Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Although I bemoan prepublication peer review, I do a fair bit of reviewing. I’m never quite sure why, but it’s probably that I’m still insufficiently practised at saying no. I reviewed for the BMJ Jerry Kassirer’s article published last week in which he regrets that young doctors don’t browse more. I wasn’t greatly impressed, and […]
I’ve been tramping from stage to stage arguing that pre publication peer is slow, expensive ($1.8 billion a year), ineffective, biased, and anti-innovatory and should be dumped in favour of post-publication peer review. But what do I mean by post publication peer review? Despite my best efforts, which are clearly not good enough, people are […]
I continue to be amazed that despite the appearance of the internet, which some have compared with the invention of fire, our methods for disseminating scientific studies are essentially the same as they were 50 years ago. We still have journals, and, although papers have electronic versions, those papers are indistinguishable from those of 50 […]
Some one billion people have no access to health care, while each year 150 million experience financial catastrophe and 100 million are pushed into poverty because of having to pay for health care. Those are some of the reasons why the world needs universal health coverage, said David Evans from WHO at the 13th Annual […]
Until very recently the Western Highlands of Kenya (once known as the White Highlands) were thick with forest, but many of those forests have been cut down. A friend in her mid 20s pointed out to me fields on the edge of Eldoret, the main city in the region, that were forest when she was […]
The biggest problem with treating hypertension in rural Kenya is lack of drugs. Health workers are plentiful, and there is an impressive health system—but drugs are scarce. I learnt this when I visited the hospital in Eldoret, a small city in the West of Kenya, and a close by community clinic. My colleagues and I […]
The Great War changed the world forever and burnt itself into our language, memory, consciousness, and understanding of life. That’s the argument of Paul Fussell’s marvelous book “The Great War and Modern Memory,” which was first published in 1975 and won the National Book Award. Before the war we had Tennyson, Kipling, Trollope, Conrad, and […]
South Africa is a country scarred by apartheid, and during my week in Cape Town I had a chance to get a sense in my own small and idiosyncratic way of how far healing has progressed. My first experiences were discouraging. I stayed in the Vineyard Hotel at the foot of Table Mountain. It’s as […]
South Africa suffers from a “quadruple burden” of disease—infectious disease, particularly AIDS and TB; trauma from road traffic injuries and violence; perinatal and maternal health problems; and non-communicable disease. I thought of this burden as we visited the community clinic in Khayelitsha, the largest “township” in Cape Town. […]
How can we encourage innovation in the NHS? Niti Pall, a GP and entrepreneur from Birmingham, asked herself this question and hit upon the idea of asking all the people she knows who might have some thoughts on the question to a meeting, putting them in a room together, letting them generate their own agenda, […]