Digital was definitely the catchword at a meeting of UK magazine publishers in London last week. Perhaps more surprising was how often the print medium emerged as a continuing focus in a conference about the rising number of digital platforms and channels. At this meeting of the Professional Publishers Association’s (PPA), organisers presented the results [...]

Patient charges have featured in the British press in recent weeks after Malcolm Grant, the head of NHS England, raised their spectre last month. Until recently I was undecided about patient charging. There’s mixed evidence and obvious downsides, but health spending is a bottomless pit, and £5 judiciously applied here or there seems like a [...]

The movement towards open science is gathering pace, driven by scientific and ethical imperatives—not simply by the technological possibilities. In medicine such openness has real potential to benefit patients and society. Indeed, the arguments for open registration and publication of studies’ protocols, methods, and main results are underpinned by ethical arguments that are focused on [...]

In 2009, Obama convened senior politicians in the Oval Office to discuss one magazine article: why were there Medicare costs of $15,000 per person per year in the Texan town of McAllen, when a neighbouring town had costs of $7,500 per person per year? Especially when the hospitals in McAllen were performing worse than its [...]

It’s at the end of a long TEDMED day that Andrew Solomon comes onto the stage. He looks a bit shiny, with a smart blue suit (did no one tell him the dress code is resort casual?) and a high forehead. He turns out to be single handedly worth the price of admission to this [...]

The best thing about TEDMED is its delegates. Firstly they genuinely want to talk to you. Secondly they are all really interesting. Everyone has either worked for NASA or is at the very least a CEO of an entrepreneurial healthcare company. The man I sit next to at one session is a neurologist who has [...]

I want the world to be a better, healthier place. Really I do. And now, at my first TEDMED conference in Washington DC, I have high hopes of hearing from people already working on that. TEDMED runs a fairly linear conference structure—big auditorium, big thinkers on the stage, for short, pack a punch presentations. At [...]

April 6th was World Physical Activity Day—did you miss it? Probably good news. Best to keep doctors out of it. Let me explain: I believe passionately in the benefits of physical activity, have researched it, published, editorialised, practised, and promoted it at every opportunity. The benefits of physical activity are undisputed and physical activity is [...]

There is something to be said for wearing your heart on your sleeve, and few do it to greater effect than Margaret McCartney, a GP in Glasgow. She exuded frustration as she galvanised a session on public and patient involvement at the Evidence Live conference, in which she explained why she had reached the point [...]