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An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine
 
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An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine (Hardcover)

by Theodore Dalrymple (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 138 pages
  • Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (12 Jul 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0715629735
  • ISBN-13: 978-0715629734
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.2 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 629,491 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Health is on of those subjects that seems easy to define and then, the closer one gets, is more and more difficult to understand. Does the health of a schizophrenic really improve by being sedated and kept in an asylum? Is a course of Prozac or psychotherapy aimed to make someone happy really a medicine? These incompatible views are most visible in the NHS which has over the decades become the focus of all these projections of health. At the expense of the taxpayer many are being "cured" while there is no money for some of those who have physical ailments in a real sense. In this book, Theodore Dalrymple sets out to tear into the myths that he believes our politicians have created, with anecdotes from his own experience as a doctor.

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46 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A physician's sagacity and bluster, 22 Nov 2001
Dalrymple, a practising doctor, is a member of the conservative intelligentsia and writer of grumbling missives for The Spectator. Endowed with a special dose of wisdom that many doctors consider theirs, he has written this short polemic on modern medicine, taking every care to offend every liberal more in the process.

Disguised by controversial rhetoric are some terribly sane ideas that counter the orthodoxies of current medical thinking. Savaging the idolisation of health, the medicalisation of anti-social behaviour, and "rights culture", Dalrymple instead advocates liberty and personal responsibility - necessary for individual and communal happiness, respectively. However, this libertarianism, while refreshing, seems only partially expounded. For example, what are the medical aspects of the debate concerning the legalisation of drugs? And what mechanisms can be used to ensure that those people who take care of their health don't bankroll those who are careless?

Readers may not agree with each thrust of his argument, but these views are seldom heard during medical education and need to be. Dalrymple impresses upon his reader a sense that we are marching blindly somewhere bleak, and that medicine is currently hurrying us on our way.

Despite these insightful views, the book has two great failings: its style and a cursory discussion of healthcare funding. Ignoring the central tenets of health insurance - risk is unevenly distributed and highly expensive - Dalrymple proposes unworkable and simplistic ideas from the fringes of the New Right. Banal chiding of the NHS and fatuous examination of European systems render the analysis void.

The Guide's style exudes a strange sense of affected erudition: quotations of the barest relevance clutter many pages, leaving one feeling that Dalrymple became engrossed in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations while writing. Wit is entirely absent and the prose, with its numerous parenthetical and laboured illustrations, manages to make even Dickens look pacey. There is also a conspicuous lack of evidence and fact throughout the book, which "an intelligent person" would surely wish to have before them.

One finishes the book feeling that Dalrymple is struggling with two opposing forces: a compassion for the common person, and an outrage that everyone - bureaucrats, liberals, plebeians, pharmaceutical companies - is stubbornly stupid and wrong. The truth of this aside, this scathing conclusion adds little to the medical profession's self-knowledge. After recent disasters, some humble soul-searching by a leading figure within the profession would surely be more appropriate.

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