Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
“All problems are ultimately linguistic problems,” says Muir Gray, once NHS chief knowledge officer, misquoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But I don’t think that he misquoted him badly, and that Wittgenstein did say something along those lines. I thought of Muir and Wittgenstein, a powerful couple, as I read a piece in the Guardian about […]
In Britain we have had a row over whether a judge, Elizabeth Butler Sloss, should chair an inquiry into child abuse. Everybody agrees that she has the necessary skills and unquestionable integrity, but she has a conflict of interest: her long dead brother was in the government and may have been involved in covering up […]
The church at the House of St Barnabas was standing room only to hear Professor Robert Lustig, a paediatric endocrinologist from San Francisco, castigate our current attempts to counter the global pandemic of NCD. (I judge that we’ve reached the stage where NCD, like AIDS, no longer needs to be spelt out.) Lustig, who has […]
I’m listening to Sandy Ruddles (not her real name), an ordinary general physician who does some rheumatology, present a case, and I’m feeling some regret at having given up the sacred calling of being a clinician. Oddly, the case Sandy is presenting was disastrous, a catalogue of errors. What impressed me was not Sandy’s knowledge […]
What should you give doctors when they graduate? An expensive stethoscope, a Ferrari, a lifetime subscription to The BMJ, a ticket to India, or a pet canary? The answer of “the medical community” in Scotland is a book of poems called Tools of the Trade. A copy will be given to every doctor graduating in […]
We have an old dog we love, and my wife and I have been debating whether to take him to the vet. Will it be worth it, asks my wife. The dog is coming up to 13 (91 in “human years”). He has a large lipoma. Some of his teeth are bad. He may be a […]
I was delighted to be asked to organise this series of events on non-communicable diseases, but I had a problem—I had no idea what NCDs are or were. So Kate Hoyland from UCL’s Grand Challenge of Global Health introduced an evening entitled “The NCD Makeover Show.” We who live in the NCD ghetto don’t know […]
“I’m outraged,” said Robert Beaglehole, former director at WHO responsible for non communicable disease, at the end of the second polypill summit in Melbourne recently. He’s outraged because the world is failing to respond adequately to the “global public health crisis” of non communicable disease (NCD) that is destroying lives in low and middle income […]
The other day I heard a wildly optimistic account of how our understanding of genetics would allow us to eradicate many diseases, potentially create better people, and reduce health costs. I’m sceptical about all of these claims, but I was taken back to a strange meeting I attended in Germany perhaps 20 years ago. David […]
It’s obvious to me that all scientific research should be available free to everybody everywhere, the polypill to prevent heart attacks and strokes should be offered to all those over 55, and patients not health institutions should control their records. Why don’t these obvious things happen? The core arguments for making all research free are […]