Yesterday, I witnessed a doctor being beaten up at the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital of Nepal. The doctor was exiting the hospital grounds when a group of people stopped him. […]
Columnists
Julian Sheather: The ghosts of medicine
I was at the Liverpool Medical Institution recently, judging a debating competition between medical students from Manchester and Liverpool. […]
Richard Smith: Run for your life
What will you be doing on 6 April? There is a high chance that you’ll spend much of the day sat in front of a computer, perhaps seeing patients at […]
Richard Smith: Is the NHS three times better than in 1979?
Reading the accounts in the BMJ of how various doctors and mangers would make savings in the NHS, I thought back to a series based on the same idea that […]
Martin McShane: Paragraph 142, page 33
The non-executive asked a simple question; “Why can’t we just say no?” In the world of business they inhabit, this is a rational question. We were on one of our […]
Richard Smith: Web 2.0 overtakes Web 1.0: get with it
Last week in the United States Facebook for the first time had more traffic than Google. This is hugely significant and shows how interacting is taking over from searching on […]
Richard Smith: Scrap peer review and beware of “top journals”
The neurologist and epidemiologist Cathie Sudlow has written a highly readable and important piece in the BMJ exposing Science magazine’s poor reporting of a paper on chronic fatigue syndrome, (1) […]
Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos turns the light on for donors and non-communicable diseases in developing countries
Last week two very important persons from a big donor agency came to visit me in my office in Dhaka. These men have vast experience in global health, and the agency […]
Richard Smith: Should drug companies be free to give information to patients?
If a patient rings a drug company asking for information about one of the company’s drugs that he or she is taking, the company cannot answer. Companies are forbidden to […]
Julian Sheather on banned words
I know not whether to laugh or cry. Into my inbox has just popped an index prohibitorum, a list of words drawn up by the Local Government Association that must […]