Dr Theodore Dalrymple
It is easier to start a health scare than to end one. Likewise, it’s easier to raise public anxieties than to calm them. Perhaps the clearest example is the worldwide panic over the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism. No matter how many times the original research is shown to have been faulty to the point of fraud, a residue of suspicion remains in the public mind– to damaging effect. Recently, I saw a headline, ‘Don’t have surgery on Friday’. This was to draw the public’s attention to a statistical study of 429,691 adult patients in Ontario. Between 2007 and 2019, they underwent surgery either on Friday or on Monday. Taking population statistics into account, this suggests that, in 13 years, citizens of Ontario, and no doubt those of many other provinces or countries, stand a roughly one-in-20 chance of having an operation performed on them either...
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