Teaching, it seems to me, is much the same as stand-up comedy. One is much scarier than the other, but which is the scariest depends on who you are. I […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: Can Devi Shetty make healthcare affordable across the globe?
It’s impossible not to be impressed by Devi Shetty, heart surgeon and the “the Henry Ford of healthcare.” We can be impressed by his surgical skill and his refusal to […]
Richard Smith: Are we too concerned with confidentiality? A fable
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Richard Smith: Confusing animals and people
My Kenyan friend thinks that Americans are mad. He worked for a while in an American hospital, and one day a colleague disappeared for a few hours. When he came […]
Richard Smith: Time for medicine to move from “why questions” to “how questions”
A famous paper published in 1993 by Alan Berg of the World Bank asked why the world had done poorly at feeding everybody. Berg had two answers: nutritionists do the […]
Richard Smith: More than a food bank
Food banks in the United States are busy. The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, which I visited last week as part of the University of Arizona’s conference on global […]