Email and mobile phones are certainly the bane of most people’s lives, but the generation of students who have never known life without the internet seem to be managing fine without them. […]
Joe Collier: An end in sight for the secretive drug price fixing pact between government and industry
By September this year it is almost certain that a new system will be in place for determining how much the NHS will pay for its brand name medicines. For over half a century government and industry have used a complex formula to calculate the overall returns drug companies can make on their sales to […]
Julian Sheather: Does art make people better doctors?
Recently a colleague of mine, a GP, told me she was taking a three-month sabbatical. She was going to sit on an island in the Mediterranean and do very little more than read novels. Reading novels, she said, made her a better doctor. After I had shrugged off the spasm of envy, I started to […]
Anna Donald: Tests
Test results can be nerve racking. They turn a complex stream of life into a binary event in which your fate seems to hang in the balance. I was especially nervous about my latest CT results. They would reveal whether the small cancers in my head had been zapped by recent whole brain radiation. Or […]
Mark Lewis: A wounded survivor
Thank you for all the replies to my last blog – I’ve had a lot of very kind feedback and sympathy from readers. […]
Ian Roberts: Slim chances for a fat planet
Last week the geopolitics of the biofuel debacle looked something like this. On the left both geographically and politically, we had Evo Morales, President of the very poor and increasingly hungry Bolivia, pleading “la vida primero los autos segundos” (life first, cars second), exhorting the wealthy world to stop burning food in their cars. On […]
Liselotte Højggard: A room with a view..a journal with a conscience
Congratulations with the first BMJ on recycled paper. Being an old editor myself it is nice to see that the usual high quality of illustrations is unchanged in spite of the recycled paper, So no downsizing of quality and a better output for the global climate. Great. […]
Domhnall MacAuley: All change on Tuesdays
Paris in the spring clearly caught the imagination of the record 2000+ delegates attending the International Quality Forum. Some fascinating lessons in quality improvement but as often, not the ones you anticipate. The first message was never to make changes on a Tuesday- because in any health care system that is when you will have a […]
Anna Donald returns from a Buddhist retreat
I am back from purdah, having just returned from 10 days of ‘Noble Silence’ at a Vipassana meditation retreat in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. These charitable Buddhist programmes are run on a pay-by-donation basis in many countries, including Britain (in Herefordshire). […]
Anna Donald: Life in the shadow
Dear Reader, I should introduce myself before launching into a blog which I hope is not too depressing: living in the shadow of death. This is my starting point, as I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (I lit up “like a Christmas tree” on the scans) in February 2007. It was not a complete […]