THE DOCTORS' REAL WORK
SIR,—In this age of science and materialism it is indeed pitiful that the citizens of our country should be so misguided and misinformed on a subject of vital importance to everyone. That subject is health. I main- tain, Sir, that "The Doctors' Real Work" should first and foremost be the maintenance of health. This conception is nowhere evident in the many medical discussions which fill the columns of the Press. Quarrels on remuneration, discoveries of new and wonderful drugs, intricate researches in the histology and biochemistry of disease occupy the minds of doctors and patients and Government.
The "National Disease Service" is a monstrous hoax. It is founded on the following broad conceptions: (1) Ill health is a miSfortune, dealt out by the hand of fate indiscriminately to the unlucky ones. (2) Illness is cured by the doctor usually by the administration of a drug or other. preparation. (3) A service should therefore consist of a highly organised grouping of doctors, hospitals, sanatoria and dinics. Of these conceptions (I) and (2) are absolutely false in so far as they apply to the majority of patients coming to the doctor's consulting room. If this were realised and remedied, the necessity for (3) would be greatly reduced.
Whence, then, ill-health? Broadly speaking, thc patients who come to
my surgery are ill through two main causes. The first of these is mal- nutrition of the body, the second is unhappiness of mind. Drugs and injections, and even in some cases operations, do nothing to remedy these fundamental faults. I further maintain that both these causes are the direct result of the way of life of a highly industrialised society, whose processed foods leave the body starved of essential nutriments, and whose wrong sense of values has destroyed, happiness and serenity in human relationships and caused millions to suffer from stress diseases and anxiety neurosis. The Government and people have seen fit to meet this problem by setting up ever-increasing numbers of hospitals and clinics, and by trying to train more and more doctors and dentists. It is as if a make of car were giving constant engine trouble and the public tried to remedy the fault by organising bigger and better repair shops, staffed by more and more technicians, instead of putting the thing right at the blue-print stage.
The doctors' real work should therefore be to study health and to guide thc people and Government into a right way of life. A small start was made during the war, when, with the advent of rationing, priority in milk supply was given to nursing and expectant mothers. The result was a dramatic fall in infant mortality. Academic medicine, in its blind fractional research in pathology, has built up a vast series of water-tight departments and has turned a blind eye on the poor patient, as a living personality, whose illness is so often not a scientific problem but a human one. By all means let us have science. It is useless to give sympathy without testing the urine, but it is equally futile to order an operation without attempting to understand the emotional causes which have made the patient ill.
Is there not something wrong when I can get, per week, on my breakfast plate, only a miserable slice of Canadian or Danish bacon, imported in exchange for the manufactured goods of some midland firm, when all the time the hill land around me is being overgrown by thistles and bracken, and many farms are standing empty, their steadings decaying, as the drift of the young men to the towns continues? Is there not something wrong when I see on a Highland croft a housewife buying from a van a tin marked "Scotch Broth," and a basket of highly coloured cakes and starchy cookies? Is there not something wrong when I sec on the breakfast tables of my patients manufactured margarine and processed cornflakes, instead of good Scotch porridge and fresh butter and wheaten bread? Is it a wonder that we are becoming a race of constipated neurotics who vaunt as a great achievement a service which gives us free false teeth and irritant purgatives? Is it a wonder that the teeth of the children rot away and that their tonsils and adenoids begin to fester, when about fifty per cent, of mothers express unwillingness to carry out the fundamental natural process of breast feeding?
Unless the Government and the people and the doctors realise that health is our inheritance and that it is we who destroy it, the money of the people will continue to be poured out in providing a service, much of which could be rendered redundant if only we could learn to livc.—I am, COUNTRY DocroK. Perthshire.
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