It’s fine to mistrust modern medicine, but plain dumb to make statements like this: ‘It is often assumed that each illness is a well-defined entity, with a single specific cause and a single specific cure.’ No it isn’t. No doctor currently practising in the UK would assume such a thing.
Time and again, in the course of this repetitive, woolly-headed polemic, Darian Leader (a psychoanalyst) and David Corfield (a philosopher) blast holes in their essentially sound thesis – that psychology is as important, diagnostically speaking, as physiology because the immune system works in tandem with the nervous and endocrine systems – by casting doctors as cynical, philistine scum who haven’t read enough Lacan.
God knows, doctors can be idiots, and the frustration with The Patient on display in a book like philosopher-doctor Raymond Tallis’s ‘Hippocratic Oaths’ is too predictable to be shocking. (Why, Tallis wonders, would you criticise a doctor for lacking ‘communication skills’? How long have you got?) But then, patients are frustrating – especially when they believe, as Leader and Corfield seem to, that heart attacks are symbolic manifestations of parent/child separation rather than nature’s way of telling them to eat less lard.
