Ray Moynihan

Ray Moynihan

Dr Ray Moynihan is Senior Research Fellow at Bond University in Australia, working within the publicly funded Wiser Healthcare research collaboration for reducing overdiagnosis. An award-winning journalist and author, Ray’s written 4 books on the business of medicine, including Selling Sickness, translated into 12 languages and Too Much Medicine?. A one-time Harkness fellow at Harvard University, Ray’s published in the NEJM, Lancet and BMJ, and currently presents The Recommended Dose podcast, produced by Cochrane Australia and co-published by BMJ. In 2012 Ray helped initiate the new series of Preventing Overdiagnosis scientific conferences, and he’s honoured to be attending this conference in Helsinki about Too Much Medicine.

 

Q: What did you want to be when you grew up?
A: Train driver was the first one I think. We lived beside a station.

Q: Who is/was your role model?
A: Parents, siblings, grandparents, partners, loved ones, and now, my son.

Q: Tell us about a meaningful moment in your career
A: Being a youngish journalist sitting next to BMJ editor Richard Smith at a restaurant in Sydney and him asking me if I’d like to be guest editor on a theme issue of BMJ about too much medicine.

Q: If someone asked you to suggest a book to read, what would you recommend?
A: Don Quixote.

Q: What do you like to do in your down time (hobbies, etc)?
A: Play music, sing, dance, and walk and swim with family and friends – and read.

Q: What is your favourite cuisine?
A: Cuisine bullshit – as a beloved friend on mine always said.

Q: What is your favourite place in the world?
A: The question is too hard. Candidates include: Australian desert, Harvard lecture theatre, the beach near my house.

Q: Who would you most like to thank, and why?
A: Everyone – since we crawled out of the ocean – who understood the value of solidarity.

Q: What are three things you would change in medicine?
A: Please see my scribblings.

Q: How do you want people to remember you?
A: Have opened my heart to the benign indifference of the universe and accepted that they won’t.