doctors (older) | Theodore Dalrymple writes:

The Wuhan flu and the wobbly-dos

The doctor-scribe declares that he will put up with any side-effects, and hopes that most of his fellow citizens will be prepared to do so also. In this way, herd immunity will build up. He writes:

In the trials, the difference in the number of people who had allergic-type reactions was very small between those who received the vaccine and those who received the placebo control. Nevertheless, 111 of the latter had such reactions, which initially is surprising.

However,

on the assumption that the placebo was the excipient of the vaccine, that is to say the substances in which it was preserved and delivered — which included (4-hydroxybutyl) azanediyl)bis (hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2-hexyldecanoate) and 2-[(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide — it is not surprising that there were some reactions. And this is to exclude the additional possibility of reactions mediated by anxiety, known to a researcher of my acquaintance as the wobbly-dos.

Dalrymple says that for the moment,

the vaccine seems a good thing.

He will take it because he has

nothing to lose, except my life.

Camillo Miola, The Oracle, 1880. J. Paul Getty Museum

Imaging machines, writes Dalrymple,

are to doctors what the Oracle at Delphi was to ancient Greeks.

The patient is stuck into one of them and

out comes the diagnosis with no possibility of error or appeal. Diagnoses that used to take weeks of elaborate examinations and painful investigations are made in less than half a day.

Who now remembers

In air encephalography, fresh air was substituted for cerebrospinal fluid, the better to show up ventricles

such ordeals as the air encephalogram, happily as redundant as the starting handle of a car?

However, older doctors

tend to lament that modern technology reduces the ability of their younger colleagues to perform physical examination of their patients or to exercise judgment, to the point that they are no longer aware of the necessity to exercise it: everything now is done by scan and algorithm.

Two other drawbacks to scanning technology are

the cost
the radiation to which it exposes patients, with possible ill-effects later in life. Medical scanning is now by far the most important cause of the population’s exposure to radiation

Dalrymple says it has been estimated that