It’s our job to help women understand the impact of their choices, while avoiding judgment and being honest about our knowledge […]
Florence Wilcock: We need to help women navigate uncertainty during pregnancy
Martin McKee: Building bridges in Budapest
Dr Tedros set out his priorities on SDGs […]
Richard Smith: Science fiction stories foresee a bleak future for healthcare
The rhetoric of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the medical royal colleges, and medical researchers is that the future of healthcare is bright. Personalised medicine is coming; diseases that are currently incurable will be cured; life expectancy will increase; big data will bring untold benefits; and the quality of care will steadily improve. But through […]
Sharon Roman: In good hands
What are the qualities that make for a good doctor and what can patients do if they’re missing? […]
Michael Marmot: The UK’s current health problems should be treated with urgency
Michael Marmot discusses why he’s calling for Jeremy Hunt to address urgent health problems in the UK […]
Joe Fraser: It takes more than language to make a good patient-clinician relationship
If you’re a clinician or a “Type Zero” (someone without diabetes) choosing the words to use when talking about diabetes is not straightforward. That’s true even for “Type ones” like me. The complexity stems from the identity associated with diabetes, and the relationship between those who have diabetes and those who are meant to help […]
Philip Berry: Teething problems with duty of candour
To doctors what began as a transparent human response has evolved into a series of deadlines […]
Richard Smith: Trying to make patient monitoring outside of intensive care widely used
Dinesh Seemakurty’s idea for a business came to him as he sat by his grandfather’s hospital bed in Kakinada, India. His grandfather had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had been treated initially in the intensive care unit. He’d been discharged, which Seemakurty and his family interpreted as a good sign, but during the night his […]
Kate A Levin: Low uptake of advance directives and the cost to public health
The older population in every country in the world is growing.1 In several high income countries, the increased health burden of older people on public spending is occurring at a time of austerity, reducing the means with which to address this issue year on year. As a consequence, there is a growing focus on anticipatory […]
Peter Doshi: Speed vs safety in the FDA’s new drug approvals—speed wins, again
In the late 1980s, AIDS activists stormed the headquarters of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with a message that the FDA’s drug approval process was, simply put, killing people by blocking the approval of new treatments. One protester’s shirt read: “If I die of AIDS—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of […]