Why all medical advice is wrong

When I first wrote this post it was in a spirit of cynicism following panicked and incoherent responses to the COVID-19 epidemic. Now that the Chief Medical Officer has taken a hand, I see that has changed, and actual science and common sense are to prevail.

This is not enough for many commentators, who seem quite indignant that the best cure for a headache is to cut the patient’s head off and that anyone opposing that obvious course is either negligent or malicious.

I add these paragraphs, and the link below to the press conference, to acknowledge that in Britain at least there is now a sensible, principled response.

Why all medical advice is wrong, first draft:

In the individual case it is wrong –

Because doctors know that although the science is proven beyond doubt, the patient’s descriptions of himself and his symptoms are not.
Because diagnosis is an art, not just a science, relying on unreliable interlocutors and ambiguous signs;
Because patients do not speak in medical language;
Because a physician prescribes drugs but the body shapes its reaction around diet, and the two cannot be separated;
Because different metabolisms react in different ways;
Because patients do not follow to the letter the advise they are given.

Public legal advice is wrong –

Because it is given in general terms but the patients are individuals;
Because it cannot possibly say everything which should be said;
Because they don’t want to offend people who need to be offended on occasion for their own good;
Because overgeneralisation even unto dishonesty is the only way to get a message across to the public;
Because telling them everything would cause everyone to hide at home and no work would get done. Then we would all starve, which is unhealthy;
Because the alerts are written by civil servants, not medical experts.

My advice is wrong –

Because I am not a medical expert and am barely ever ill myself so don’t rely on anything I say; but at least I admit that.

I can be forgiven some cynicism. If you remember the MMR triple-vaccine scare, which still has not faded away, there was a lot of Public Health material to convince parents that the triple-jab is safe, as it is for most children. But I read the leaflets and also the background research papers and found discrepancies. I found out-and-out lies in the government material (no, the Danish study did not show that single jabs are identical in effect to the triple-jab as single jabs were not available in Denmark). The advice though was there to make a change in behaviour, not to tell the whole truth. That would be too complicated. The material was wrong but the conclusion was true, for most children.

Now we have the new Wuhan pneumonia, ‘COVID-19’, and the initial advice, before the experts on epidemics got hold of it, was not even coherent. That is unsurprising as the data is not available. There is a twofold thrust: to prevent the spread of the new disease by limiting the opportunities for infection, but also to stop panic and keep people going into work.

Thankfully, that has been taken in hand now in Britain, and practicality prevails in the new advice. It is not so abroad, where publicly pleasing panic measures seem to be preferred, defying the science and quite probably doing more harm than good.

Our own nation, being not so incontinently emotional, the panic buying is real in places, but mainly as a reaction to others emptying the shelves. That cannot last, as long as there are workers available to refill the shelves when the panic calms down. I hope.

A worrying thing is when a phrase becomes a buzzword, and that coming phrase is “self-isolation”. Now, in Italy we are told, everyone has gone home and stopped work (but these are Italians – will we even notice?) In Britain the dynamics are different. As the phase comes into the collective consciousness, it becomes a thing-to-do. Hang-on though: self-isolation is meant to be for those with a real risk of having been infected, not as a protection for that person but to stop him becoming a source of onward infection. Just going to bed for a fortnight and then emerging weakened into society ready to be infected is worse than useless. It may be hard to telling someone who has got it into their head that this is the thing to do. Until there is a proven vaccine, which will take months to develop as it is a living organism, the only way to stop yourself, ultimately, from being infected is to contract the disease and get through it, if you can survive it.

Let us pray that the reliable analyses are correct and that this is just another disease fatal to many but otherwise washing over the population like all the recent contagions, leaving a legacy of immunity in the population against future outbreaks. We shall see.

This is all meat to the Extinction Rebellion mob, who must be positively rejoicing at the idea that mankind is about to be wiped out as their prophetess has predicted. However getting people to stay in bed for weeks on end is not going to reduce the population – quite the contrary in fact.