I am the chief medical officer of our family. I am the bridge between my family members, some of them eccentric and one of them demented, and an unforgiving health […]
Columnists
Richard Smith: Disclosure of conflicts of interest may increase bias
I’ve worried that disclosing conflicts of interest may be counterproductive ever since we did an experiment that showed that readers of articles with declared conflicts discounted not only the believability […]
Richard Smith: Our need for clockware and swarmware
Tackling the global pandemic problem of non-communicable disease (NCDs) is a complex problem that needs clockware and swarmware. I imagine that most BMJ readers have no idea what that sentence […]
Edzard Ernst: Pascal’s Wager and alternative medicine
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) argued that, because it is impossible to either prove or disprove the existence of God, it would be best to wager in favour of his existence. In […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Bringing systematic reviews with a development focus to South Asia
A substantial body of evidence exists to answer many of the questions asked by policymakers and development partners in low and middle income countries (LMIC). However, evidence is often scattered, […]
Richard Smith: Doctors are not interested in health or prevention
“Doctors are not interested in health” is one of my many wild generalisations. My evidence is my experience, a 40 year collection of anecdotes, and the observation that a thousand […]
Tiago Villanueva: Austerity eroding Portuguese healthcare
In 1960, Portugal’s infant mortality rate was 77.5 deaths per 1000 live births, which is comparable to that of many Sub Saharan African countries today. In 2010, Portugal’s infant mortality […]
Martin McShane: 80:20
We are working through trying to understand exactly how commissioning support (CSS) will work with Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). At a recent time out the lead manager for the CSS […]
Desmond O’Neill: The ethics of advocacy
The infant’s eyes are huge, the profile of its tiny cheek bisected by a naso-gastric tube and its ugly adhesive patch. Peering from the corner of the billboard, the image […]
Richard Smith: Managing infertility in Kenya
Ivan Illich, the great critic of modern medicine, argued that it had displaced well the traditional cultural mechanisms for managing pain, sickness, and death with a false promise of eliminating […]