Useless Doctors

I spoke to Nisakiman last night.

He got his biopsy results last week. And the prognosis was delivered to him by a harridan doctor who told him that he had “not years” to live, but only months. And of course she also insisted that the cancer which had shot to pieces his lungs and bones and liver had been caused by smoking.

“Harridan” was his description of her, not mine. He had pointed out that there were plenty of other risk factors in his life (one of which was surely that, working as a carpenter, he’d spent many hours in a cloud of wood shavings and wood dust), but She Knew Better, of course.

It seems that the doctors in the Swindon hospital where he was being treated had determined very early on that he was a hopeless case. Before he left hospital 10 days ago, one of them had even come to ask him whether he wanted to be resuscitated. And that had made him angry.

He’s now at the home of one of his daughters. And two sons, one of whom he hadn’t seen for 15 years, have arrived from Australia to see him. And today he’ll be having a pub lunch, on what is a warm bright English summer day, somewhere in the Cotswolds hills.

He’s hoping to return to Greece briefly some time in the next week or two. And he’d also like to see me and twentyrothmans, who are proposing to make a day trip to visit him. It’s a short motorway trip for me. I could be home by nightfall.

But he was in good spirits. He laughed when I suggested that the harridan might have broken the news to him by saying, “You have a few hours. And even a few days. Perhaps also a few weeks.”

The odd thing about all this, for me at least, is that up until a month ago he was living in Patras in Greece, to which he had moved from Corfu recently, and had been re-assembling his carpentry workshop there, and occasionally dropping into the Smoky Drinky Bar to say hello with a roll-up and a glass of wine. None of us thought that he was unwell. Although his wife had been asking him for over a year to see a doctor. It had taken the arrival of one of his daughters in Greece for him to be put on a plane to England, admitted into a hospital, pumped full of drugs, and then condemned to death by its resident harridan.

Was it worth it? Wouldn’t it have been better to have just stayed on in Greece, continued working on his workshop, and enjoying Greek sunshine, Greek tavernas, Greek wine, and Greek cigarettes? I suggested as much when I first reported his condition. For he has been pretty much converted from a well man into a terminal invalid in the space of a few weeks. If he’d stayed in Greece, continuing as he had, maybe he just wouldn’t have woken up one morning. And that is the way that lots of people die.

What good are all these doctors, if all they can do with their ever-bigger institutional hospitals, filled with ever-more-exotic electronic equipment, is pump people full of drugs, and then condemn them to death? When my father had a stroke, some 25 years ago, there was nothing they could do for him, and he was dead inside 6 months. Same with my mother, 15 years ago, when she slowly became bed-bound. In fact, it was while she was in hospital during this time that she fell and broke a hip on its concrete floor.

What use has the medical profession been to me either? I’ve never been ill in my entire life (despite smoking cigarettes for the past 50 years), and so have had no need of them. No, the medical profession has instead done me, and millions of other smokers, a colossal amount of harm. They have evicted us from our pubs and cafes and restaurants, exiled us to the outdoors (and thereby endangered our lives), and made social pariahs of us. I used to have a wide circle of friends, but I lost them all once there ceased to be anywhere to meet them any more, thanks entirely to the antismoking busybodies in Tobacco Control.

I think the medical profession is facing destruction. I think it’s going to be torn apart. And if I have anything to do with it, countless antismoking doctors will be thrown out of it. And that would include the harridan in Nisakiman’s Swindon hospital. She’d just be told to leave one day, and told to never come back. And the same would happen to all the healthist doctors who want to ban alcohol, and fat, and sugar. They can all go. The whole damn lot. And the medical profession can then return to caring for the sick, rather than trying to stop them from getting sick in the first place.

And that includes antismoking physician Elliott Bettman. He can get lost too. He’s come back to tell us today that:

Smokers have Terrible Gum Disease. The folks who lose their teeth are much more likely to be smokers or tobacco chewers. The only exception is those who avoid the Dentist, and their teeth rot from the top down from cavities. Smoking is also a major cause of Lower Back Pain, because it causes the Spinal Disks to degenerate (they are cartilage, with no direct blood supply, so the Carbon Monoxide and the nicotine (which constricts the blood vessels in the nearby bone) causes the cartilage to die and be replaced by bone.

Well, I haven’t got any gum disease at all. And I don’t avoid dentists. I visited one just yesterday, in fact. I’m sure he would have told me if I had gum disease. Sure, I’ve had lots of cavities, but I’ve had cavities since I was about 5 years old (15 years before I started smoking). And I still have almost all my teeth, even if most of them have been filled or crowned. I find it odd that the only completely intact survivor teeth are the four incisors along the bottom front, which have taken the full brunt of of 50 years of smoking, and 65 years of hot, sweet tea. For the likely cause of all those cavities has been the hot, sweet tea that I drink. Oh, and I don’t have lower back pain either. The only person I ever knew who suffered from that was, oddly enough, one of my (former) antismoking friends, an avid cyclist.

You’re completely full of shit, Mr Bettman. You think you know a lot, but you know next to nothing.

And that’s the crime of the medical profession: they pretend to know far more than they actually know. They transform probabilities (and even improbabilities) about tobacco and alcohol and sugar and salt into absolute certainties. They imagine themselves to be not just omniscient medical practitioners, but also peerless mathematicians who can juggle with numbers just as easily as they can juggle with arms and legs and hearts. And their certainties are now being acted out in a global war on smoking, alcohol, fast food, in what amounts to a modern day witch hunt against millions of their fellow men and women.

It’s also the crime of the climate scientists. They too are absolutely certain that CO2 is causing global warming. God save us all from men with the passionate intensity that is born of perfect certainty.

If they had a little humility, they’d neither of them be so perfectly certain. But they have no humility. None at all.

And so Tobacco Control must be destroyed. And Tobacco Control will be destroyed. And so will Climate Control. None of them have a clue what they’re talking about. They all must go.

Anyway, the good news about Nisakiman is that he’s still enjoying the occasional roll-up, even if he can’t quite manage cigars. And I hope that right now, right this very minute, he’s enjoying a pint of beer, and a slab of roast beef laden with roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding, complete with side dishes of sugar, salt, fat, and confectioner’s custard.