BMJ blogs

My mother was horrified when she discovered I’d become “one of those people who refuse patients drugs because they’re too expensive.” Barely a week goes by without another story in the media about someone somewhere who has been “denied” a treatment. Usually accompanied by a photo of them with their concerned relatives, the language is always emotive; the local PCT is portrayed as an anonymous decision-making machine and, above all, heartless and uncaring. Read the rest of this entry »

Jannik Boehmfeld is dead. He is six years old, a year younger than my eldest son. He is lying on his back. His mouth is open but his eyes are shut. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever thought the BMJ would be competing in the same publishing awards as Nuts magazine? To be fair, some of you probably did - not least because of the extensive coverage of anatomy. Read the rest of this entry »

First, I want to thank the many people who have posted such thoughtful comments to this blog. I’ve been a bit overwhelmed, though not surprised, by people’s generosity (again and again, cancer has revealed to me the kindness of strangers as well as friends). To my embarrassment, I haven’t been able to get my login details to work, so haven’t posted replies. I will certainly reply to several people’s kind suggestions once I figure out how to do so. (BMJ help!) Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 the NHS. Read the rest of this entry »

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 think about what she had said. Read the rest of this entry »

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 not. Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you for all the replies to my last blog - I’ve had a lot of very kind feedback and sympathy from readers.  Read the rest of this entry »

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 the right, we had Gordon Brown, fresh out of his food summit, calling for more agricultural research, free trade and food aid for the starving. Read the rest of this entry »