We are all doctors now

Type the words “English obsession with ...” into Google and its top suggestions are class, tea, weather and Germany.

At the apex of our class structure is the Queen, and below her the various ranks of those with noble titles. These may be held by right or by courtesy, like those of the select band of Ladies who are the daughters of dukes, marquesses and earls, and the many more who are the wives of peers, baronets and knights.

Coronets: a spotter's guide

Only the former, pedants like me delight in pointing out, may properly use their Christian names in conjunction with their titles, like the fictional Lady Mary Crawley of Downton Abbey.

The principle of the courtesy title is well established in medicine, too, where the vast majority of the people we call “doctor” do not actually hold such a qualification, but are mere Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery.

While those who progress up the career ladder to become consultant surgeons confusingly promote themselves to “Mr”.

I could have been a doctor myself if only I had had the stamina to complete the PhD on World War II I began in 1976. As I might have done if there had not a particularly good pub adjacent to the Public Record Office in Kew.

Flogging back to Cambridge after a hard day wrestling with three pints of Young’s Bitter and a steak pie, I used to compare notes with my flatmate, who was completing the long course to qualify as a veterinary surgeon.

Meeting him again at his eldest son’s wedding on Saturday, I was surprised to find that he has suddenly metamorphosed into a doctor.

As have all UK vets who feel so inclined as of March 6th this year when, following a public consultation, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons ruled that its members could adopt the title if they wished. Bringing them into line with vets in other parts of the EU and elsewhere in the world.

Similar arguments about international equity have apparently allowed British dentists to call themselves doctor since 1995, though they have yet to allay all the concerns of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Mrs Hann was quick off the mark with her congratulations, asserting her long-held belief that vets are far cleverer than doctors since their patients can’t explain what ails them.

That sentence becomes more complex now that it needs to be recast to say that the people calling themselves doctors who treat animals are obviously brighter than the people calling themselves doctors who treat humans.

Vets are enjoined by their Royal College to put a suitable suffix after their names to make it clear that they are, in fact, vets. But I feel we have a lot to learn from this levelling of the playing field.

Heart-warming indeed

Sitting in vets’ waiting rooms over the years, I have long been fascinated by the willingness of people who do not appear conspicuously wealthy to hand over large wedges of cash for the treatment of their pit bull terriers or Persian cats.

These same individuals, I suspect, would be horrified if asked to pay anything at all for a consultation with their GP.

Vets also have the freedom to advise when further treatment seems futile and it would be kinder to bring life to a merciful close. An exit route denied to us mere humans unless we have the wherewithal and the physical strength to get ourselves to Dignitas in Zurich.

In creating more doctors we still have some way to go to catch up with our friends in Dr Merkel’s Germany, where a doctoral title is so de rigueur for anyone aspiring to the top in politics or business that their defence minister famously had to resign in 2011 after being found to have plagiarised his PhD thesis.

In Germany even the pizzas are made by doctors

So I congratulate my old friend on his belated and I am sure well-deserved elevation to the doctoral ranks. I hope to join him, in time, either because it is decided to award the title to senior practitioners of public relations; or because I make it back to university to complete my PhD

Though this time I think my thesis might be about class, tea or the weather rather than the Germans.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

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.

Inspired by an irascible 90-year-old

It is my birthday on Friday and I am most definitely feeling my age, even though it will be another three years before I qualify for a bus pass.

No, make that seven years. Because I have just checked the Government’s online ready reckoner of my entitlements, which increasingly resemble one of those carrots suspended in front of a donkey on a long stick.

This seems odd, given that railway booking clerks have been raising their voices and enunciating “Have you got a railcard?” with painful clarity for at least a decade now. The last such encounter was on the Welsh Highland Railway a couple of weeks ago, when the conductor offered us “two seniors and an adult” after apparently mistaking me for the husband of my 86-year-old aunt.

You might think it foolish to make a fuss, but the railway proved to have the unusual policy of charging more for its concessionary fares than for the ordinary ones. So I was moderately cheered until we reached the terminus and I took my small son into the gift shop, where the bloke behind the counter immediately addressed me as “Granddad”.

Morale was not improved when I got home and opened a cheery letter from my doctor containing a nine point questionnaire on just how depressed I feel about being on her coronary heart disease register. As a matter of fact, until I opened my mail I was feeling less miserable than I have been for most of the last 40 years. Now, on the other hand …

At least there is the chance that I may be gloriously Raptured on Harold Camping’s revised date of October 21 this year, or when the Mayan calendar runs out on December 21, 2012. Or there is the long-standing prediction by deathclock.com that I will be handing in my dinner pail on February 4, 2012, though the credibility of this received a severe knock when my brother took the self-same test and it told him that he had been dead for a decade already.

But what of the alternative of getting seriously old, as opposed to just looking it as I evidently do? Could there be a finer role model for any of us than HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, 90 on June 10, who just keeps beggaring on, as Churchill almost put it? One week it’s the State Visit to Ireland, the next it’s the Obamas in London. Both fraught with a huge range of risks, not least the potential for some mind-bogglingly inappropriate asides, yet both adjudged diplomatic triumphs.

My hero

One of the very few bits of television I watched last week was Alan Titchmarsh’s epic interview with the Duke, which had clearly been edited to eliminate HRH’s initial reply to each of the timid gardener’s queries: “What a blanking stupid question!” It was like watching a crocodile toy with a chihuahua.

How much more fun it would be to let His Royal Highness loose on a Paxman or a Humphrys, and see these legendarily tough interviewers being tossed, gored and trampled by a man who truly has nothing to gain by winning them over. And who apparently cares so little for his own reputation that even when presented with an open goal – the chance to take credit for a genuinely great innovation, The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award – modestly snapped that he had merely lent it his name.

I have a friend who repeatedly asserts that there is no such thing as a happy 90-year-old (readers please feel free to correct him). And on the evidence of Alan Titchmarsh’s cringeworthy efforts, there is probably no right thing to say to Prince Philip. Nevertheless I wish him a very happy birthday, and many more. Like the Royal Yacht, he is a unique asset who will be sorely missed when he is gone.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Making notes for Charlie

If I had any principles at all, this is the one by which I would have governed my life: leave well alone.

If you spot a suspicious mound of earth in the garden, or a mysterious pile of papers in the attic, do not think, “Ooh, I wonder what’s in there?” Avert your eyes and pass on. The alternative will undoubtedly lead down a clichéd path involving cans and worms.

For example, I believed until quite recently that my maternal grandfather, a respectable Alnwick garage proprietor, died suddenly of a heart attack in 1936 while on a fishing holiday in Wales. But then a cousin’s cousin began researching the family tree and uncovered an altogether more lurid cause of death.

Vainly scrabbling for respectability, the last survivor of my parents’ generation observed that lots of men picked up exotic diseases during their service in the First World War. Which might have been a satisfying explanation if my grandfather had not spent the entire war tinkering with cars (among other things, by the sound of it) in Northumberland. I suspect he rarely if ever ventured beyond Gateshead, though that in itself may explain a lot.

My other grandfather was also oddly spared the trenches, even though he volunteered for them. I still have a letter of appreciation from Lord Kitchener’s PA’s PA’s PA, regretfully turning down his application because of his vital work on the home front, and enclosing an armband bearing a crown.

Wearing this was presumably designed to stem the flow of white feathers from war-hungry ladies as he plodded around the centre of Newcastle, putting the fear of God into the Kaiser as one of His Majesty’s postmen. Why this work could not have been delegated to one of the eager feather distributors remains a mystery.

In case you are thinking wistfully of what might have been, I should perhaps add that even the despatch of both my grandfathers to the Western Front would not have saved you from this column, for my parents had already been born in the Edwardian glory days of Downton Abbey (though not, sadly, in quite such privileged circumstances).

These reminiscences are prompted by a flagrantly stupid departure from my principles of laissez-faire. In my book (which I inherited from my father) doctors are to be avoided at all costs. Yet now that I am a married man with family responsibilities, I allowed myself to be nagged into consulting one after a mildly worrisome incident a couple of weeks ago, when I turned to leave after standing through a half hour presentation and found that I had temporarily lost the use of both my legs.

Predictably enough, the resulting medical investigations have so far shed no light whatsoever on that incident, but have definitively established that I have suffered a heart attack – albeit a heart attack I never even noticed. Cue medication, further unpleasant tests, possible surgery and a massive adjustment of diet and lifestyle.

Male Hanns have never made old bones. Indeed my father, who had his fatal heart attack aged 73, was the longest-lived of us since at least 1700 – a fact rather glumly pointed out to me last year by my brother, now aged 72 ¾.

I shall do my best to improve on that, but do not feel inclined to bet on it. So I now propose to occupy much of my remaining time writing a big, fat, square book for my son distilling everything I know about the history of our family, country and the world at large, and any other advice that I think might prove useful when I am no longer around for consultation.

I doubt that it will become a best-seller, but so long as one particular person reads it to the end I shall not feel that my life has been completely wasted.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.