Dr No’s mother, a fit 80-something year old, recently attended an ophthalmology clinic, on the advice of her optician, and was told – out of the blue, by a nurse – she hadn’t even seen a doctor – that a bed had been arranged for her to come in two days later to have her cataract removed. The nurse was most put out when Dr No’s mother – who knows her mind very well – said she had no intention of coming in for an operation she neither knew about, nor did she need. Yes, she does wear reading glasses – but otherwise her eyesight is fine.
Category: Coercive Healthism
Good Nooze
It is a truism of the festive season that, as the party lights come out, so to do the Temperance Brigade. Last week we had two pronouncements: one from Sir Liar, advising no booze for under fifteen year olds, and another from Alcohol Concern, telling us we grossly underestimate our consumption when answering drink surveys. What Alcohol Concern didn’t say – probably because they hadn’t realised it – is that the study data behind their pronouncements show that the current safe drinking limits of 21 units/week for men and 14 for women – already known to be arbitrary – are also misleadingly low.
Totto Blotto
The planet may be heading for Gas Mark 10 – and the country half buried under snow – but that is not the only science anomaly in the news.
Yesterday, we had Pants telling us that not a drop of the demon drink should pass the lips of children. Where once we had Gin Lane, we now have middle class parents weaning tiny tots into blotto tots. Pants even managed to tot up some figures of his own: half a million of England’s 11-15 years olds had been drunk in the last four weeks, he wailed, before switching to Full Temperance Mode: childhood was being robbed of its ‘clear-eyed innocence’, only to be replaced with the ‘befuddled futility’ of ‘dirt cheap alcohol’.
The Lies of Others
Twenty five years ago, the General Medical Council’s Annual Retention Fee for doctors to remain on the Medical Register was £20, and the “Blue Book” – the Council’s code of professional conduct for doctors – ran to some thirty pages. Today, the same fee is £410, and the code, which is now issued in several volumes, runs to hundreds of pages.