What is the value of obesity research? - Comment on Blundell JE, Hebebrand J, Oppert JM. What is the value of obesity research? Obes Facts 2010;3:279-282.

Mistaking the Map for the Territory: What Society Does With Medicine; Comment on “Medicalisation and Overdiagnosis: What Society Does to Medicine”

Van Dijk et al describe how society’s influence on medicine drives both medicalisation and overdiagnosis, and allege that a major political and ethical concern regarding our increasingly interpreting the world through a biomedical lens is that it serves to individualise and depoliticize social problems. I argue that for medicalisation to serve this purpose, it would have to exclude the possibil...

Can a Healthcare “Lean Sweep” Deliver on What Matters to Patients?; Comment on “Improving Wait Times to Care for Individuals with Multimorbidities and Complex Conditions Using Value Stream Mapping”

Disconnects and defects in care – such as duplication, poor integration between services or avoidable adverse events – are costly to the health system and potentially harmful to patients and families. For patients living with multiple chronic conditions, such disconnects can be particularly detrimental. Lean is an approach to optimizing value by reducing waste (eg, duplication and defects) and ...

Obesity and diabetic retinopathy: What is the association?

A Doctor’s First, and Last, Responsibility is to Care Comment on “Denial of Treatment to Obese Patients—the Wrong Policy on Personal Responsibility for Health”

The obesity epidemic raises important and complex issues for clinicians and policy-makers, such as what clinical and public health measures will be most effective and most ethically-sound. While Nir Eyal’s analysis of these issues is very helpful and while he correctly concludes that “conditioning the very aid that patients need in order to become healthier on success in becoming healthier” is ...

Politics or Technocracy – What Next for Global Health?; Comment on “Navigating Between Stealth Advocacy and Unconscious Dogmatism: The Challenge of Researching the Norms, Politics and Power of Global Health”

Politics play a central part in determining health and development outcomes as Gorik Ooms highlights in his recent commentary. As health becomes more global and more politicized the need grows to better understand the inherently political processes at all levels of governance, such as ideological positions, ideas, value judgments, and power. I agree that global health research should strengthen...