Tropical medicine (also sometimes called International medicine) is the branch of medicine that deals with health problems that occur uniquely, are more widespread, or prove more difficult to control in tropical and subtropical regions.

Many infections and infestations that are classified as "tropical diseases" used to be endemic in countries located in temperate or even cold areas. This includes widespread epidemics such as malaria and hookworm infections as well as exceedingly rare diseases like lagochilascaris minor. Many of these diseases have been controlled or even eliminated from developed countries, as a result of improvements in housing, diet, sanitation, and personal hygiene. Since climate is not the main reason why those infections remain endemic in tropical areas, there is a trend towards renaming this speciality as "Geographic Medicine" or "Third World Medicine."^{[citation needed]}

The training in Tropical Medicine is quite different between countries. Most doctors are trained at Institutes of Tropical Medicine. For example, the training of Dutch tropical doctors consists of two clinical years (Obstetrics & Gynecology, Paediatrics or General Surgery) and a three months course at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam.

Ben Michael Goldacre (born 1974) is a British science writer, doctor and psychiatrist. He is the author of The Guardian newspaper's Bad Science column and a book of the same title, published by Fourth Estate in September 2008.

Goldacre is the son of Australians Michael Goldacre, professor of public health at the University of Oxford, and the pop singer Susan Traynor, aka Noosha Fox, the nephew of science journalist Robyn Williams, and the great-great-grandson of Sir Henry Parkes.

Goldacre was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford then studied medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in his preclinical studies in 1995. While at Oxford he also edited the student magazine Isis. He was a visiting researcher in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Milan, working on fMRI brain scans of language and executive function, and then he went on to study clinical medicine at UCL Medical School and qualified as a medical doctor in 2000. He received a master's degree in philosophy (funded by the British Academy) from King's College London. He passed the MRCPsych Part II examinations in December 2005 and became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. In 2008 he was a research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. As of November 2009^[update], Goldacre is a psychiatric registrar and Guardian research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.