Inspired

I already run a personal blog, but I've been inspired to open up this blog as a separate entity.

On here I will be running the occasional story about the lives of real people as seen by the doctor.

Many people think they are authorities on society, but most of those people - especially the "intelligentsia" don't often meet people outside of their social class and certainly don't have much of an idea of what their lives are like.

Doctors are probably the most likely to come into contact with the public in this way. In the past it was doctors and priests who heard the confidences of peoples' lives. The priests have less influence not, but with the NHS, everyone can visit the doctor, and all sorts of social issues walk through the door with them.

This blog will recount the stories (always anonymised) that we doctors often tell that give more of an insight into people's lives than reality TV can.

Who inspired me? - Theodore Dalrymple, a bit of a hero of mine, as most things he says reflect my views and experiences. Read his Wiki page here, but below is a summary.

PS I hope you will like my stories.

Dalrymple:

• Compassionate Conservative

• written extensivelydrawing upon his experience as a doctor and psychiatrist in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and more recently at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham.

• his writing has some recurring themes:

• The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries - criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families - is the nihilistic, decadent and/or self-destructive behaviour of people who do not know how to live.
• Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier.
• An attitude characterized by 'gratefulness' and 'obligations towards others' has been replaced, with awful consequences, by an awareness of rights, a sense of entitlement. The result is resentment as, naturally, those rights are violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.
• Criminality is much more often the cause of drug addiction than its consequence.
• The ideology of the welfare state is used to diminish personal responsibility. Erosion of personal responsibility makes people dependent on institutions and favours the existence of a threatening and vulnerable underclass.
• Moral relativism can easily be a trick of an egotistical mind to silence the voice of conscience.^[17]
• Multiculturalism and cultural relativism are at odds with common sense and statistical evidence.^[18]
• The decline of civilised behaviour--such as: self-restraint, modesty, zeal, humility, irony, detachment--is a disaster for social and personal life.
• The root cause of our contemporary cultural poverty is intellectual dishonesty. First, the intellectuals have destroyed the foundation of culture, and second, they refuse to acknowledge it by resorting to the caves of political correctness.