Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
I associate camps with wood smoke, burnt sausages, and filled latrines marked with crosses, but HealthCamp is different. It’s about innovation, and I attended my first one last week—at the soulless Excel Centre in Docklands, LondonHeathCamp begins with lightning talks. In under two minutes participants must pose one problem they’d like to discuss. We had […]
The Student BMJ is asking, via Twitter, for accounts of people’s first days as a doctor, and their request has for me brought back painful and partially suppressed memories. I started in the Eastern General in Edinburgh on Sunday 1 August 1976 and experienced my first death from medical error on the Monday. Maybe this […]
If there was a pill that would improve your interaction with patients by 50% would you take it? I imagine you would. Well, I don’t know of such pill and can’t think that there will ever be such a thing, but there is a non-pharmacological way to improve you consulting—it’s called “values based practice.” […]
Mathew Bishop, one of the authors of Philanthrocapitalism , last night told the audience of a Lancet debate packed into the grandeur of the Royal Society of Arts in London, that the rich—like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Carlos Slim—could save the world. […]
One of the things I love about the polypill is that it upsets everybody. (Just in case there are still people who haven’t heard of the polypill, it’s one pill that contains a statin, several drugs to lower blood pressure, and possibly aspirin that if everybody over 55 started taking daily might prevent three quarters […]
I spent two days last week in the seductive grandeur of Trinity College, Oxford, fretting about the global pandemic of chronic disease, but I left feeling optimistic—despite the pandemic raging as fiercely as ever. […]
I’ve just attended a conference on preventing chronic disease, and something that appealed to me greatly was the idea that at all formal dinners (and my how I’ve suffered from formal dinners over the years) the main choice would be vegetarian. You’d have to request meat. The idea came from Susan Jebb, Head of Nutrition […]
Is medicine, like the banks, falling into excess? I asked myself this question at the end of last year as I read about the death of Faith Williams, the conjoint twin who died 23 days after the operation to divide her from her sister, Hope, who died during the operation. Does it really make sense […]
It depresses me that despite the spread of the internet we are still most of us stuck in our intellectual and geographical silos. Why, I wondered at a conference in California last month, do we hear in Britain so little about Asian systems when they have so much to teach us? […]
A friend has written to me asking whom I think might be the “E O Wilson of Medicine,” and I’m stumped. Perhaps some readers of the BMJ have never heard of E O Wilson. For those that haven’t he is a Harvard biologist who has twice won the Pullitzer Prize and who invented “consilience,” the […]