Medicine Today
SIR,—Although I am on holiday. I was so appalled by the comments in 'Spectator's Notebook' on medicine today in your issue of January 14 that I 'felt impelled to write you this letter.
Your yardstick would horrify any 'good' doctor, for it is well recognised that there can be nothing more dangerous in medicine than to try to diagnose a patient without his physical presence. Every doctor could give you instances of this danger and it is of course recognised not as 'a breach of the Hippocratic oath' but as downright bad medicine to attempt to do so. I can only make a literary diagnosis that you either have a National Health doctor but are too snobbish to attend his dingy waiting-room or that you use a private doctor out- side the National Health Service and want a tele- phone diagnosis and treatment in order that you may escape being charged for it!
However, let me say that the first of your fort- nightly articles by Dr. Wilson was a most intelligent assessment of the position today as far as your hospitals are concerned and I look forward to read- ing his further articles. You would be doing greater service to your country if you would assist in the rehabilitation of the general practitioner in the United Kingdom and his integration with the hos- pital services and fight for a unification of the general practitioner services, the hospital services and the health services. It is a well-known axiom that an article is only worth what you are pre- pared to pay for it and your general practitioner is only worth what you are prepared to pay for his services; and until the British realise that the general practitioner is worth as much as your consultants, then shortly there will be no GPs.
Davos. Switzerlana
It J. DAVID TURNBULL
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