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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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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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 a big subject and [...]
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Congratulations to the Foundation for Genomics and Population Health (@PHGFoundation) for winning the NHS Partnership Award of the ERBI’s 2009 Bench2Boardroom conference. PKB and PHG were both finalists for the award and as you can read from the article below their work is important and interesting. In at least 20% of families affected by the [...]
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It is my great pleasure to announce that the Journal of Participatory Medicine has launched. I am on the editorial board and the inaugural issue includes a paper by our chairman, Dr Richard Smith. Participatory medicine is about a new approach to patient care: where patients are part of the team, and everyone in the [...]
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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, [...]
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Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Dr Richard Smith