On Campaigns

Nowadays, it seems as if no chronic disease is complete until there is a campaign against it. The campaign will portray heroic doctors battling to save suffering humanity from some dreadful blight. St George slaying The Dragon will scarcely have been more daring. So for example we find a “Defeat Depression Campaign” and a “Petition for a Bill of Rights” for Asthma patients.

Now whilst I am all in favour of good treatment of chronic illnesses I find a large element of absurdity in having campaigns against them. The problem seems to me to be the lack of any opposition that could possibly exist to these campaigns. Who would support poorer care of patients with whatever disease? Who wants the depressed to get even more miserable? Who cares if some people still have fungal nail disease?

And as we start looking at these campaigns we start to notice their sponsors. Many appear to be grassroots organisations of patients. Look more closely and you find vocal patients, prominent physicians armed with background funding from pharmaceutical companies lobbying for more money to be spent on this particular disease area. The feeling grows that the campaign is a device to market a disease and its associated treatments.

Something is rotten in the state of campaigning. The campaigns never feel to me, a regular GP, to be about to make much improvement at the level of my surgery. There will be lots of leaflets, and lots of pharmaceutical representatives come and go, and sponsored educational events but then it will all go quiet again and I will be left with the doctor, the patient and the illness.

I, as a Don Quixote of General Practice, will once again take up my lance and tilt it at the whirlwind of leaflets, and blizzard of guidelines drawn up on GOBSAT rules. Good old boys and girls sat around a table, often sponsored by big pharma.

Meanwhile patients come and patients go. They and I both do our best to make some sense of life. Strangely very few people offer me much help with this, and no-one seems to be running a concerted campaign to drain the swamp, yet many seem to love shouting encouragement from the sunlit uplands of a campaign against something. Somehow single disease campaigns seem to make little sense when dealing with the complexity of life, illness and death that is the arena of general practice.