Last week the World Health Assembly adopted some tough targets for NCD, including reducing deaths among those under 70 by 25% by 2025. The rhetoric is that a “whole of […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: Is anything less than fully informed consent abuse?
Recently in preparing a talk I was giving in Bologna I found a copy of a talk I’d given to WONCA, the world meeting of general practitioners, back in the […]
Richard Smith: Reclaiming blood pressure from doctors
We all know about obesity. We can see fatness. Obesity belongs to all of us, and it’s a global problem. Politicians care about obesity. But who cares about blood pressure? […]
Richard Smith: The irrationality of the REF
The Saturday before last I was rung up by a fellow of the Royal Society who was having trouble with the New England Journal of Medicine, and our conversation soon […]
Richard Smith: Stop jumping from “is” to “ought”
Last week for the first time I examined a PhD, and one of my co-examiners, a moral philosopher, told us of “Hume’s guillotine” and taught us a lesson that all […]
Richard Smith: A French recipe for happiness
Émilie du Châtelet, the French aristocrat, philosopher, lover of Voltaire, and interpreter of Newton, had highly original (and possibly even correct) ideas on the route to happiness. Those who are […]
Richard Smith: Two deaths
A woman I hardly know and I are sat in a café in a country far from Britain, and the conversation turns to death. She tells me of two deaths […]
Richard Smith: Memories of Thatcher
My early years at the BMJ were very bound up with Margaret Thatcher. I started as an assistant editor a month before she became prime minister in 1979 and was […]
Richard Smith: Is email work?
“Email is not work. It’s a distraction.” So said a fierce, bearded lecturer at a talk I attended recently. Is he right? I have every reason to think him wrong […]
Richard Smith: Should the first priority of the NHS be to stop us dying or to help us die well?
Good Friday is an excellent day for thinking about death, but I think about death every day. I find it energising. As I write this blog on Easter Sunday, I read […]