Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Ivan Illich, the great critic of modern medicine, argued that it had displaced well the traditional cultural mechanisms for managing pain, sickness, and death with a false promise of eliminating all three. This is an abstract idea, but at a party in Cape Town last night I encountered an easily understood example. My Kenyan friends […]
My Kenyan friend thinks that Americans are mad. He worked for a while in an American hospital, and one day a colleague disappeared for a few hours. When he came back in the afternoon he said that he’d been to his father’s funeral. “He didn’t even seem sad,” said my friend. “In Kenya when a […]
A famous paper published in 1993 by Alan Berg of the World Bank asked why the world had done poorly at feeding everybody. Berg had two answers: nutritionists do the wrong kind of research and train people in the wrong way. I heard of Berg’s paper from Maria Isabel Ortega Velez, a Mexican nutritionist, at […]
Food banks in the United States are busy. The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, which I visited last week as part of the University of Arizona’s conference on global health leadership, is helping more than 225 500 people every month. The numbers have grown dramatically with the recession. Some 16% of people in Southern […]
The symbol of the Tohono O’odham, a native American tribe, is a man in a maze (see below). All of us, they believe, are born into a maze. We have to make our journey through the maze to try and reach the centre of peace and serenity. Often we are lost, and when we are […]
In 2007 I arrived in Beijing at the start of a philanthropic exercise, and as I was driven into the city and stared at the modern buildings I thought: “Why are we funding something here? This could be Minneapolis.” Later I learnt that there are at least three Chinas: western China, which is as undeveloped […]
Some things divide us fundamentally. Are you male or female, gay or straight, right wing or left wing? Another fundamental division, I suggest, is whether we want to be burnt or buried. It’s important to get this clear with your loved ones. John Lanchester begins his memoir about his parents with the realisation just after […]
Last year I attended a meeting in Heidelberg on treatment of mental health problems and came away with a bleak view of the lack of progress. This week in another delightful university town, St Andrews, I heard more positive messages. Progress with traumatic brain injury? Traumatic brain injury is currently one of medicine’s failures. In […]
In 1988 the World Health Assembly passed a resolution calling for the eradication of polio by 2000. There were 350 000 cases in 1988, and by 2000 the number had been reduced by 99%—to around 600. Since then the number has stuck at around 600, and there is anxiety that the last 1% of cases […]
At a recent party to honour David Pencheon, head of the NHS Sustainability Unit, we were all invited to have a go at defining sustainable intelligence. When I was a boy there was only one kind of intelligence. It was tested for in Intelligence Quotient tests, and important decisions were made about us based on […]