Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Although there is political hysteria about migrants in Europe, the health of migrants receives insufficient attention. That was the main message to emerge from Imperial College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation’s forum on migrant health in December. Definitions are a besetting problem in studying migrant health. A migrant is anybody who moves across borders away […]
The Dutch, an outward looking people, have long had a unique programme for training what were called “tropical doctors” and are now called “global health doctors.” The two years and three months of clinical and theoretical training aims to prepare doctors to work as generalists in challenging environments worldwide providing clinical care and strengthening health […]
At the end of last week I received this email: “Greetings from India, and I hope this finds you well! My name is Anoo. I’m a journalist based in Delhi, at The Wire. I broke the story on 13 December, about Derek Yach’s email-list, targeting health professionals with grant money: “Exclusive: Philip Morris Funded Anti-Smoking […]
I have taught classes on how to get published in scientific journals in many low and middle income countries, and just about every participant in every class has thought that science journals are biased against research from low and middle income countries. I think that they are as well, but strong evidence of the effect […]
A friend from a middle income country writes to me in despair about the way he and his colleagues have been treated by medical journals. His story made me angry at medical journals and the delay, waste, and inefficiency they cause for no obvious benefit. My friend and his colleagues conducted a huge pragmatic cluster […]
Artificial intelligence, which few of us understand, might apocalyptically enslave humanity or release it from death. Some prominent scientists believe that robots blessed with artificial intelligence will soon be more intelligent than humans and conclude that they have little use for us. Other transhumanists think that it will be possible to “download” human minds into […]
Mary Gunn, looking very well and wearing her 65 years lightly, stands in front of the audience in an Edinburgh bookshop describing how eight years ago she was diagnosed with recurrent breast cancer and given two years to live. She is launching her book Well: A Doctor’s Journey Through Fear to Freedom. The book tells […]
Hypertension is the world’s leading cause of premature death, ahead even of tobacco and obesity, and most of those deaths occur in poor countries. Yet the health system in most of those countries is unable to help people with hypertension. Tazeen Jafar, a nephrologist and professor of health services and systems research at Duke-NUS Medical […]
When you develop a mortal illness, as you will do if you’re not one of the fifth of the population who dies suddenly, you are likely to find that many friends desert you. The same will happen if somebody in your family develops such an illness. And if you’re a doctor then the people most […]
The NHS is primarily concerned with fending off death. It may be crazy, but it’s so. No expense is spared: heroic surgery, prolonged chemotherapy, absurdly expensive drugs, intensive care, experimental treatments, whatever—the cash-strapped NHS will find the money. As a consequence those activities little concerned with death—dentistry, mental health, social care, and even primary care—“must […]