Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Around the world research groups are sequencing the genome of tens of thousands of people, and a crucial question is what to do about feeding back to individuals findings that may be “clinically significant.” My immediate reaction was “Of course you should feed the findings back,” but after chairing a session on this topic at […]
Here’s a simulated doctor patient consultation that took place today at the Royal Society of Medicine. A 65 year old woman (cunningly disguised as a bald, male professor from the Mayo Clinic) who is known to be hypertensive and on treatment says that her blood pressure has gone up over the last 10 days. An […]
Banks are probably now our most unpopular institutions, more so than estate agents, local authorities, and the Press Complaints Commission. So perhaps I shouldn’t kick them when they are down, but I fear that not only are they hopeless at managing risk (supposedly their core business) but also they are hopeless with vulnerable people. […]
Defeat is a marvellous thing. It can refresh in a way that never happens after victory. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought this morning as I awoke, if medicine were to feel defeated and have to rethink its purpose? […]
The German speaking world is having a flare up of burnout. The media are full of stories on burnout, and 150 000 school pupils in Austria are said to be burnt out together with “every second doctor.” The annual cost to Austria is supposedly 2.7 billion Euros, and, said Anita Rieder, professor of social medicine […]
Through Twitter from my friend Martin I have received a list of the five things that people most commonly regret when dying. This is enormously useful information, much more so than a delicious recipe, a good joke or a great quote—my usual favourites. I could be on my deathbed in the next five minutes, but […]
I must start this blog with a competing interest. I’m the chair of Patients Know Best, a start up that aims to use information technology to enhance the relationship between patients and clinicians. In the long run we want to promote personal health records, where patients own all their records and can share them with […]
It may be what epidemiologists call “ascertainment bias” (seeing what you want to see), but I detect the beginning of the end of prepublication peer review. The latest death knell is the appearance of a “liquid journal” where scientists can post papers without peer review and papers in evolution, data sets, pieces of computer code, […]
High blood pressure is the second main cause of disease burden in Australia and is only marginally behind tobacco, said Bruce Neal, senior director, research and development at the George Institute for International Health in Sydney, at a seminar organised by C3, Collaborating for Health. It’s the same in other developed countries and increasingly in […]
Can a doctor ask a patient anything? In the Netherlands the answer seems to be “yes.” Doctors tend not to think so, but at a meeting between doctors and patients in the Netherlands the doctors found that the questions they thought impossible to ask, the patients were happy to answer. Unfortunately the meeting wasn’t written […]