WHEN HELP DOESN'T HELP AT ALL

We’ve moved house and so had to register with a new GP. As I used to have high cholesterol I take statins and had to renew my prescription. The conversation with the new Doctor went well enough until referring to my medical notes he started talking about “my heart disease.”  “What heart disease? They once thought I had it but after an angiogram they found I didn’t” “Oh yes; you do have it …it says so here”…and he read something extremely fast that was both news to me and incomprehensible.

I went home and sat down. Evidently I wasn’t very well. In just a few minutes I’d aged 20 years. I wondered if my funeral would be before or after the Ashes series was over.

I went to bed.

I want to talk about “iatrogenics”. The term was unfamiliar to me before reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of ‘The Black Swan’ and ‘Antifragile’).  From the Greek "brought forth by the healer" it refers to any effect on a person resulting from a Doctor’s treatment which rather than being helpful has the opposite effect.

Effects include anxiety about or annoyance with the Doctor. So bingo…. I was a victim of “iatrogenics.”
I’d felt less well immediately…as though I’d been poisoned. Later on I recalled completing a form on my alcohol consumption from the NHS. I’d said it was on average 24 units a week. I then got a text asking if I needed to discuss reducing my consumption levels. It made me feel like an inebriate. (Stop looking at me like that! Anyway I’m off to New Zealand.)

Melissa Kite the journalist wrote recently about being denied HRT patches because of NHS guidelines about its dangers (allegedly small). Eventually in despair and not sleeping,  she snarled at her Doctor: “Give them to me I’m a danger to the public otherwise”.

Is the NHS is ignoring the simple strategy of encouraging people to feel well? Better surely to have a slightly shorter, happier life than live to be an old valetudinarian.

Stanley Holloway was renowned for his monologues like “My word you do look queer” about a guy who recovering from being ill is told by everyone how dreadful he looks. It has immortal lines like

“Oh, dear! You look dreadful: you've had a near shave, 
You look like a man with one foot in the grave…….    
I heard you were bad, well I heard you were gone. 
You look like a corpse with an overcoat on.” 

Eventually someone says ….
“You're looking fine and in the pink!'
I shouted, 'Am I? ... Come and have a drink!” 

So is the NHS spending too much time worrying about tactics and changing the rules (what for instance, is the “5 a day” Campaign but an invention by the Californian Fruit Marketing Company?) rather than improving morale?

Let’s relax a bit more… overall we’ve never been healthier…

“Are we really?”

“Yes”.

“Come and have a drink.”

And let’s beware of iatrogenics.

DOCTORS ARE REALLY IN THE TRANSPORT BUSINESS

I suppose I could change him for someone less philosophical - my doctor that is - who came out with the slightly gloomy thought as he examined me during a routine investigation that all life strategies ended in one place.

Death.

Put it into an economic environment and this would mean all empires and business empires end up collapsing. Which if you take a long view of history is about right. Persia. Egypt. Greece. Rome.  And, probably in the near future, will include Western Civilisation.

However he then added something slightly more cheering which was the journey of life was what mattered anyway. Enjoy it, discover new things and try to make a difference. He was there to make sure, as best he could, that one had rather more time than otherwise on the journey enjoying the experience, but, nonetheless, on a train without brakes that would one day hit the buffers.

Business leaders talking about long term strategy as opposed to short term tactics, about exit plans or about sustaining themselves through a series of generations are deluding themselves. If there’s only one certain exit plan it’s death.

Jeremy Clarkson talked about trying to lose weight and giving up drinking. He concluded:

“Waking up feeling fresh is like dying with a clear conscience and a healthy bank balance.  It means you’ve wasted your life”.

We’ll look back on the South Sea Bubble, the traumas of the 1970s miners’ strike and the current recession as blips in a high speed journey through vivid landscape.

So when you sit down to write your business plan in today’s chaotic times think of the tactics of short term success - of how you can make technological, marketing or simply product breakthroughs sooner rather than later…there may not be a later. Think about doing great stuff not about creating a great company. As Herb Kelleher founder of South West Airlines in the USA put it:

“We have a strategic plan; it’s called doing things.”

Ben and Jerry may not quite match Watson and Crick; Walt Disney may not have been as significant as Alexander Fleming and Woody Allen may be a pale shadow of Shakespeare but each and every creative journey is a roller coaster like the legendary Kingda Ka in New Jersey - the world's tallest roller coaster, the world's second fastest roller coaster and voted the scariest roller coaster.  There’s nothing strategic here just a near-death experience.

Which brings me back to my doctor.

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