Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Last week in the United States Facebook for the first time had more traffic than Google. This is hugely significant and shows how interacting is taking over from searching on the internet. What’s more, Facebook’s traffic is increasing steeply, whereas Google’s traffic is largely static. Soon Facebook will be way ahead. […]
The neurologist and epidemiologist Cathie Sudlow has written a highly readable and important piece in the BMJ exposing Science magazine’s poor reporting of a paper on chronic fatigue syndrome, (1) but she reaches the wrong conclusions on how scientific publishing should change. […]
If a patient rings a drug company asking for information about one of the company’s drugs that he or she is taking, the company cannot answer. Companies are forbidden to “come between” patients and their doctors. Is that right? This question was discussed last week at a conference in Monte Carlo of some 3000 regulators, […]
When governments spend money on “health” they get lots of sickness but very little health. Increasing expenditure on healthcare—now 17% of GDP in the United States and 9% of GDP here—leads to more and more people clinging onto life in a seriously impaired state. Better, I believe, to recognise that death is a friend and […]
What should you say to a major food company if asked to speak to its senior managers? A friend of mine, a cardiovascular epidemiologist, received such an invitation and emailed friends asking for advice on what to say. The context is that some people consider food companies to be like tobacco companies. They are making […]
Every day hundreds of thousands of doctors and patients around the world discuss the benefits and risks of drugs. You might think therefore that we know how to communicate the information well, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration agree that we don’t. Indeed, the EMA logically thinks that before […]
I’ve always thought that death, although universal, was the great taboo for health services, but now I’ve discovered something that seems to cause even greater difficulty for clinicians – domestic violence. […]
Pakistan, like most developing countries, is experiencing rapidly rising rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and it has developed a draft national plan for countering chronic disease. It’s an impressive and elaborate plan, as I discovered when I discussed the plan last week with people from the health ministry in […]
I’ve been in Pakistan teaching around 30 young women on the day that the Taliban has bombed a girls’ school in north west Pakistan killing three girls and injuring another 62. For the Taliban it’s a crime to educate women. For me the women I taught were an inspiration. The conventional view of women in […]
I’m on a plane flying home from Nigeria, where I’ve been participating in a workshop on writing and publishing in journals, reading scientific papers, and encouraging evidence based practice. I had a wonderful time. The workshop had around 100 participants, and they were exuberant and highly responsive. The debate was intense, and some struggled with […]