Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy has together with Stanford University created a Global Compassion Initiative, and, as I walked last week towards the launch of the initiative in one of Edinburgh’s most elegant houses I wondered exactly what compassion is. I wondered too whether you can teach and promote compassion. What I was sure about […]
“Doctors need to bring something of themselves to their patients, to make a personal connection, if medicine is to be a healing science,” writes an anonymous obituarist, somewhat portentously, at the end of an obituary of Oliver Sacks. But if you’re a nurse you might be disciplined for such a human healing action. […]
Existential psychotherapists help people with the existential, eternal, unsettling, and human problems of meaninglessness, isolation, and the terror of death. These are problems that are causing much suffering in Britain and yet do not respond to the drugs that are the standby of the NHS. That’s why the NHS needs existential psychotherapists. It may have […]
Some even most (depending on how you measure it) of what doctors do lacks strong evidence. Even when evidence exists it often doesn’t seem to be relevant to doctors—because their patients or their circumstances are so different from those in the trials that produce the evidence. This is especially true in low and middle income countries […]
I wrote this piece some six weeks ago after giving evidence in a libel case reported by The BMJ and published on 30 July 2015 . I’ve had to wait until the case was over to post the blog. I’ve just finished giving evidence for a day and a half in the high court in […]
“We seem to spend all our time talking about the downside of making patient data available and little about the upside,” said a frustrated researcher at last week’s Sowerby eHealth Symposium organised by Imperial College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation. The problem seems to be that the downside—somebody’s health records being made public—is horrible, concrete, […]
The other night in a dream I saw my father, who died 11 years ago. He was very clear, recently shaved, with his hair combed and in full colour. He was perhaps 60, although he was 81 when he died. Smiling, he hugged the person beside me (I don’t know who that was), and then […]
Informed consent is impossible at the end of life, said a British palliative care physician last week at a conference on Heybeliada, one of the Prince’s Islands in the Sea of Marmara, close to Istanbul. Could he be right? Before I reflect on the question, I want to say a little about what was an […]
I don’t suppose that the people who taught me at medical school thought that they were promoting particular mental models. They were trying (and sadly failing) to make me the best doctor they could. But just like the man who didn’t know he’d been speaking prose all his life, they were promoting mental models. One […]
General practitioners are overworked, underappreciated, and perhaps underpaid. Politicians are unsympathetic to their plight and expecting more of them. Hospital doctors dump work on them. Nurses are after their jobs. Patients are demanding and ungrateful. Bureaucrats and regulators are making their professional lives a misery. General practitioners have replaced farmers as the profession that complains […]