NEJM 16 Jan 2014 Vol 370 201 Developing and marketing a new drug is a tricky business, but it can be a very lucrative one. AiCuris is a company I hadn’t heard of before, but it seems to specialize in antiviral drugs. For such a company, herpes simplex 2 infection presents a huge market opportunity: […]
In the Victorian era the patients who acquired public profiles tended to be doubly disadvantaged. Think Joseph Merrick. His fame as the “Elephant Man” stemmed from others exploiting his disfiguring disorder (Proteus syndrome?) for financial gain. Now patients are becoming well known less for shouldering disease burdens so much as using their experience to help […]
Back in June 2013 protests began to protect the trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. Within a few days this turned into an outcry from millions of protesters all over Turkey asking for more democracy and freedom from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and, particularly, prime minister Tayyip Erdogan. To subdue protesters, police used […]
In most low and middle income countries the private sector accounts for 60-80% of outpatient care and 40-60% of inpatient care. Yet aid agencies have largely ignored the private sector, severely limiting their impact. This week a small meeting organised by the Centre for Global Development in Europe discussed how attitudes might be changed. Some […]
In conversation with my grandmother recently, I travelled nearly 60 years back in time to a village in Rajasthan as she recounted her near death experience during childbirth. Though lately prone to forgetting minor details, she surprised me with a vivid description of the events as they unfurled when she experienced excessive bleeding around the […]
As I walked beside Clapham Common towards Trinity Hospice a famous BMJ phrase was ringing in my ears: “Hospice care is deluxe dying for the few looked after by dowager duchesses.” That may not be the actual quote, but the point was that hospices, funded mostly by charity, could provide an excellent death while most […]
In September 2013, shortly after starting in post as a national medical director’s clinical fellow at the BMJ and NHS England, I received an email inviting applicants to join “Mike’s army” as a junior doctor on a CQC (Care Quality Commission) inspection. My application was duly accepted and I was signed up to inspect one […]
Since the Francis report there has been much discussion about the need to disseminate “compassion” in the NHS. While there has been a great deal of moralistic rhetoric extolling the virtues of this noble and uniquely human quality, and its indispensible role in a caring health system, there is relatively little analysis of those organisational […]
The Spanish government recently announced that it plans to introduce restrictions on abortion in Spain. This move has been supported by the Ministry of Justice. From the beginning of this reform the debate about abortion has been focused mainly on its ethical and legal perspective, discussing primarily when the foetus has the right to life, […]
While noodling around on Linked In one day, I was pleased to notice that the professional networking site has some member groups discussing patient engagement. I’m a heart attack survivor, a blogger, and a women’s health activist—so I also consider myself a fairly engaged patient. Maybe I should drop in on one of these groups […]