On Monday I was at a meeting with Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon, illustrating my global significance. […]
Richard Smith on why the private sector is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals
Category: Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Demand online access to your medical records, says Richard Smith
I’ve just emailed my GP asking her to give me online access to my medical records. It was quite a palaver as I couldn’t find her email address, or the email address of the practice after searching on Google, and the practice doesn’t seem to have a website. Eventually I had to ring. […]
Richard Smith on barriers to writing and getting published for authors from low income countries
While teaching two courses on “getting published” in Dhaka I had a marvellous opportunity to gather insights into why researchers from a low income country have problems writing and getting published. Most of the researchers were juniors from ICDDR, B (formerly the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), a well established and highly successful […]
Richard Smith: Can poetry define health?
Reflecting on the challenge by Alex Jadad and Laura O’Grady to define health, I begin to conclude that it can’t be captured in a few words. Disease is a simple concept compared with health, and diseases can be defined — but with all the paraphernalia of pathophysiology, epidemiology, symptomatology, and the like. Defining health will […]
Richard Smith on the right to health
On first acquaintance the concept of a right to health can seem ridiculous. Why not a right to happiness, beauty, high intelligence, and Arsenal winning the cup every year? The right to health has been questioned legally and on grounds of feasibility and policy, but the Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen answers these questions convincingly […]
Richard Smith on why diabetes envies cancer
Those who campaign on diabetes envy those who campaign on cancer because cancer gets so much more attention than diabetes. Indeed, the diabetes campaigners are very frustrated that diabetes is so consistently neglected. Around 250 million people globally have diabetes, and because of the pandemic sweeping the world that number will increase to 380 million […]
Richard Smith: A ripping yarn of editorial misconduct
In what has been called the age of accountability, editors have continued to be as unaccountable as kings. But stories of editorial misconduct are growing, and another story, nothing less than a ripping yarn, has recently appeared in the Harvard Health Policy Review (2008; 9: 46-55.) The story is told by Donald Light and Rebecca […]
Richard Smith: Painfully slow progress improving health care
Are we making good progress with improving health care? If not, why not and how could we do better? I tried to answer these questions as I spoke to a thousand enthusiasts for health care quality in Nijmegen at the launch of IQ Scientific Institute for Quality of Healthcare. There were probably 50 people in […]
Richard Smith: Medpedia – inspired by the counterculture of the 60s
Medpedia, a medical version of Wikipedia, had to happen, and now it has. The full site will launch later in 2008, but a preview is already available. The founders—James Currier and Mitch Kapor, both serial entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley—aim to create “the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world.” I see no reason […]
Richard Smith: Are we all Thatcherites now?
A friend, possibly drunk, recently sent me a message on Facebook to ask if I was a Thatcherite. Thatcher was in the news because of the debate about her state funeral. Hours later my friend sent a second message hoping that she hadn’t offended me. Eventually the next morning she rang me, desperate to be […]