Yesterday, Dr No was putting together a post on Mary’s Bottom Line, a Channel 4 documentary in which the Retail Raptor revealed not only her smalls, but her softer side. It seems to Dr No there are parallels between what markets did to Britain’s clothing industry, and what markets will do to the NHS when the HSCB becomes law. He wondered if in a decade’s time we might not come across another Channel 4 documentary, Mary’s Life Line, in which a clutch of long-term unemployed doctors and nurses reoccupy derelict NHS premises and start a renaissance of NHS practice.
As he wrote the post, he became aware via twitter of a drop-the-bill rally in central London being met with not just a solid police presence, but armed riot police, kettling, and all the paraphernalia of police state control. By twitter accounts, the rally was peaceful, and the police response outrageous, but then twitter is not Reuters, so Dr No turned to the established media for confirmation. And what did Dr No find in the established media? Nothing.
Dr No has always had Dylan high on his list of Desert Island Discs. He even thinks Dylan is a bit like Shakespeare, even the Bible: we should get a complete set, without needing to ask for it. But if he had to choose one for now, it might just be this one.
There has arisen, it seems to Dr No, a certain class of doctor, typically female and in their thirties or forties, maybe a GP, but not in full time clinical practice, perhaps instead involved in medical education in some guise or other, or perhaps not, who number, amongst their many duties, that of patrolling the internet. They patrol other, often male, members of their profession for what they consider to be misdemeanours, great and small, and when they find such misdemeanours, they feel driven to act, in the name of decency, correctness, and the final eradication of all victimisation, bullying and harassment; and for the greater good of the name of a modern caring profession. Dr No calls them The Furies, after the Roman version of the Greek Ερινύες, the avenging goddesses of wrath, who arose, fittingly enough, from drops of blood spilt at the castration of Uranus.
RNLI crews, expert mariners that they are, often have to deal with casualties. The Institution has recently attempted to simplify first aid for crews by introducing ‘Big sick/Little sick’, an approach which reduces initial assessment of a casualty to simple question. It is a clever approach, and Dr No has decided to apply it to a question that has been ruffling him lately: whether Scot Junior was entirely innocent in his fate? He did, after all, build an impressive log cabin, and dumped it where it could be read. Might he in some more significant way have been the architect not just of his cabin, but of his own fate? In the battle between Needham and Scot Junior, who of the two is the bigger Richard? Who, when we get to the bottom line, is the ten bob note, and who the two bob bit?
Dr No doesn’t really do duty of care. Instead, he just cares. When he sees a patient, he does what he does simply because he cares for his patient, just as he always has, and always will. He suspects – but isn’t over-bothered, perhaps even doesn’t care – that what he does in fact more than satisfies any duty of care baloney, which in the real world he steers clear of, finding it to be tedious, tiresome, distracting, legalistic, defensive, job-serving, and all about doing the minimum to cover one’s back, rather than aiming to go the extra mile and do the best for one’s patient. In all this, Dr No is no doubt frightfully old-fashioned, maybe even old-fashioned enough to trigger the crackle of snapped pencils in the legal offices of his professional indemnity society. But Dr No remains resolute. True care is always better than duty of care; for the former is human and comes from the heart, the latter formulaic, and from the law.
Once upon a time, in a hospital far away, a frustrated junior doctor suddenly found himself in very hot water. Dr Scot Jnr – as he became known - had expressed himself vigorously – exceedingly vigorously - on a doctors-only forum. He had even dared to call the great and the good in his profession Richards. Even before anyone had time to cry ‘Foul!’, let alone Code Brown, red lights were flashing in Deaneries up and down the land. Deans – senior doctors responsible for junior doctors training – got on their hot-lines, and then their high horses, and before anyone could say appendicectomy – Scot Jnr was said to be a surgeon - he had been suspended.
We have seen in recent times how secure our national databases are. HM Revenue & Customs, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Health, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have all been reprimanded for serious ‘lapses’ that have put at risk the personal data of millions of UK subjects. On a wider scale, The Information Commissioner reported in January that there had been over 400 data breaches by government and the NHS in the past two years. Last month, the national children’s database, which records details of England’s 11 million under 18 year olds, was described as ‘not stable’ – official-speak for yet another security breach. Our national databases, it seems, are about as secure as a paper bag full of water.
We are seeing the first blowback from the introduction last autumn of the Government’s absurdly over-egged Vetting and Barring scheme. Children scheduled for surgery are having their operations 
Totalitarianism does not arise spontaneously. It arrives instead by a series of steps, each one small enough; and, like the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step, many small steps can take us a long way from home; until one day we arrive in a strange world where the pigs walk on two legs, all are equal, but some more so that others, and the clocks strike thirteen. 
The ever-interesting Witch Doctor has made a welcome return to the blogosphere. It seems that while she was away in the witchosphere, she spent time contemplating one of her persistent themes – that of creep. The Witch Doctor, she says, believes in creep. So does Dr No. But, it appears, not everyone is familiar with the term as the Witch Doctor and Dr No use it. A little while ago, one of Dr No’s confidants – a well read and intelligent woman - was reading a post and remarked on what she read as a grammatical error. Dr No had missed out a subject to the verb creep. She had not before come across the word creep used as a noun to describe a social process. Dr No wonders if there may be others unfamiliar with this usage.