The cholera hospital in Matlab, Bangladesh, has patients in the corridors and every nook and cranny, but as we walk through the mood is calm. Most beds have two people, […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: the unrecognised epidemic
About 200 million adults a year undergo major surgery that is not cardiac surgery, and about 5 million of those people suffer a major vascular complication. That, said P J […]
Richard Smith: A day in village India
“The village is the real India,” said an Indian friend, echoing Gandhi and the continuing belief of many Indian intellectuals. “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den […]
Richard Smith: Anna’s legacy
“Anna [Donald] has left a remarkable legacy to other patients like myself with advanced disease,” says Helen Owens, a patient with cancer, on the website Anna’s Adventure. Anna Donald, as […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
Richard Smith: Move money from the NHS to social care
When governments spend money on “health” they get lots of sickness but very little health. Increasing expenditure on healthcare—now 17% of GDP in the United States and 9% of GDP […]