Uganda, like all low income countries, has formidable health problems and limited resources. If you were the health minister in Uganda what would be your priorities? This question was in […]
Columnists
Nick Hopkinson: Canvassing—should medical students get out on the doorstep?
The price good people pay for not engaging in politics is bad government. I prefer this version of Plato’s aphorism to the more usual “rule by your inferiors” one. The […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Weasel words
It has been reported that Department of Health lawyers have said that the secretary of state for health, known to us as the SoSH or the Cunctator, never intended to […]
David Oliver: Are we recreating the conditions that led to the Mid Staffs scandal and Francis inquiries?
I am worried that we are heading right back to the very conditions that led to the Francis inquiries, losing any progress we have gained on the back of them. […]
Richard Smith: The deeper causes of the doctors’ strike—a thought experiment
I’m on my way to walk among bluebells, but my mind is on junior doctors engaging in a total strike, not providing even emergency care, for the first time in […]
Richard Smith: The NHS is a fiction, but what’s the story?
Ask somebody “What is the NHS?” and they are likely to answer to “The people who work in it, the buildings they work in, and the tools they use to […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . A contract or a contra-act?
So, the junior hospital doctors’ “contract” has been published, and the secretary of state for health, described in BMA documents as “SoSH”, which is also an obsolete word meaning a […]
Richard Smith: What are medical journals for and how well do they fulfil those functions?
Last week I gave a talk to the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals entitled “Medical journals: time for something different.” My core argument was that “Medical journals have played […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Mechanisms and evidence
To recap: my definition of a pharmacological mechanism, slightly expanded from before, is “one or more entities and activities organised spatially and temporally to interact in such a way as […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Flashes, flies, and spanners
Knowing the vicissitudes of medical research, I expected a fair number of flashes in the pan and flies in the ointment, but neither is a common metaphor in PubMed. I […]