One of the worries about medical students is that they are not well connected to the real world. The come mostly from privileged backgrounds, enter the monastery of the medical […]
Richard Smith
Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.
Richard Smith: Does it still make sense for healthcare to be “free” and social care means tested?
Does it make sense for the state to pay tens of thousands of pounds for a drug that might keep a patient with cancer alive for another six weeks and […]
Richard Smith: A modest proposal to supermarkets
In healthcare we are much concerned about privacy, but Sainsbury’s, the supermarket chain, knows how much toilet paper I’ve bought in the past 20 years, how many chocolate éclairs I […]
Richard Smith: Transparency—the latest panacea
Opening up NHS data to all will bring jobs, economic growth, innovation, a better health service, reduced health costs, and a new age in science. That was the heady message […]
Richard Smith: Death becomes fashionable
Death is becoming fashionable. London’s Southbank is planning a two day festival of death, the BMJ has a Christmas editorial urging us to think of death as a friend rather […]
Richard Smith: Hauling the private sector onboard to combat diabetes
The golden phrase for countering non-communicable disease (NCD) is that we need a “whole of government and whole of society approach.” An important step on that path is obviously for […]
Richard Smith: The happiness questionnaire
My son, a chef, is part of a “pop up think tank” of people under 35 working on happiness. They are gathering evidence through a questionnaire, and I thought that […]
Richard Smith: Can information technology improve healthcare?
I doubt that anybody within airlines, financial services, or manufacturing goes to meetings to debate whether information technology can improve what they do. It already has. But in healthcare we’ve […]
Richard Smith: More on the uselessness of peer review
I know I’m becoming a bore with all this raving against prepublication peer review, but like all true bores I’m charging on regardless. And I’m fired up by the experience […]
Richard Smith: Battling over safe alcohol limits
Advice on smoking is simple: don’t smoke. But what should be the advice on alcohol? It can’t be “don’t drink,” nor can it be “drink less.” Doctors and governments think […]