Nervous laughter

“‘Tsunami not our problem,’ say top docs.” So ran the spoof headline at our strategy day last week. David Tovey, head of the BMJ's Clinical Evidence, was drawing his vision of a worst case tabloid future for the BMJ. (Other headlines on his flipchart masterpiece were “Name that rash and win an iPod,” and “Cox 6 inhibitors work for everyone.”)

We were laughing at the time, if somewhat nervously, but the tsunami-rejecting, insular view within medicine is real (we have heard it from readers at focus groups). It is also to some extent understandable. After all, …