One of the things I love about the polypill is that it upsets everybody. (Just in case there are still people who haven’t heard of the polypill, it’s one pill […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith on countering the “wicked problem” of the chronic disease pandemic
I spent two days last week in the seductive grandeur of Trinity College, Oxford, fretting about the global pandemic of chronic disease, but I left feeling optimistic—despite the pandemic raging […]
Richard Smith says make vegetarian food the norm at formal dinners
I’ve just attended a conference on preventing chronic disease, and something that appealed to me greatly was the idea that at all formal dinners (and my how I’ve suffered from […]
Richard Smith asks: Is medicine as excessive as the banks?
Is medicine, like the banks, falling into excess? I asked myself this question at the end of last year as I read about the death of Faith Williams, the conjoint […]
Richard Smith on learning from health systems in Asia
It depresses me that despite the spread of the internet we are still most of us stuck in our intellectual and geographical silos. Why, I wondered at a conference in […]
Richard Smith asks who is the E O Wilson of medicine?
A friend has written to me asking whom I think might be the “E O Wilson of Medicine,” and I’m stumped. Perhaps some readers of the BMJ have never heard […]
Richard Smith on why the private sector is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals
On Monday I was at a meeting with Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon, illustrating my global significance. […]
Demand online access to your medical records, says Richard Smith
I’ve just emailed my GP asking her to give me online access to my medical records. It was quite a palaver as I couldn’t find her email address, or the […]
Richard Smith on barriers to writing and getting published for authors from low income countries
While teaching two courses on “getting published” in Dhaka I had a marvellous opportunity to gather insights into why researchers from a low income country have problems writing and getting […]
Richard Smith: Can poetry define health?
Reflecting on the challenge by Alex Jadad and Laura O’Grady to define health, I begin to conclude that it can’t be captured in a few words. Disease is a simple […]