Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
I think I’m healthy, but am I right? I’m tubby. My hair is white and thin and gone altogether from some parts of my head. I’m short sighted and astigmatic. My Achilles tendon aches at times, and when I get out of bed in the morning I hobble. I haven’t had my blood pressure measured […]
I ring the Kent and Sussex Hospital to try and find out when my mother can expect to have her hip replaced. I’m worried that the hospital may have sent her a letter and that she may have lost it—as she has become very forgetful. Indeed, she’s dementing. […]
Web 2.0—the social web—has the potential to improve global health greatly and to solve complex problems in health science—as it has already done in particle physics. I heard this message at a conference on global health in Geneva last week, but I also heard that the barriers to these potential achievements are social and cultural, […]
People in Bangladesh get 80% of their healthcare from the private sector. Across Sub-Saharan Africa it’s 60%, and the proportion is increasing. The poorer people are the more likely they are to receive private care, and the middle classes consume more publicly funded care than the poor. […]
Thursday 22 January – 17.19 On the plane from London to Zurich I’m on my way to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, a ski resort in Switzerland. It sounds grand and may turn out to be grand. I imagine rubbing shoulders with Colin Powell, Jack Straw, and the like and […]