Memo to the NHS: we're all going to die

The NHS does not seem to offer anything as simple as a mission statement on its website, preferring instead to outline seven principles and a longish list of values.

Nowhere among these can I find the words, “To make the nation’s flesh creep, like the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers”.

Yet that is undoubtedly the effect on me of their current advertising campaign: “Be Clear on Cancer”.

I nodded knowingly as I watched the TV ad showing that bloke picking up his indigestion pills every time he left the house. Then came the punchline: “If you suffer heartburn most days for three weeks or more, it could be a sign of cancer”.

Stone me, I’ve suffered heartburn most days for at least 25 years. I felt an urgent need to kick the hearth to make sure that I wasn’t already dead.

I was about to pick up the phone and make an appointment with my doctor, when I remembered three salient facts.

First, he already thinks – with some reason – that I am Northumberland’s biggest hypochondriac. 

Secondly, he has prescribed me some pills for heartburn, which I take nearly every day, and presumably wouldn’t have done that if he suspected I was suffering from cancer.

And, thirdly, you can never get an appointment with my doctor. Sometimes I go online and book one a couple of months in advance just in case I happen to feel poorly then. (Before anyone complains, I always cancel these in good time, thereby creating a golden opportunity for someone who is genuinely ill.)

Ever since a colleague died of skin cancer many years ago I have been boring my local medics into catatonia by subjecting every new bodily growth (apart from my disgustingly expanding stomach) to their informed inspection.

Once the legendary and now retired head of the practice looked at the single word “Moles” on my record card and delivered a very full disquisition on the state of his lawn, before asking why I was bothering him with my problem, rather than a pest controller. I don’t think he was trying to be funny. 

The problem with running advertising campaigns encouraging more people to go to their doctor is that those who prick up their ears will be alarmists like me. No doubt reinforcing the GPs’ inclination to treat such worries with suitable scepticism.

In recent years I have known two people who went to their doctors convinced they were suffering from brain tumours. Both were repeatedly informed that they were imagining their ailments and advised to relax and stop Googling medical websites. One is now dead, and the other happily in remission following brain surgery and chemotherapy. We shall never know whether a less sceptical initial response would have made any difference to these outcomes.

Perhaps the time is ripe for a full merger between the NHS and the Daily Mail, so they could focus their mighty combined resources on frightening the living daylights out of us.

To give just a few examples from the last two weeks alone, eating too much protein is as dangerous as smoking 20 cigarettes a day; while eating too much sugar will kill us (though fat, which “experts” been telling us to avoid like the plague for decades, turns out to be not so bad after all).

Even the salmon the authorities have been advising us to tuck into with gusto, because oily fish is good for you, turns out to be contaminated with microscopic amounts of DDT. Which pose no known risk to health, but when has that ever stood in the way of a screaming headline?

I am old enough to remember when DDT was hailed as a saviour for controlling malaria. Then people started worrying about its impact on wildlife and side-effects like cancer.

That’s reputations for you. Up one minute, down the next. Just look at fat and sugar.

The key facts are that we’re all going to die of something, and the best way of deferring that unhappy day is to eat, drink and do all things in moderation. Oh, and please don’t trouble your doctor unnecessarily. He’s almost certainly got quite enough on his plate dealing with hysterical mole-watchers.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Sorry, Prof: it may well be fatal, but mine is still another pint

I yawned on Sunday when I glanced at the story in the press digest I receive each morning, After all, it was hardly a surprise to learn that I am more likely to die of cancer if I drink more than two pints of beer a day.

But then I looked at the piece more closely. It was actually suggesting that the safe limit, for those of us who do not actively fancy a horrible death, is two pints of beer A YEAR.

Death. This is what it looks like.

Actually, it said “drinks”. So it might have meant halves. Let’s not get carried away.

This joyless appraisal, according to the Sunday Express, came from one Professor Peter Anderson of Newcastle University, whose dinner party guests are presumably not encouraged to bring a bottle.

His prescription is for the European Commission to step up the marvellous work it has already done on cigarette labelling, and plaster all drinks bottles with warnings that they cause cancer.

As if rapacious pub companies, cut-price supermarkets, the drink-driving crackdown and smoking ban were not enough, the few remaining rural pubs would presumably be forced to display on their pump clips: “Old Badger Ale, 4.0% ABV. Oh, and it will GIVE YOU CANCER.”

Somehow, I cannot see this providing a boost to sales.

Now, life is a continuous process of risk assessment and it is important never to lose sight of the important fact that even those who never drink or smoke, and subsist entirely on organically grown lettuce leaves, still die eventually. Quite possibly of boredom.

I also write as one who has consumed significantly more than two pints of beer a year for the last 44 years. In fact, I would still be in serious trouble if the suggested limit had been two pints per day, as I originally imagined.

But if we all took to heart every bit of the health advice with which we are bombarded by science each day, we would surely be afraid to eat or drink pretty much anything at all.

Even breakfast is a minefield. Bacon and eggs? Don’t be ridiculous: cured meat is a proven carcinogen, cholesterol blocks your arteries. Cereal with milk? A great cue to worry about “Frankenstein” GM maize and all that fat in dairy products.

I have little doubt that if alcohol were a newly invented product, it would struggle to make it past the regulators and onto the market. But since it has been around for many hundreds of years, it is perhaps more appropriate to accept that it is going to remain part of our life and assess how much serious harm it really does.

Oh yes, it now fills our city centres with the revolting spectacle of mass drunkenness almost every night of the week, and keeps our overstretched A&E departments busy dealing with the fallout.

A typical night in the Bigg Market

Will slapping health warning labels onto bottles of lager have any impact whatsoever on this? What do you think?

It would surely be more productive to focus on recreating the sort of sensible licensing laws that were designed to deal with this sort of problem in the first place, and which our politicians have bafflingly spent the last 15 years or so dismantling.

As for Professor Anderson’s report, I have been giving it a great deal of thought as I have spent the last two nights in small hotel rooms in Berkshire and London with two over-excited small boys making their first visit to the capital for a packed programme of royalty, dinosaurs and toy emporia.

Hampton Court

Changing of the Guard

Duke of Edinburgh's 92nd birthday gun salute

Natural History Museum

I have considered, on the one hand, the fact that they are both under four and I am pushing 60, and really ought to make an effort to stay alive as long as possible to fulfil my paternal responsibilities.

On the other hand, there is the stress associated with taking the two of them out anywhere in public, particularly now that the older boy has taken to pretending that he does not know me when we are left alone together, and I look so much like a silver-haired candidate for an Operation Yewtree investigation.

And the firm conclusion I have reached, with my sincere apologies to the Professor, is that mine is most definitely another pint.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.