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 we [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
Let’s [...]
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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 [...]
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Last week I was privileged to hear a brilliant talk—by Nicholas Janni—on what Henry V or rather Shakespeare has to teach us about leadership.
Prince Harry was, as most people know, a dissolute youth, hanging out with drunks, pimps, whores, and undesirables with the great Falstaff chief among them. But when his [...]
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I’ve just spent five days—yes, five days—talking about health literacy. Before my five day conversation I’d never thought much about health literacy, but now I see myself as an expert. Pick a small enough subject and you can be a world expert in about 20 minutes. But health literacy is actually [...]
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My paper was published today in inaugural issue of the Journal of Participatory Medicine, whose editorial board includes our CEO, Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli.
Abstract
Summary: After 30 years of practicing peer review and 15 years of studying it experimentally, I’m unconvinced of its value. Its downside is much more obvious to me than its upside, and the [...]
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I wrote a blog some six months ago about how a talk by Harold Shipman’s successor had convinced me that I should get access. I do most of my work online, complete my tax return online, make all my travel arrangements online, bank online, and buy books and CDs online, so [...]
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Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Dr Richard Smith