Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Things are not going well with the UN high level meeting on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that will take place in New York in a month’s time. The aim was to have completed negotiations on the outcomes document before the UN closed for its summer break, but this wasn’t achieved. The member states causing the most […]
Tobacco companies clearly cause harm, and we will always need food companies. But what about alcohol companies? Can they produce net benefit? I’ve been pondering this question for three decades, but it’s a live issue for governments who must decide whether to include alcohol companies in programmes to reduce harm from alcohol and also for organisations, like […]
Earlier this week I attended a lunch in an expensive London restaurant where a motley collection of people discussed what to do about binge drinking. Alcohol was served, but I felt duty bound to decline (and I was cycling). The lunch was sponsored by an alcohol company, and they must have been well pleased with […]
For the past two months I have been trying to find somebody to speak in in favour of mammography in a debate, but I have failed. Some six people have turned me down. Why, I wonder? […]
A compelling piece in the Economist argues that social media are returning news to the “more vibrant, freewheeling, and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era” and that newspapers will prove to have been a historical aberration. The same, I think, will be true of scientific journals. […]
In my last blog I described my time in a goldfish bowl with some 35 GPs on a leadership course—how the process worked, and what I learnt about myself, and how GPs think about me. But what I really meant to describe was our discussion on commissioning, how to do it well. In particular, I […]
Two weeks ago I spent 90 minutes in a goldfish bowl with about 30 GPs. The goldfish bowl is a process to encourage reflection, and it certainly caused me to reflect. The goldfish bowl features in the leadership course of the Royal General College of Practitioners. Somebody with some pretensions to having been a leader […]
I urge you to read Michael Millenson’s article on “Spock, Feminists, and the Fight for Participatory Medicine: a History.” It’s a fascinating and very readable account of how patient power has steadily increased in the US, and it would be very good to have a similar history in Britain. Most of what follows in this […]
I’m about to spend two weeks in Nigeria and need antimalarial tablets, but it seems that the NHS cannot help me. If I come back with malaria, no doubt it will help me – with two weeks in intensive care and a post mortem if necessary. It’s Monday morning, and I’m going on Saturday. I […]
In September the United Nations will hold a high level meeting on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This is only the second such meeting that the UN has held, and the first in 2001 led to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has […]