A friend from a middle income country writes to me in despair about the way he and his colleagues have been treated by medical journals. His story made me angry […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: How might artificial intelligence improve healthcare?
Artificial intelligence, which few of us understand, might apocalyptically enslave humanity or release it from death. Some prominent scientists believe that robots blessed with artificial intelligence will soon be more […]
Richard Smith: Coming to terms with “the second illness,” the fear of cancer
Mary Gunn, looking very well and wearing her 65 years lightly, stands in front of the audience in an Edinburgh bookshop describing how eight years ago she was diagnosed with […]
Richard Smith: Searching for an effective system to manage the world’s biggest killer
Hypertension is the world’s leading cause of premature death, ahead even of tobacco and obesity, and most of those deaths occur in poor countries. Yet the health system in most […]
Richard Smith: How we shun the mortally ill
When you develop a mortal illness, as you will do if you’re not one of the fifth of the population who dies suddenly, you are likely to find that many […]
Richard Smith: Surely time to let the private sector take over dental care completely
The NHS is primarily concerned with fending off death. It may be crazy, but it’s so. No expense is spared: heroic surgery, prolonged chemotherapy, absurdly expensive drugs, intensive care, experimental […]
Richard Smith: Schopenhauer, the Economist, and cancer
This morning I’ve read a disappointingly shallow account in the Economist of the attempt to cure cancer and a quote from Schopenhauer that could be sent as a letter to […]
Richard Smith: Science fiction stories foresee a bleak future for healthcare
The rhetoric of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the medical royal colleges, and medical researchers is that the future of healthcare is bright. Personalised medicine is coming; diseases that are […]
Richard Smith: Trying to make patient monitoring outside of intensive care widely used
Dinesh Seemakurty’s idea for a business came to him as he sat by his grandfather’s hospital bed in Kakinada, India. His grandfather had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had been […]
Disavowal: the great excuser that may destroy us
By Richard Smith and David Pencheon In 2007 Fiona Godlee, editor of The BMJ and somebody who has been concerned about the environment for at least 30 years, was outed […]