Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
My son, a chef, is part of a “pop up think tank” of people under 35 working on happiness. They are gathering evidence through a questionnaire, and I thought that some BMJ readers might be interested in both the questions and my answers. You might like to try answering the questions yourself. […]
I doubt that anybody within airlines, financial services, or manufacturing goes to meetings to debate whether information technology can improve what they do. It already has. But in healthcare we’ve grown very sceptical about information technology. In fact information technology already has improved healthcare and much of what is done now could not be done […]
I know I’m becoming a bore with all this raving against prepublication peer review, but like all true bores I’m charging on regardless. And I’m fired up by the experience I’ve had in the past few minutes. Unsurprisingly, I’m a hypocrite as well as a bore, and despite my protestations I do a fair bit […]
Advice on smoking is simple: don’t smoke. But what should be the advice on alcohol? It can’t be “don’t drink,” nor can it be “drink less.” Doctors and governments think that they need to give guidance to people on alcohol—and mostly they do that by suggesting “safe limits” based on units of alcohol. But is […]
Let me tell you a sad tale of wasted time and effort that illustrates clearly for me why it’s time to abandon prepublication peer review. It’s the tale of an important paper that argues that we can screen for risk of cardiovascular disease using simply age. (1) I’ve already posted a blog on the implications […]
Using simply age to screen for cardiovascular disease is as effective as more complicated methods using blood pressure and serum cholesterol, concludes a study published in PloS One in May by Nick Wald, Mark Simmonds, and Joan Morris. (1) Can this really be right and if so what does it mean? The authors used a Monte […]
Mental health disorders—particularly depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease—account for a huge proportion of the global burden of disease, but the outlook for better treatments looks bleak. I don’t think that was the message I was supposed to get from a conference entitled Making Sense of Mental Illness organised by EMBO at the European Molecular Biology […]
Can we imagine a world 20 years from now that no longer has health professionals? Instead of regulated health professionals anybody could offer healthcare—and perhaps much of it would be healthcare rather than sickness care. Patients with diabetes might offer care to other patients, and robots with superior technology might provide round the clock not […]
The BMJ meeting on climate change keeps reverberating through my mind, and the apocalyptic feel of the meeting was deeply unsettling. Is the end of the world nigh? And what does that mean for those under 40? People have been predicting “the end of the world” ever since there has been a written historical record, […]
“We know what we need to do to avoid severe climate change. We know how to get it done. We have the technology, and we can afford it. But we don’t have the political will.” That’s the message I remember most clearly from the BMJ’s conference on climate change, and sadly as a human being […]