry to have contact with patients, but it can be unfair to unleash on patients students who know nothing of medicine and until yesterday were school children. Leicester Medical School has an innovative solution to this conundrum that has the added benefit of familiarising students with consulting online, something […]
This morning I read the line “The gift of forgetting” in a poem by Wisława Szymborska. Immediately I asked myself if it is a gift to forget, and quickly—and somewhat counterintuitively—decided it was. Something else that I’d read this morning in a book by a neurosurgeon supported the conclusion. Henry Marsh in his uncomfortably honest […]
When I read the paragraph that follows I thought how it accurately sums up how many people feel in 2017 and explains the political upheavals of 2016. But it was said in 1972 when Jimmy Reid, a leader of Clydeside shipworkers, was elected rector of Glasgow University. Some, with understandable excess, have called it the […]
My friend Nicholas Christakis recently tweeted: “Critique of evidence based medicine on grounds that it is exclusionary and ‘colonized’” providing a link to the critical article. He added an NB to me, and the result was that I was a witness to a Twitter squall (not quite a storm). Most of the tweeters were appalled by […]
We hear a constant chorus that general practice is underfunded, understaffed, and on the point of collapse, so I couldn’t resist the temptation to visit a practice that is flourishing and has a bold vision for the future. Granta Medical Practices in Cambridgeshire currently serve 34 000 patients in four buildings. Soon they expect to […]
Democracy, we are all told and mostly believe, is “the least bad form of government.” Sadly and ironically that belief is hardest to sustain during elections when we are deluged in slogans (“strong and stable”) and wild promises, long term issues are largely ignored, and complex issues are simplified to the point where meaning is […]
The Singularity, when men merge with machines and become immortal, is “pencilled in” for 2045. I learn this from Irish journalist Mark O’Connell’s meetings with transhumanists described in his book To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. If I’m still alive in 2045 I’ll […]
The Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon (c1214-1294), who some regard as the father of modern science, argued in his great text Opus Majus that there were four sources of ignorance: Frail and unsuited authority The influence of custom The opinion of the unlearned crowd The concealment of our ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom I […]