Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Some polls suggest that the NHS is the number one issue for voters in Britain’s coming general election. That’s one reason that the Labour Party has put it at the centre of its campaign, the other being “when in doubt retreat to where you are comfortable.” But would a healthy society put the NHS as […]
According to the Canadian psychologist Ami Rokach who has long studied it, “acute loneliness is a terrorising pain, an agonising and frightening experience that leaves a person vulnerable, shaken, and often wounded.” In our world of anomie and divorce and where medicine has extended life beyond usefulness, loneliness is one of the main causes of […]
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind,” said W B Yeats, so, although more of a flippant than a serious mind, I return to death after my last pondering on the subject that spread literally across the globe. I’m asking whether it would be better to live to 75 […]
I’m sorry that I’ve upset many people who have cancer or who have had a bad experience of somebody dying of cancer [see previous blog]. That wasn’t my intention. I was writing for The BMJ and so primarily for doctors. My main intention was to urge people to think much more about death and dying […]
Luis Buñuel, filmmaker, surrealist, iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary, thought a lot about death. “Sometimes,” he wrote in 1982, a year before he died at 83, “I think the quicker the better—like the death of my friend Max Aub, who died all of a sudden during a card game. But most of the time I prefer […]
Globally, about 70% of people diagnosed with tuberculosis and about 40% of those with HIV are treated, but less than 20% of those who have had heart attacks or strokes receive the treatments known to reduce further events substantially, said Anthony Rodgers at the Global Cardiovascular Clinical Trials Forum in Washington earlier this month. Even in […]
“I’d like to introduce Richard Smith, who is professor of philosophy at Durham University, an expert on epistemology, and chair of several European committees, who will speak on conflict of interest.” These weren’t the exact words that introduced me at the European Union’s conference on SIS-RRI (Science in Society—Responsible Research and Innovation), but they were […]
In 1973 about 280 000 scientific articles were published, but there were no retractions. When I became an editor in 1979, retractions were rare and of little interest to anybody. Now we have moved to a point when somebody passionately objects to an article in a scientific journal they call for it to be retracted. […]
Low and middle income countries have the chance to create health systems that will perform much better than those in high income countries. Copying health systems that look increasingly unsustainable would not be wise. Instead, low and middle income countries can “leapfrog” to something better, and the World Economic Forum has a project to make […]
I had a hernia repair recently, but the day turned out to be one of the pleasantest I’ve had in a long time. Can that really be true? Oddly, I looked forward to the day. It was partly the thought of being “made whole,” partly it being a different day from the normal, and partly […]