Richard Smith: Four future scenarios of death and dying
The future is unpredictable. The unexpected happens often and can have a major impact. Nevertheless, some thought of how the future might look is important in preparing for it. Scenarios are one way of...
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Richard Smith: What was difficult if not impossible two weeks ago is...
Almost a quarter of a century ago I wrote in The BMJ about an evolution from “industrial age medicine” to “information age healthcare.” Despite the spread of the internet, social media, and smartphones...
View ArticleRichard Smith: Covid-19—an oblique view on who shall live and who shall die
The day before Boris Johnson announced a lockdown (or cloistering, as I prefer to call it), I sat in a theatre in Tonbridge and watched my brother, Nicholas, playing a Nazi doctor, the director of a...
View ArticleThe arrival of covid-19 in low and middle-income countries should promote...
Chances of a healthy recovery from covid-19 are not bright for the elderly who need hospital care. In a series of 5700 patients with covid-19 treated in New York hospitals, there were 320 who were...
View ArticleRichard Smith: How to talk to the dying—a lesson from a novel
In one chapter of Elizabeth Strout’s novel Olive, Again Olive Kitteridge, a large, blunt-speaking, retired schoolmistress, encounters in a supermarket Cindy Coombs, who is being treated for cancer and...
View ArticleRichard Smith: Support for health and social care staff
Health and social care staff are under enormous strain. The weekly clap and being given priority in shops is much appreciated, but how can more direct, practical, and evidence-based emotional support...
View ArticleRichard Smith: learning from a four-star general on leading in a time of...
No matter what you think about the US, war, or the invasion of Iraq, you can’t help thinking that a four-star general who has led several hundred thousand people in a surge to bring some sort of order...
View ArticleRichard Smith: Healthcare not only fails to respond to suffering but often...
“The test of a system of medicine should be its adequacy in the face of suffering,” writes the physician Eric J Cassell in his book The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine published in 1991....
View ArticleRichard Smith: How can we achieve a healthy recovery from the pandemic?
I recently saw a cartoon that has uncomfortably embedded itself in my brain: it shows a relatively small tidal wave that is the pandemic, followed by a bigger tidal wave that is the recession, and a...
View ArticleRichard Smith: A collection of consistently hilarious (but also pointed)...
Jim Drife, the singing professor of obstetrics and gynaecology from Leeds, wrote a hilarious, teasing column in The BMJ over many years. His columns have now been collected together in a book called...
View ArticleRichard Smith: The perplexing pursuit of an economy that promotes wellbeing...
Our economy, said John Maynard Keynes in 1933, “is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods.” Katherine Trebeck,...
View ArticleRichard Smith: Will carbon consumption, cost, and severe limitations finish...
The demise of most medical journals and the transformation of the remaining rump has been predicted for years, not least in my book The Trouble With Medical Journals, which I wrote in 2003 and was...
View ArticleTaking a covid-19 test at home: the fragile base on which track-and-trace is...
Like millions of others every day I have “done my bit” by entering into an app my symptoms and whether I’ve had a test for covid-19, and day after day I had no symptoms and had not been tested. Then I...
View ArticleRichard Smith: The well known story of how Easter Islanders destroyed their...
In 2011, I posted an article in The BMJ “Will we follow Easter Islanders into extinction?” It was a deeply pessimistic piece, and now I need to correct it with a more optimistic version of the story of...
View ArticlePharmaceutical companies should publish more research open access
Many organisations are working towards making scientific publications more transparent, discoverable, accessible, and accountable, but wouldn’t it be better if all these organisations could work...
View ArticleRichard Smith: Medical schools move to teaching online consultation with...
As for everybody and every organisation, the covid-19 pandemic has presented challenges, but also opportunities, to medical schools. One challenge is how the schools can ensure adequate and safe...
View ArticleWhat to say to a 7 year old terrified by climate change?
How can we support children who are worried about climate change? Richard Smith, David Pencheon, and Frances Mortimer look at how we might find hope through action Richard Smith: I have a friend whose...
View ArticleRichard Smith: The faults and dangers of an iatrocracy
The first thing that struck Bernard-Henri Lévy, arguably France’s leading public intellectual, about the covid-19 pandemic was the rise of “medical power.” In his short, enjoyable, and provocative book...
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Richard Smith: Relearning how to die
Kevin Toolis, author of the beautiful My Father’s Wake, would agree with the surgeon Atul Gawande that we have forgotten how to die. Toolis’s core argument is that his forebears on an Atlantic-lashed...
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Richard Smith: Could Sweden have got it right with covid-19?
Pandemics are unpredictable and it is too soon to say, argues Richard Smith Sweden stood alone in Europe in not opting for a severe lockdown when cases of covid-19 began to rise in the spring. As a...
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