Aching honeymoons
Sir: It was magnanimous of John Rowan Wilson to tell the story against himself of how as a surgical registrar he once tried to send a girl with backache on her honeymoon in a plaster cast (April 29). It would be interesting, however, to know the follow-up to that tale. My guess is that the backache may well have been precipitated by the anxiety of the girl's impending marriage, and provided the honeymoon went well no further treatment would have been required. Certainly I know of a recent case where a young girl was about to have spinal surgery — which seems to have replaced the plaster cast as a fashionable treatment for backache — in similar circumstances. Again, when her marriage plans were discovered the operation was cancelled. Once her anxieties had been brought into the open she made an uneventful recovery without incurring either the risk or cost (to the taxpayer, of course) of a serious operation.
Perhaps we do not only have to worry about the harmful sideaffects of intentional psychosurgery. There may be a good deal of unintentional ' psychosurgery ' as well.
George Teeling-Smith Director, Office of Health Economics, 162 Regent Street, London WI
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