Nick Hopkinson: Canvassing—should medical students get out on the doorstep?
The price good people pay for not engaging in politics is bad government. I prefer this version of Plato’s aphorism to the more usual “rule by your inferiors” one. The guiding ethical principle should...
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Nick Hopkinson: The burden of asthma—how to frame it and what needs to be done?
A study this week from the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research at the University of Edinburgh, widely reported in the media, estimates that asthma costs the UK £1.1 billion/year in direct healthcare...
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Nick Hopkinson: Saving the NHS—a lesson from Carthage
Cato the Elder is said to have concluded every speech he made in the Roman Senate, regardless of the topic, with “Delenda est Carthago”—Carthage must be destroyed. In answering the Editor of The BMJ’s...
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Nicholas S Hopkinson reviews “The state of medicine”
“I am furious, sad, and scared for the NHS” —Margaret McCartney’s opening words in the introduction to her latest, timely book, The State of Medicine (Pinter and Martin 2016). Understandable...
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Nick Hopkinson: Air quality—what’s the point of warnings?
The Thames is wreathed in smog—the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, issues an air quality alert and announces a new system of air quality warnings. There will be road-side dot matrix message signs on the...
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Nick Hopkinson on Steve Biko, the NHS, and the mind of the oppressed
It would have been Steve Biko’s seventieth birthday this weekend. The anti-apartheid leader was beaten to death by the South African Police in a jail cell in 1977. His death was a medical scandal...
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Nick Hopkinson: NHS humanitarian crisis denial
When I qualified as a doctor in 1993, trolley medicine was completely routine. Post take ward rounds would typically visit people who had been waiting patiently in corridors overnight or longer. I’m...
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Nick Hopkinson: Bad air, poor memory
One explanation that has been offered for the UK’s self-destructive decision to leave the European Union is that there are now few people left alive who can remember the ruined Europe after the Second...
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Nick Hopkinson: Why an academic boycott of Trump’s America is misguided
How should a European clinical academic react to the fact that the US election appears to have sent a racist, misogynist, climate change denier to the White House? One response, arising in the context...
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Nick Hopkinson: What is breathing worth? The economic cost of lung disease
It is no secret that the UK healthcare system is under strain. The percentage of GDP spent on healthcare is projected to fall to 6.6% by 2020/21, back to the same levels as the 1990s. For comparison,...
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Nick Hopkinson: Conservatism and the cancer drugs fund
Decisions about healthcare inevitably involve choices around the allocation of finite resources. Democracy, if it is meaningful, is public reasoning. The National Institute for Health and Clinical...
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Nick Hopkinson: Chronic breathlessness syndrome—the power of a name
The recognition of a new clinical entity, “chronic breathlessness syndrome” has been proposed, following an international Delphi process to achieve an expert consensus.1 Why does this matter and is it...
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Nick Hopkinson: What we talk about when we talk about privatisation
It’s indisputable that privatisation is occurring in the NHS, so where does privatisation denial come from? That privatisation is occurring in the NHS, as in education, council services, and a host of...
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Nick Hopkinson: The lungs in winter—helping the NHS to cope better with...
Winter is here and with it the annual NHS winter crisis. Lung disease makes a substantial contribution to this, particularly in children and older people. Many respiratory illnesses are seasonal; cold...
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Nick Hopkinson: Your life in my hands—review
Andrew Lansley had his calamitous Health and Social Care Act 2012; Kenneth Clarke introduced the wasteful and destructive NHS internal market before going off to work for British American Tobacco;...
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Nick Hopkinson: Smoking in “The Crown”
A youthful Christine Keeler sits in custody refusing to answer questions, cigarette in hand. Season 2 of Netflix’s The Crown, culminates with the Profumo affair. It is 1963, six years after The Medical...
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Nick Hopkinson: Making sense of e-cigarettes—Public Health England’s review...
“I switched over to vaping but someone told me they were just as bad as cigarettes so I went back to smoking again.” A depressing thing to hear in a COPD clinic, but unfortunately not that uncommon....
View ArticleNick Hopkinson: Canvassing—should medical students get out on the doorstep?
The price good people pay for not engaging in politics is bad government. I prefer this version of Plato’s aphorism to the more usual “rule by your inferiors” one. The guiding ethical principle should...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nick Hopkinson: The burden of asthma—how to frame it and what needs to be done?
A study this week from the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research at the University of Edinburgh, widely reported in the media, estimates that asthma costs the UK £1.1 billion/year in direct healthcare...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nick Hopkinson: Saving the NHS—a lesson from Carthage
Cato the Elder is said to have concluded every speech he made in the Roman Senate, regardless of the topic, with “Delenda est Carthago”—Carthage must be destroyed. In answering the Editor of The BMJ’s...
View Article
