Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
A kiss without a moustache, the proverb says, is like an egg without salt and, added Jean Paul Sartre, like good without evil. The proverb doesn’t make clear which kisser should have the moustache and who loses out, but we can perhaps assume that the man has the moustache and the woman suffers a saltless […]
The piece that follows is my foreword to a new and fascinating book by Peter Gøtzsche, the head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, entitled Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. I hope that this piece might prompt you to read the book. I was not paid for my foreword and […]
Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth. That was the chilling message delivered by the smiling, brilliant, erudite, and cuddly John Ioannidis at the Seventh Peer Review Congress in Chicago this week. Listening to somebody as brilliant as Ioannidis is like listening […]
It is now some 15 years since the emergence of the idea and supporting evidence that combining antihypertensives and a statin into a single polypill and giving it to people daily could dramatically reduce morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease and stroke. Yet polypills are still not licensed in any high income country, although […]
I’ve been puzzling for years over how to define health without making much progress, but I thought I might take a step forward by listening to a discussion on the radio about whether philosophy can help you live the good life. The answer seemed to be no: philosophy doesn’t have a wholly convincing answer to […]
Paul Valéry, the French poet and polymath, believed that we all have three bodies and suffer because we cannot bring them together. The best doctors, I suggest, pay attention to all three bodies, but most doctors, I fear, restrict themselves to one of the three. The first body, argued Valéry, is the one we live […]
Those of us outside the US think of holidays, sun, Disney, and orange juice when we think of Florida. We don’t even think of it as part of the slavery, blues, and cotton South, and so I was shocked to read in the magnificent, Pulitzer prize winning book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the […]
There is a huge theoretical body of knowledge about the history of the novel, but almost nothing on the history of the medical case report. Gianna Pomata from Johns Hopkins University would like to change that and is writing a book on the history of the medical case report. Last week she gave a talk […]
About once a year a furious researcher writes to me complaining that the New England Journal of Medicine won’t publish a letter that strongly criticises, even demolishes, an article the journal has published. They write to me out of frustration, not because I have any influence over the Bostonian paragon, but because I’ve dared to […]
Countries that are strongly Muslim or Roman Catholic find abortion unacceptable, but Bangladesh, a Muslim country, has found a clever way of helping women who might be pregnant and don’t want to be. In Bangladesh induced abortion is illegal unless a woman’s life is threatened. But a woman who has missed a period may in […]