The Fly Agaric mushroom, depicted in many a book of fairytales, is a powerful hallucinogen but still perfectly legal. The reason why successive governments have not sought to ban it […]
Latest articles
Richard Smith on improving what the world eats
High blood pressure is the second main cause of disease burden in Australia and is only marginally behind tobacco, said Bruce Neal, senior director, research and development at the George […]
Simon Chapman: Sick and famous
Singer Cheryl Cole may turn out to be the most famous person to get malaria in 2010, but of course she’s not the only one. And more importantly, she’s hardly […]
Sandra Lako: An introduction
When I was two years old my parents moved onboard the M/V Anastasis, a hospital ship run by the organisation Mercy Ships, which provided relief and medical services to communities […]
Emily Spry: Does Freetown really exist?
I’m back in London after spending nearly a year working in the national Children’s Hospital in Sierra Leone, West Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world. It […]
Beth Cherryman: A graduate tax
Business secretary Vince Cable has proposed a “graduate tax” as a solution to university funding. Graduates will be taxed according to some percentage of their income (once earning over £15,000 […]
Julian Sheather on public health: complex problems, simple truths – the case of Sebastian Kneipp
Near universal consensus then that we are in the grip of a public health disaster. Daily the evidence mounts: obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, our very lives are killing us. And […]
Richard Smith: Can you ask a patient anything?
Can a doctor ask a patient anything? In the Netherlands the answer seems to be “yes.” Doctors tend not to think so, but at a meeting between doctors and patients […]
Chris Ham on GP commissioning
In a recent speech to the BMA, Andrew Lansley argued that separating the management of care from the management of resources was a fundamental weakness, adding “examples in America of […]
Richard Lehman’s journal blog, 19 July 2010
JAMA 14 July 2010 Vol 304 163 The classic hero of palliative care used to be the personal doctor who turned up in the middle of the night to administer […]