It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist impulse in the visual arts. It sounds plausible: the documentary impulse, the desire faithfully to record what is actually there, which has always been close […]
After years of blogging in the cyber-wilderness, the BMJ has welcomed me into its warm embrace by giving me a little blogging corner all of my own. From this virtual soapbox I’m hoping to chart my efforts to navigate the murky waters of GP training as I kick off a year-long stint as a GP […]
Yesterday, the Tax Policy Center released its initial analysis of the health reform plans of the two presidential campaigns. The center is a joint initiative of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two leading Washington think tanks. […]
We have no right to steal from future generations. At the end of this month, the consultation will close on the proposed carbon reduction strategy for the NHS in England. This country is the first in the world to start legislating on climate change, the most serious and urgent health threat to current and future […]
Are we making good progress with improving health care? If not, why not and how could we do better? I tried to answer these questions as I spoke to a thousand enthusiasts for health care quality in Nijmegen at the launch of IQ Scientific Institute for Quality of Healthcare. There were probably 50 people in […]
After the Democratic Convention last week, when healthcare featured in almost every major speech, I had been waiting all week to see whether the Republicans would talk about it at all during their Convention in Minneapolis. Yesterday, on the last day of the Convention, healthcare reform finally got a mention when John McCain took to […]
It runs like an uneasy theme in the ethics of health care provision. How do we respond to the genuine health needs of individuals who do not have legal rights of residency and are unable to pay privately for their own health care? What obligations, if any, do we have to sick people who are […]
On July 31, two of Canada’s biggest tobacco companies, Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd and Rothmans Benson and Hedges Inc, agreed to pay $300 million in fines and an additional $815 million in civil damages over the next 15 years for their admission that both companies aided persons to sell and be in possession of tobacco […]
Lightning struck my home recently and the power surge resulted in my computer crashing. I lost a small file that kept track of several dozen emails (out of the well over 4000) that i had received in the last two months and that were still awaiting a reply from me. These emails were ones that […]
I am forty-four. Even allowing for the decade or so that modern medicine has added to our Biblical three score years and ten, I am, statistically, over half way through the journey. There are times when I feel it. Not so much physically: never having been much of an athlete the decline of my body […]