Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
The differences between rural and urban China are stark. Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities are filled with new buildings, best illustrated by those built for the Olympics, whereas rural China has as many as 300 million people living on under a dollar a day, more than any other country. Indeed, China can be described […]
Last week I was privileged to hear a brilliant talk—by Nicholas Janni—on what Henry V or rather Shakespeare has to teach us about leadership. Prince Harry was, as most people know, a dissolute youth, hanging out with drunks, pimps, whores, and undesirables with the great Falstaff chief among them. But when his father, Henry IV, […]
The budget of Britain’s Health Technology Assessment programme has grown from £13m in 2006 to £88m in 2010, and it has conducted a swathe of trials on new technologies, published dozens of papers, and supported a study that won the BMJ paper of the year. But could it do even better? This was the question addressed […]
Last week’s conference to launch Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy left me thinking that priorities in global health may be very wrong. David Molyneaux from Liverpool said that an alien observing earth for the first time would think that it had only three diseases: AIDS, TB, and malaria. He is one of the “three dinosaurs […]
I’ve just spent five days—yes, five days—talking about health literacy. Before my five day conversation I’d never thought much about health literacy, but now I see myself as an expert. Pick a small enough subject and you can be a world expert in about 20 minutes. But health literacy is actually a big subject and […]
Something has just happened that will almost certainly end the tyranny of impact factors and may well mark another step towards the extinction of most scientific journals. Did you notice it? Probably not, and even if you did you may not have understood what it was or what it may lead to. It was the […]
WHO is currently setting priorities for research in chronic or non-communicable disease, and generally the first research question is “Will what has worked in rich countries work in low and middle income countries?” We know, for example, what to do to reduce deaths from heart disease and how to reduce tobacco consumption. But interestingly when […]
At last I have online access to my medical records. I wrote a blog some six months ago about how a talk by Harold Shipman’s successor had convinced me that I should get access. I do most of my work online, complete my tax return online, make all my travel arrangements online, bank online, and […]
The most interesting, and certainly the most chilling, experience I had in four days in Buenos Aires was to visit the memorial to “the disappeared.” […]
Firsthand personal experience of a great crime can make it real in a way that full intellectual understanding will not. Spend two hours in close contact with an African AIDS orphan, and you’ll know what I mean. […]