Last week, as yet more errors were piled on the statin comedy, and antibiotics got it in the neck from Red Dave, another it’s time we put-it-in/took-it-out of the water story caught Dr No’s eye. An economist – economists seem to get all the top health slots these days – and a psychologist – he was on the Today programme, sounding worryingly like Peter Cook’s classic amiable psychiatrist – want Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to be much more widely available to treat mental health problems. It is what airheads call a no-brainer. As Bush Lite might have said, CBT is where wings take dream (it works), and it makes the pie higher (it more than pays for itself: lower healthcare costs and folks back at work). Yet not just folks but our government have misunderestimated the power of CBT. NHS provision has increased in recent years, but from a very low base, and still only one patient in eight who might benefit gets the therapy. That’s one helluva misunderprovision for something that has if not wings then legs.
Powering a juggernaut through a minefield of metaphors, Professor Sue Bailey last week achieved a spectacular pileup. Describing the dire state of mental health services, the outgoing Chief Pongo of the Royal College of Psychiatrists said, ‘It’s a car-crash that we are sleepwalking into’. Never mind the grammar being of the kind up with which we will not put, the utterance revealed what psychiatrists once called a word salad is now so old hat; instead, word-stir-fry is the new black. Bailey then took a punt at Health Secretary Hunt, but Punt was saving his powder for later in the week, when his chum Cammers was scheduled to get up in a crate, pop over the Brussels, and take a shufti. In the best English losing tradition, Punt reckoned that crashing and burning with only a Hungarian in tow was a swell show. Cammers himself appealed to an inverted – and so imploded – Pyrrhic logic, averring that sometimes one has to lose a battle to win the war. In the political fallout, only one thing was certain: Cinderella was still out in the cold.
Established readers of Bad Medicine will know that Dr No takes a dim view of m’learned friends, considering them to be a verminous infestation in the lives of normal folk. In Dr No’s ideal world, lawyers would be deported to burrows on the fringe of an unknown desert, where they could live out their wretched litigious lives fighting each other, while the rest of us get on with our lives, unimpeded by lawyerly interference. For the time being though, back in the real world, lawyers are still with us, an inconvenience to be lived with, like a pimple on the bum that won’t go away. The day before yesterday, the 18th, Dr No had occasion to email one such pimple, only to get back one of those pesky out-of-office auto-replies. The reply, of course also dated the 18th, stated “I am away from the office until Monday 16th June.” The pimple, it appeared, was a zombie pimple, stuck in a limbo the Devil knows where. Dr No was left with a worrying thought: if lawyers don’t even know where they are, how on earth can we be confident they know what they are talking about?
Yesterday, BBC One’s News at Ten saturated itself with D-Day coverage, and rightly so. Hu Wedwards was on hand in Normandy to anchor clips of dignified talking berets, many spry despite their ninety years, cut with long vistas of white tombstones. Obama, naturally, outbarmed his own high standard of excellent oratory. Yet the tone was at once both sombre and urgent: sombre with remembrance, yet urgent with the certainty that this, the seventieth, would be the last decennial commemoration attended by many who had been on those blood stained beaches in 1944, beginning the fight that would erase the dark stain of Nazi tyranny from Europe. Liberation, as Churchill foretold, was sure, but at a cost of so many lives. Yesterday’s urgency, as Prince William told us, was to ensure that the baton of remembrance is passed to future generations.
For richer or poorer, for better or worse, Dr No is a smoker. And like most smokers, he knows he should quit. And – since you ask – no, it isn’t that easy. If it was, Dr No would now be an ex-smoker. Instead, even in the face of all the evidence, the cost, and a family history that includes a father and a grandmother who died from smoking related diseases, will-power time and again fails. He has managed smoking holidays, but sooner or later the nicotine magnet draws Dr No in again. In his orbits of despair, Dr No is as likely to escape the nicotine magnet as the moon is to escape the earth’s gravitational field.
stackery n., – the art of confounding people about statins.
Writing in the 
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