Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
England is said to have 30 hospitals that are failing so badly that they may be taken over by the private sector. So there might be a lot of interest in a case study posted this week on the Health Foundation website that describes how a major academic hospital in Boston was saved from failure. […]
The number of diseases seems to be increasing dramatically with the arrival of conditions like social phobia, attention deficit disorder, chronic procrastination syndrome, and female sexual arousal disorder. Now this progression has reached its logical conclusion—with the proposal that happiness be classified as a disease. […]
Informed consent has degenerated from an important and respectful act to a cumbersome, meaningless regulatory process that impedes research. That bluntly is the opinion of many researchers, and so a large group of them started listening with scepticism to a talk on informed consent from a bioethicist from the National Institutes of Health, Joseph Millum, […]
We are all more interested in the conflicts of interests of others than we are in our own, and editors are no exception. Having preached to authors and reviewers on conflict of interest, editors have largely neglected their own, but an important and fascinating paper in PloS Medicine shows how editors can be exposed to […]
With almost every endeavour participants have many more ideas on what might be done that than there are resources to get them done. Prioritisation is thus essential, but, my goodness, it’s hard. Many groups will slide back to making almost everything a priority, which means, of course, that nothing is a priority. I reflected on […]
In what I think is a very important BMJ paper, John Ioannidis and Fotini Karassa have shown that systematic reviews, the highest level of evidence, may be highly deceptive. We did, I suppose, know this in a way, but they illustrate the case beautifully. What disappoints me is that nobody has responded to their paper. […]
Until now medical schools have had it easy. They have lots of high quality applicants, most students graduate, and all of them can find jobs. Suddenly, as for many others in Britain, the world looks more hostile. I hang around medical schools, and many people think it likely that one or two medical schools may […]
One response to a deep financial cut is to change radically, to do things in a wholly different way. An alternative response is to shrink back to old ways on a smaller scale. I’ve been wondering for a while what will happen with the NHS, hoping for radical change but fearing unchallenging retrenchment. […]
Have you ever heard of the “medcomms community”? I suspect not, but they are shaping your world. It might be worth spending two minutes reading this blog to learn more about this shadowy crew. […]
If we carry on as now we will need 2.3 planets to support the 9 billion people who will be alive in 2050, says the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. This is a relatively uncontroversial statement, and it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that we don’t have 2.3 planets. We have only one. So […]