Medicine’s relationship with the mass media is fickle with clinicians praising its judgement one minute (when they are subject to media approval) and cursing its trickery the next (when the object of criticism). The truth is that the media deserves a more reasoned attitude, a view I have come to after working closely with the media for much of my professional life. The story is relatively simple. In the early 1980s (as I was turning 40), I realised (probably later than most people) that the most powerful influence on our day-to-day thinking was the media. more…

Mexican (swine) flu is clearly a threat. It is difficult to know exactly how best to avoid being infected, and although the risks for a Londoner are remote here are some changes I now make in my day-to-day life in an attempt to stave contagion off.

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I have been bald for most of my adult life. My hair started ‘thinning’ in my late teens. By my early 20s I no longer needed to brush it out of my eyes when playing sport. By 27 it had gone from the crown of my pate (save for some fine ‘baby’ hair) and all that remained was a rim of hair stretching from around my ears to the back of my head. With time, the rim has gradually silvered.  more…

I have taught medical students for over forty years and, after a difficult start and the occasional hiccough, it has, overall, given me enormous satisfaction. Of the key components of teaching - lecturing and nurturing - lecturing was a particular challenge. Lecturing is, if nothing else, a public performance, and my beginnings as a performer were hardly auspicious. Up until my late teens I would simply freeze if placed in front of an “audience,” whether it was parents at the school play or simply my classmates.  Faced with speaking out loud my tongue failed to move, and with reading a text the page would become invisible. more…

I am now 67 and am having the time of my life. Inevitably, the way I am feeling and acting now is the product of both my age and my recent retirement, and the exact contribution of the two components is difficult to disentangle. I actually retired from being an academic with an active role in the medical establishment two years ago, and to minimise the “shock” of retirement I had started my withdrawal several years earlier. more…

My belief that a supernatural power such as a god does not exist (ie, my being an  atheist), is central to the way I think and act, and also determines how I see and relate to others both as individuals and when they function as groups (as in organised religion). But this is no recent conversion. Throughout my life I have lived in an atheist environment, so both my parents were atheists, as are currently my sisters, my wife (I feel sure I could not have married a ‘believer’), my children, and the majority of my close friends. more…

The sheer plasticity in the way we relate to one another amazes. Over any day I could be a father, a husband, a son (in-law), a teacher, a professor, a lecturer, a tutor, a supervisor, a doctor, a patient, a carer, a friend, a clown, an entertainer, a legal expert/opinion, a witness, a government advisor, a writer, a media pundit, a game show host, a chef, an apprentice (to a stonemason), a student (of French), a guilty accusee (speeding), a nondescript, and so on. more…