Are you being worried to death ?

I've just come across a new book called "Medicine Balls" by my favourite TV doctor, Dr Phil Hammond. It's very funny and poignant - here's a very brief extract:

"Medical researchers have become just like the rest of us, desperate for media exposure. If you feed anything to a rat in large enough quantities, either you give it cancer or you cure it of the cancer you gave it in the first place. Either way, you've got a paper in The Lancet and all the fame and funding it brings.

But experts have been known to get it wrong. Remember the 'BSE in sheep' scandal ? Or rather non-scandal, because the experts mistook the sheep samples for cow samples. They should get out of the lab more. The sheep are the ones without the udders.

And what about SARS ? Three thousand column inches of panic, and not one death in the UK. True, it took some nifty global infection control and we had to lock up an entire hospital in Canada but it never reached us. Still, if you wanted a train to yourself, all you had to do was stick a Chinese flag on your luggage and cough.

In contrast, a hundred people a year die falling down the stairs. Every year. Why don't we have a STAIRS scare ? Even more people die when they're wearing those ridiculous SARS masks because they can't see where they're going. Falls in the elderly are a better predictor of death than all the health scares put together...

Bird flu happens to birds. It may transfer to humans but you can cut your risks by not having sex with a wild goose. Or if you do, please use a condom. If chlamydia and bird flu mix, we're all going down.

Healthy is what you are when you're not worrying about your health. Most health scares never happen. And yet they cost the NHS a fortune in panic management. Either ignore them, treat them as light entertainment or, if you're like me, do the opposite out of bloodly-mindedness. I eat beef, use a mobile phone, vaccinate my kids and have unprotected sex with all my geese. Works for me."

If you want to find out more take a look at:

Medicine Balls: Consultations with the world's greatest TV doctor. Dr Phil Hammond (2007)
Published by Black & White Publishing Ltd.

And if you want to find out how easy it is to scare us where our health is concerned read:

Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming - Why Scares are costing us the Earth. Christopher Booker & Richard North (2007)
Published by Continuum.