Prevention better than cure
How to reset our relationship with our own health
Everywhere we look we are bombarded with information about how to improve our health. Most of it is, inevitably, commercial but not all. Leaving aside the constant bombardment of, for instance, anti-aging products (such arrant, unscientific nonsense, growing older is good, a natural process) there is a lot to absorb and well worth acting upon.
The NHS has failed (by no means entirely through its fault): that’s the first lesson to take in. To help fix it, which will take years) we have to take charge of our own well-being. Over the past 75 years we have become complacent about health provision. It took the Covid pandemic to shake us up sufficiently to realise, with horror, that we could not rely on a public service to pick us up (metaphorically and literally), quickly and efficiently, to deliver the healthcare we needed, and send us back to our lives as experienced before.
The pandemic should have provided that moment of gestalt, our Eureka flash of understanding that, when push comes to shove, we have to take back control of that critical part of our lives that keeps us as we are, what we expect to be. To be sure, other factors, genetic, familial, social play a large part. You can’t be held responsible for having a congenital heart condition, for carrying a gene, or part-gene, that suggests susceptibility to, for instance, breast cancer, or Huntington’s disease. Poverty, all too present, we know increases by a huge factor the probability you may fall victim to all manner of disease, chronic or acute. And age does bring its own potential toll, most clearly through the onset of dementia, of the increased likelihood of some cancers, stroke or heart failure.
But, and it is a huge word here, we can mitigate so many factors that otherwise push us toward sickness. The pandemic showed how, inchoately in many respects, crucial in others, that while the virus stalked our streets, shops, offices, places of leisure, we could – and mostly did –take steps to protect ourselves. Collectively and, at first with stumbling and scary steps, we did our best not to catch it. This was before the first vaccines emerged, when we were starkly naked and exposed to a virus we barely understood and whose transmission we were desperately unclear about.
In those circumstances, we all knew the NHS had become a place of last resort, quite possibly a place where we would, perforce, go to die. From a hitherto haven of safety, hospitals became close to becoming a charnel house of death. Each of us had to act in the best interests of our own health. Suddenly, to the shock of many, we were, alone, fully in charge of our bodies and how they should be best preserved for future life.
We are, in truth, still in that place and, you know what, we ought to relish the opportunity we have been given to reset our relationship with that amazingly complex, finely tuned organism, our own body. It works a treat, even when, perhaps best when, under constant attack from the myriad organisms that assail it. Instead, we chose too readily to add to its constant unremitting travails at keeping us alive, by swamping it with toxins of our own making, chief among them sugar, excess fat, protein and carbohydrates. To which one might add alcohol, caffeine, UPFs and all the unnessary rest.
Belatedly – not least because there are huge profits to be made from folk being ill; ask Big Pharma – the NHS itself has woken up to the blindingly obvious notion that prevention is so much better than cure. Painfully slowly, it is being gently suggested that we might address some of the issues which, summed, come down to my wife’s grandfather’s mantra of ‘everything in moderation’ (he was a GP in the 1930s).
It goes a bit deeper than that. As I have grown older, although by no means necessarily wiser, it has borne in on me that, on a daily basis, I need to check my health. This might sound as though verging on hypochondria, but it is not. It’s just a quick assessment, starting with, at its simplest, ‘how do I feel this morning’ upon rising from my bed. It continues with one or two other easily applied observations.
It does not involve obsessive BP monitoring, or weighing myself, but I find my small other daily checks help me immensely. It does require a somewhat closer monitoring of daily diet – and alcohol and drugs (caffeine: what did you think, haha!) intake. It is not, once applied, either intrusive or anxiety inducing. Far from it, it helps me maintain an equilibrium, both physical and mental. Exercise is crucial: however, gyms are not. Mental exercise is key, as well: keep on thinking, try new things, like learning a language, just for the hell of it.
I know I ought to do more physical daily work but, as the psychs are wont to say: good enough. It has helped me no end by making a point of switching my so-called smart phone off for at least 12 hours a day (since you ask, the easy time is 19.00-07.00). And I never take one when walking, running, cycling, riding, any of that. There’s growing evidence the bloody things mess with your brains, turning it into mush, as you come to rely on its ‘helpful’ AI-driven drivel. So, dump the lump: bankrupt Google, Apple, Meta, and the rest. That thought alone ought to boost all our health.
None of these actions cost anyone a penny. Critically, I am trying not be a burden on the state by using its numerous if ailing various health services.
The obvious riposte is to say – and it would be correct – ‘but, you’re one of the fortunate ones, in good, one might opine, robust shape’. That misses the point. I’m not so smug as to believe I’m not increasingly vulnerable (based purely on statistics) to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, made more likely as the days pass and I approach my ninth decade. My point is: we all have the capacity which, with the passing years, we owe our own body, to take good care of it. We’re only given one (with the possible addition of a donor’s heart and lungs, kidney and liver etc., thanks to medical science) We really should take a lot more care of it. To say we depend on its continuing to function is trite but a terrible truth, too often dismissed or casually forgotten. Here’s a thing: I worked out, a while ago, how many times my heart has unerringly beaten. The number was pushing three billion. Words fail; my heart, bless it, has not.
We ought not to expect, as if it was an absolute, rather than a conditional, right, to demand others do that looking after for us, not infrequently when we have been the authors of our own foolishness, by over-eating, under-exercising, filling our guts and lungs (or our veins, if we inject drugs) with poison.
The health service, for which, in my view, we need to pay much more for, in state insurance, is not there to rescue us from our self-inflicted wounds. It has a role to play, in giving vital assistance, and providing cures, for those who conditions are not their making: real illness, or wear and tear from legitimate use. We need, every day, to remember that. There is an old saying, ‘physician, heal thyself’. That needs to be amended to simply ‘heal thyself’.
This week: Tim read Sing As We Go by Simon Heffer, about the period between the two world wars (1918-1939). Did you know that on the day set aside for a victory celebration in 1919, enraged former soldiers (and supporters) burned down Luton town hall, furious at the crass nature and tin-eared response to their plight as war veterans, and the failure to provide not just jobs for them but ‘homes fit for heroes’. Heffer is meticulous in his research, and has raided extensive archives to tell this story of what another author, writing of the same period in the 1960s, named ‘the long weekend’.
Quote of the week: ‘You cannot hope to bribe or twist – thank God! – the British journalist. But seeing what the man, unbribed, will do, there’s no occasion to.’ Humbert Wolfe, a civil servant and popular poet of the 1920s, wrote this apposite ditty. For those of you of a prurient caste, he died in his bed on the evening of his 55th birthday – in 1940 – after no doubt celebrating the occasion with his mistress, who was with him at his demise, the somewhat younger (by 23 years) Pamela Frankau. Or, maybe, given the date, it was less from the earth moving, more a literal bomb dropping. I thank Simon Heffer (see above) for this delightfully priapic vignette.
Music of the week: Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (Songs of Gurre). I went to a rare performance of this mighty choral work in 1973 at the RAH but my companion, finding the music too hard to follow, insisted we left after part 1, thereby missing the climatic finale. It’s not an easy work to listen to but worth the effort. You will be glad to know Schoenberg uses a diatonic rather than a chromatic scale, for which he is best (if not notoriously) known. There is an excellent version on Decca, Riccardo Chailly conducting the Deutsche Symphonie Orchestra of Berlin. The double disc also includes Schoenberg’s sublime Verklärte Nacht.