BMJ blogs

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

Earlier this year I declined an invitation to fly all expenses from Sydney to Geneva to speak for 15 minutes at an international cancer conference. There was a hole in my calendar. Geneva is a hop from Lyon, where I have good friends. I have a son in London who I haven’t seen for a while. It was tempting.  But the carbon footprint and the derisory speaking time got to me.  (more…)

At an international research integrity meeting in Lisbon last year, I was horrified when a US scientist told me that UK universities didn’t reply to her concerns about alleged research misconduct. We cannot be proud of the fact that the UK scientific establishment took so long to set up a body to investigate research misconduct. And, even more embarrasing is the fact that, now we have the UK Research Integrity Office (RIO), it is hasn’t even got permanent funding. (more…)

People in Bangladesh get 80% of their healthcare from the private sector. Across Sub-Saharan Africa it’s 60%, and the proportion is increasing. The poorer people are the more likely they are to receive private care, and the middle classes consume more publicly funded care than the poor. (more…)

On 26 January 2007 a regulation and amending regulation on medicinal products for paediatric use came into force in the EU, which requires that medicines are ethically researched and made available for children aged 0-17 years. (more…)

The sub-theme of this inaugural Think About Health conference is on “The Remoralisation of Health Policy”, and day two of the event, held in Manchester on 4-5 April 2008, began with a paper titled just that, from Jonathan Montgomery.  For those (including myself) who may have been somewhat uncertain about what the remoralisation of health policy might entail or why it might be necessary, he started by demonstrating what he sees as the current de-moralisation of health policy and practice. (more…)

Public health: it’s one of those things, like free education or saving the giant panda, that we all pretty much agree is a “Good Thing;” and not just a good thing but one of the fundamental social goods that most of us expect the state to provide.  But what, exactly, is public health; and perhaps more importantly, what measures are justified in pursuit of it?  For example: should we introduce compulsory food labelling, the “traffic light” system and educational campaigns about nutrition as ways of reducing obesity – or should we ban fat people from restaurants? (more…)