Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
How important is what happens to you in fetal and neonatal life in determining whether you develop heart disease later in life? I found myself thinking about that question a great deal back in the early 90s when the BMJ published many studies by David Barker, who in 1986 published the “Barker hypothesis” that fetal […]
Dave Sackett, the father of evidence based medicine, used to warn people against reading journals. They took up time that could be better spent and gave you fragments of evidence not the whole picture. This all felt uncomfortable to me when I was editor of the BMJ. […]
I’ve stayed out of the NHS debate. These days I spend lots of time in countries like Bangladesh, Kenya, and Guatemala, and viewed from those countries – where health workers and essential drugs are often missing – you wonder why the fuss over the NHS. Everybody has a doctor, primary care is strong, and access to […]
In the 1980s it was conventional wisdom that type 2 diabetes couldn’t be prevented, said Michael Engelgau of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when I chatted to him in Changzhi, China last week. The condition was treatable but not preventable. Dr Engelgau went onto to tell me about the thinking that led […]
I’ve a collection of stories editors of medical publications coming unstuck, often in bizarre ways, but the story of Lazar Greenfield departing Surgery News and causing a whole issue to disappear will be the Mona Lisa of my collection. Surgery News is published by Elsevier and is the official newspaper of the American College of […]
My first inkling that this wasn’t going to be a routine village visit was when I noticed that our coach had a police escort. Then when we arrived at the village of Lianghu in Shanxi province in China I saw the huge, highly decorated arch that is the entry to the road to the village. […]
My boots died last week as I walked the Cornish coastal path from St Just to St Ives. One comfort was that they died together. The sole of one boot detached five miles out of St Just, and the sole of the second detached just a few miles later. After taking me a thousand miles […]
Some years a go a young friend who had worked with me became the head of a big organisation and asked for my tips on leadership. I’ve had some interest in leadership ever since I did a year at the Stanford Business School, and I enjoyed thinking of what to write to my friend. Perhaps […]
Last week I enjoyed myself facilitating a lunchtime meeting of 90 health ministers at a meeting in Moscow on non-communicable disease. The meeting, like all global meetings, was something of a trial—see previous blog—but the lunch was fun. I wasn’t clear exactly who was there, but the meeting included ministers from China, India, Russia, US, […]
Along with about 600 other people, 90 of them health ministers from all over the world, I spent two hours recently waiting for Vladimir Putin, prime minister of the Russian Federation, to arrive at a meeting in Moscow. It was dull but did give us “NCD nuts” a chance to catch up with each other and […]