On 1 September 2012 the conservative Spanish government of the People’s Party ended 26 years of highly valued universal healthcare coverage. The Royal decree 16/2012 on urgent measures to guarantee the sustainability of the Spanish national health service changed our general taxation funded system back to the previous social security model dating from 1986, and […]
Richard Smith: Time for science to be about truth rather than careers
Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth. That was the chilling message delivered by the smiling, brilliant, erudite, and cuddly John Ioannidis at the Seventh Peer Review Congress in Chicago this week. Listening to somebody as brilliant as Ioannidis is like listening […]
Radhika Arora and Krishna D Rao: The struggle to provide healthcare in rural India
Being treated by a qualified doctor is something of a rarity for rural Indians. The country faces an overall scarcity of health workers (doctors, nurses, and midwives) with approximately 20 health workers per 10,000 people in India. The numbers are already below the World Health Organization’s benchmark figure of 25 health workers per 10,000 people. […]
Stirling Smith on the ethical procurement of NHS medical supplies
Welcome to a series of blogs on sustainable healthcare that will look at health, sustainability, and the interplay between the two. The blog will share ideas from experts across the healthcare field, some of whom are speaking at a major European conference looking at Pathways to Sustainable Healthcare in September 2013. More about the Cleanmed […]
Richard Smith: A gamechanger for the polypill?
It is now some 15 years since the emergence of the idea and supporting evidence that combining antihypertensives and a statin into a single polypill and giving it to people daily could dramatically reduce morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease and stroke. Yet polypills are still not licensed in any high income country, although […]
Desmond O’Neill: Elysium—an effective Trojan horse for Obamacare and the social gradient
“Just enjoy the film, dad, you don’t always have to write about it!” is a familiar refrain from my family on our sporadic outings to the movies. Yet cinema was the great art form of the 20th century and this century is continuing the same way, according to Philip French, the masterly film critic of […]
Siddhartha Yadav: A foreign medical graduate’s path to US residency
On 15 September 2013, thousands of doctors and doctors-to-be will flock to the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) website to apply for a residency position in the United States. As this date is approaching, I can see both excitement and apprehension on the faces of prospective candidates. Most of the candidates that I know are […]
Readers’ editor: Where has all the research news gone?
In March 2005 Ali Tonks wrote her first weekly Short Cuts column, a summary of nine papers published in the world’s other main general medical journals. The following year we published the first of Richard Lehman’s weekly journal review blogs. […]
Jett Aislabie: Is all sponsorship equal?
Advertising and sponsorship are generally seen as necessary evils by us here at The BMJ. While we are positively fizzing with ideas for new content, we know that bringing it to you, and as wide an audience as possible, is much more likely with the support of sponsors. Having said that we would like to […]
Richard Smith: A bad case of health
I’ve been puzzling for years over how to define health without making much progress, but I thought I might take a step forward by listening to a discussion on the radio about whether philosophy can help you live the good life. The answer seemed to be no: philosophy doesn’t have a wholly convincing answer to […]