Who really needs a check up?

Don't worry Prime Minister, we'll have that new health policy out of there in a jiffy.

So we all need a shiny new health check do we? Well we for one, and several others judging by the Telegraph readers’ comments, think we don’t even if Francis’ plethora is worsening, and his BP has reached 220/120! Actually for Francis writing this blog is one of the most splendid anti-hypertensives ever found.

On here we think there’s an absurdity to the government’s latest wheeze (recycled from, if I recall correctly, 2000 and 2004) to get everyone to have “health MOTs”

We need to face facts, and this Lif of Brian/Spamalot lyric might be a good place to start from:-

“For life is quite absurd
And death's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin
Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow.

So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Life's a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.”

Look, life’s a one hundred per cent fatal sexually transmitted disease. There’s a lot of it about, and we’ll none of get out of here alive. As Dr Blue said on the Telegraph website,

“Trying to avoid death is a very unhealthy way to pass the time before it catches up with you.”

There’s something wrong with the belief that you need to see a doctor to know that you are healthy. Doctors deal in illness and the many ways in which we go wrong mentally and physically. Very few doctors have any positive vision of health. The NHS as an institution has no vision of health at all.

Trying to avoid illness is not a healthy pursuit. Being free of disease does not make you healthy. Being healthy makes you healthy.

Sloth, gluttony, debauchery, anger etc do make you ill. The seven deadly sins are deadly…but did you need a doctor to tell you this? For most of the time doctors acknowledge their patient’s poor lifestyles, and treat them as well as they can around this. As Mencken puts it,

“The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.”

There’s something odd about this mania for health checks, and that’s before you get into the practicalities (time, money, blood bottles, result handling, follow up etc)

In hospital medicine we used to spend a long time working out fluid balance, and potassium levels on seriously ill patients. They still died…but their potassium level was normal. We’re reaching a stage with these health checks where everyone will die, but their blood pressure and cholesterol will at least be normal! What progress.

At The Dr Rant Foundation^TM we’re puzzled by this latest wheeze on the NHS. It couldn’t be a distraction to satisfy the worried well away from service failings in dentistry, obstetrics, oncology, obstetrics, hygiene could it?

Anyway as a proactive measure and in good spirits (with normal blood pressure) we are next going to do a health check on this government.