Educated at Highgate School and the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, I qualified in 1973. After pre-registration posts at the Middlesex and Kettering hospital I worked at the Hammersmith and Brompton hospitals before moving to Bath as a medical registrar. I undertook my training in rheumatology and rehabilitation back at the Middlesex, with attachments to the Royal National Orthopaedic and Northwick Park Hospitals, before being appointed Consultant at Queen Mary's Sidcup and the Brook Hospital, Woolwich in 1983.

A re-organisation of sessions took me full-time to Queen Mary's in 1989. I have been Director of the Elmstead Rehabilitation Unit since 1985.

My particular rheumatology interests are the teaching of examination technique and joint injection and the clinic management of rheumatoid arthritis. Over many years I have amassed an extensive collection of interesting and representative clinical photographs and X-rays, and co-edited a slide atlas (published in book form as "Clinical Rheumatology" by Gower Medical Publishing in 1986). My e-lecture on digital photography and images in rheumatology appeared on the MSec portal early in 2005. I am currently writing podcasts for Doctors.net and assisting with the construction of their rheumatology image database.

Between 2001-2005 I authored a monthly column in "Rheumatology", writing as Robin Goodfellow (the mischievous Puck in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream).

I have always been involved in the "politics" of Rheumatology and was Chairman of the Clinical Affairs Committee of the British Society for Rheumatology from 1998 to 2001, during which time I chaired the Society's Working Party on TNF-alpha blockade in rheumatoid arthritis. I was until 2005 a member of the External Relations Committee. In April 2005 I became President-Elect of the BSR and assumed the Presidency at the Annual General Meeting of the Society in May 2006, demitting office at the end of April 2008.