This blog post was originally published on the British Medical Journal’s web site. What follows is intercepted pseudonymous correspondence between a patient and a GP as the patient tries to persuade the GP to use Patients Know Best’s system so that she can consult online. Dear Dr Today, Can I ask you to accept the invitation [...]
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Can the NHS get digital? Why has the NHS been so much slower to use information technology than other sectors and what might be done to encourage it to speed up? These were questions addressed yesterday at an NHS Confederation seminar, but we were urged to talk opportunity not barriers and to avoid answers like [...]
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Cognitive surplus One of the great pleasures of living in London is that a friend can email you (in this case from Salamanca) and say: “Hey, did you know Clay Shirky, a world famous internet guru, is speaking at LSE in 60 minutes?”—and you can drop everything, go, and be thrilled. I knew about Shirky [...]
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The first example was from Abu Dhabi, which Oliver Harrison, a British doctor, and colleagues have turned into a “living laboratory”. They are aiming to measure the risk factors of every adult in the country, including blood pressure and lipids, and give them personal treatments, plans, and targets. They have begun with a cohort of almost [...]
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Every day hundreds of thousands of doctors and patients around the world discuss the benefits and risks of drugs. You might think therefore that we know how to communicate the information well, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration agree that we don’t. Indeed, the EMA logically thinks that before [...]
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Some three million children in Britain are obese, and treating childhood obesity is far from easy. If we are to have any chance of responding adequately to the epidemic of obesity we need to find, firstly, a treatment that works and, secondly, a way to scale it up so that it can be used across [...]
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The differences between rural and urban China are stark. Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities are filled with new buildings, best illustrated by those built for the Olympics, whereas rural China has as many as 300 million people living on under a dollar a day, more than any other country. Indeed, China can be described [...]
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Perhaps I should have realised from the title, but when I began to read The Book of Dead Philosophers I didn’t expect it to be funny. In fact Simon Critchley’s stories of how “190 or so” philosophers died and some of what they said about death is at times hilarious—as well as rich with meaning. [...]
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Slowly but surely the internet is transforming industries—finance, travel, music, entertainment—but so far it has had little impact on public services. But can it transform public services and if so how and when? These were the questions that ran through a day of “cocreation” organized by Patient Opinion, an organisation founded by GP Paul Hodgkin [...]
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Last week’s conference to launch Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy left me thinking that priorities in global health may be very wrong. David Molyneaux from Liverpool said that an alien observing earth for the first time would think that it had only three diseases: AIDS, TB, and malaria. He is one of the “three dinosaurs [...]
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Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Dr Richard Smith