As from 15th April 2020, all new Dr No posts will be on a new, more mobile device friendly website. This website, badmed.net, has served Dr No well for over a decade, but it struggles at times, and is not easily converted to a responsive website that works on desktops, tablets, ipads and mobile phones.
All future posts will be just as if they had been posted here — the same Dr No style and content as before, but just posted on the new website. This website will remain as an archive of previous posts.
If you are a Dr No subscriber by email, Dr No suggests you follow him on twitter, as all posts are announced there. The badmed.net emails will cease, as they are triggered by a new post here, and that isn’t going to happen.
The new website (appropriately enough dr-no.co.uk) can be found here.
Update 2nd May 2020: the handful of 2020 posts that were first published here and then on the new website have now been removed from this website, to avoid double posting of content.
Update 23rd June 2021: Dr No has migrated this website from the old drupal 6 platform to this current Wordpress platform. The appearance, theme and styling are different, but the content remains the same, and all links, including historical links, should end up on this new website.
There’s no doubt that, in no particular order, the BBC, the SNP and the Tories won the election, just as, in no particular order, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Kippers lost the election. If any one moment defined election night, it was Mouldy Auld Sporran asking a craggy slit-eyed Pantsdown shortly after ten pm about the BBC’s newly announced exit poll which predicted a Tory win. Pants piled on more crags, tightened the slits and went Hatsdown: if the poll was right, Pants cragged, he’d eat his hat. At least one viewer was left wondering for a moment whether Pants’ appearance was the consequence of a life spent digesting hats. Mouldy declined to offer to eat his sporran if the exit poll was wrong. Pants appeared to nod off, his eyes the natal clefts of two hippos reclining back to back. In the bowels of the building, a prop hand searched for a digestible hat. 
The election manifestos have been delivered, like tickets from a parking machine, along with their announcement speeches. Perhaps Dr No has a forgotten cotton wool bud stuck in each ear, but it seems to him that the tones and voices of the three main party leaders are doing a sort of verbal regression to the mean, and are becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart. Sometimes the content provides distinction, sometimes it doesn’t. The smaller parties, as they are politely known, on the other hand, tend to have distinctive voices. We all know who has taken the Hay Rood, and who is behind all that farfing and barfing. Mostly lacking any realistic prospect, the smaller parties can indulge their creative sides, and entertain us with curious pledges, like the one to nationalise bluebell woods, or reverse the smoking ban in schools, the better to turn nippers into Kippers.
In the second part of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, Louis Theroux went a whiter shade of pale. In Part One, the patients had been linear: given time, though the content was often horrific, sometimes bizarre, they talked straight. Louis wandered, but remained grounded. In Part Two, everything, including Louis, was up in the air. Windmills of the mind rolled aimlessly, milling nothing. A toxic runt of a shrink made it his job to finger the malingerers. He did this by raising an eyebrow and curling his lip. When patients-experts in madness faked symptoms of madness, he just knew the shirkers were doing it to dodge their day in court, but they were tough nuts to crack. Weary Dr Lip Curl sure had a hard hoe to row. Here was the proverbial patients running the asylum in action: the nuts had cracked the shrinks. Every day, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. Dr Curl was damned if he knew what to do about it. It was enough to make anyone’s lip curl. He ratcheted up the curl another notch, to no avail. At some point, Dr Curl will need surgery, to put his lip back where it should be. He may even need anti-psychotics, to calm the delusion that all the inmates have got one over him. All the while, Louis gazed on, his mind as focused as a windmill in the sky. Everything was going nowhere, and nothing was going everywhere. Windmills of the mind, turning slowly in the sky.
When the Chief Medical Officer feels uncomfortable, should the nation tremble? Probably not. Certainly, Dr Atul Gawande didn’t, fielding Dame Sally Davies’s troubled comments after giving his second 2014 Reith Lecture, 
November is the sombrest month. As the leaves complete their fall, we Brits go through two very different but very British annual events, Remembrance and Children in Need. Both have at their heart charitie, in the King James sense of the word, but the tone of each could not be more different. On the BBC, Remembrance commentary comes from National Treasures, Huyuwoo Wedwards and Dimblebug D currently standing in, while Children in Need is forever stamped with the ebullience of a National Buffoon, one Terry Wogan. Heaven forbid that, in the current 
Despite the crack in the Union that threatened to appear as things got tighter and tighter in the run up to the vote, the headlines this morning are Scotland Says No. This result is both a golden example of democracy at its best, with the turnout a credit to the Scots, but also a reminder that democracy, though the best of those that have been tried, is not necessarily a good form of government. Instead, it is the least bad. The headlines are misleading: Scotland, the nation, is an abstraction that can no more decide its fate than it can decide what socks to wear in the morning. Instead, it is the people of Scotland who decided, individually, with the referendum result a binary outcome based on counts of millions of individual decisions. The outcome is pure democracy, rule by the majority in the interests of the majority, but as always, and starkly in this case, where for every fifty-five Scots who voted no, forty-five voted yes, there is a substantial minority for whom the outcome is not what they wanted; the result not, as they see it, in their interests. The Union Jack may still be intact, but the Union has been jarred. 
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?
Justin Wood, the