Theodore Dalrymple

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InternacionalSalud Pública

When I was 6, very shortly before polio vaccine was released, my best friend, from whom I was inseparable, contracted the disease, and was permanently paralysed from the waist down.

Unbeknown to me, my parents lived many weeks of terrible anxiety on my behalf. This is an anxiety that no parent now has to experience, thanks to the vaccine.

But as a medical student, I saw a case of generalised vaccinia (the active virus in the smallpox vaccine) and never forgot it. A young man with severe eczema had, against all accepted practice, been immunised against smallpox and later died.

In the absence of perspective, information can be dangerous; and nothing is harder to assess than the proper significance of a single dramatic event.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, , ,

It is unusual for politicians to face up to the obvious, but the Scottish Executive seems for once to have done so: it has recognised what has long stared it in the face, namely that dishing out methadone to drug addicts is not the answer to their problems or to the problems that they cause society. A different approach is needed.

Perhaps in 100 years historians will wonder why so many of the governing elite, from senior doctors to Cabinet ministers, persisted for so long in the belief that doling out methadone was the answer. The explanation, I think, will be that they wilfully misunderstood the nature of the problem.…  Seguir leyendo »