Mental health disorders—particularly depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease—account for a huge proportion of the global burden of disease, but the outlook for better treatments looks bleak. I don’t think that […]
Columnists
Julian Sheather: The fifth horseman of the apocalypse?
During the years when the Book of Revelations was being laid down, some time apparently in the first century AD, human populations were likely, with some exceptions, to be small, […]
Martin McShane: A day at the Mid Staffordshire foundation trust enquiry
I was privileged to be invited to the patient experience seminar being held as part of the Mid Staffordshire enquiry. I felt as though I was participating in one of […]
Desmond O’Neill: Quantitative easing – the academic version
The economic downturn has given us all a crash course in the arcane language of economics. A fine example is “quantitative easing,” a sober and serious sounding euphemism for the […]
Richard Smith: Time to get rid of health professionals?
Can we imagine a world 20 years from now that no longer has health professionals? Instead of regulated health professionals anybody could offer healthcare—and perhaps much of it would be […]
Martin McShane: Little and large
While I was a partner in general practice, we started to receive information about how we were performing compared to other practices. Whatever the data, we always looked at how we […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: the 19th Cochrane Colloquium in Madrid
¡Hola! from Madrid where the 19th Cochrane Colloquium was hosted last week by the IberoAmerican Cochrane Centre. The theme of this year’s meeting was “scientific evidence for healthcare quality and patient […]
Tiago Villanueva: Learning about European general practice research in Krakow, Poland
Last week I left the 30ºC heat of Lisbon for the almost sub-zero temperatures of Krakow, and made premature use of my winter gear. But the cold was not enough to deter me from attending […]
Desmond O’Neill: Death and the composer: Thanatos as muse?
Even though my clinical life is enmeshed with an active arts and health programme with music in pole position –a composer in residence in the Stroke Unit and a hospital […]
Richard Smith: “End of the world” and the under 40s
The BMJ meeting on climate change keeps reverberating through my mind, and the apocalyptic feel of the meeting was deeply unsettling. Is the end of the world nigh? And what […]