Health
Giving up smoking was an absolute doddle
I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces…
We still love our failing NHS
A new poll about the NHS, the Sunday Times tells us, has discovered ‘a decline in support’ for the National…
The causes of gout
Medical problems come and go in the media, and at the moment the flavour of the month appears to be…
One to spare
Why I donated my kidney
Dirty dogs
The dangers and distortion of yoga
How we fell for antidepressants
The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By…
Finally, some justice for the infected blood scandal’s victims
Why has the greatest patient scandal in the history of the NHS rumbled on for so long before its victims…
Cutting corners
The NHS is letting down patients in small, crucial ways
I won’t have another Covid jab
In the news recently, we’ve heard from multiple Britons who’ve lost family members or sacrificed their own health to Covid’s…
Medical emergency
General practice is broken
Along comes monkeypox
I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking…
How to handle the next pandemic
There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally…
Pause célèbre
The march of the ‘menosplainers’
Are we falling out of love with the NHS?
Clap for carers now feels like ancient history. Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest since 1997, according…
The cancer care timebomb that desperately needs to be fixed
As many as 100,000 patients had a cancer that was missed, or had their diagnoses or treatments delayed during the…
Poet’s notebook
Living, as Clive James put it, under a life sentence, and having refused chemotherapy, I find I respond to the…
Barometer
Blow by blow Did Storm Eunice really set a new record for wind speed in England? A 122 mph gust…
Low life
Eighty yards west of the high terrace where I’ve sat for three weeks recuperating is a hospice built for Napoleon’s…
Sceptic shock
I got Covid a couple of weeks ago. Second time for me, which was annoying because I’d told Caroline that…
Health, wealth and happiness
Stories about money are never about money. They are about pain, about family, about atrocity, about luck, about health, about…
Does the doctor really need to see you now?
Only later, perhaps even a decade later, as the pandemic of 2020-22 shrinks in our rear-view mirror, may we be…
Do we want the nanny state tracking our every step?
The best thing that can be said about the government’s latest anti-obesity scheme is that it’s cheap. For now. The…
Why did we decide that Covid was over?
Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind.…
A great reformer?
Sajid Javid has big plans for the NHS – if Covid lets him
Boris Johnson and the Tory identity crisis
The Tory conference in Manchester will be a relatively muted affair. In part, this is because — as I say…
