NHS
Patients like being told they need an operation. It doesn’t mean they do
In George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma, written early last century, the knife-happy surgeon invents a nut-shaped abdominal organ,…
We all suffer ‘old age’ ailments – that doesn’t mean we all need a scan
Memory, neuroscientists tell us, is fallible. It is a dynamic process whereby each time we remember something, it will be…
Health and personal choice
Public health specialist Sir Michael Marmot has blamed ‘the cuts’ for the rise in dementia among the elderly, resulting in…
Counting on sheep
Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable…
Long life
When your mind suddenly goes wonky, you may be the one person who doesn’t realise that there is something wrong…
In praise of doctors’ handwriting
My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like…
Polly’s pleb adventure
Down and Out in Paris and London is a brilliant specimen from a disreputable branch of writing: the chav safari,…
Stress point
It’s not work that’s killing us. It’s the irritation and confusion of modern office life
Diary
It’s clear that Vladimir Putin has had a facelift, which might explain why Wendi Deng would take an interest in…
The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence…
What was this bed-blocker doing on my ward?
There’s some journalistic research you’d really never do by choice. Spending four days in an NHS hospital with a life-threatening…
Flying doctors
A few months ago, paramedics were on the brink of industrial action. They had legitimate grievances. Ambulance services were being…
Death on the NHS
Ten years ago, the National Health Service eased my father’s final days. My mother, this year, was not so lucky
All in the mind
You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most…
Pickets of privilege
Treatment for that once-virulent condition, the British disease of strikes, has largely been successful. The number of working days lost…
What I got right
And what the Labour party is now getting wrong
The spending cuts Osborne flatly refused to make
The Autumn Statement on 25 November had long been circled in Downing Street diaries as the season’s defining political moment.…
The ringfence cycle
By now, George Osborne had hoped to have completed his austerity programme. Instead, he finds himself making what is, still,…
Letters
The NHS and politicians Sir: The NHS is indeed in need of fundamental reform, but Max Pemberton’s excellent article (‘The…
How ‘stress management’ can make your blood pressure soar
‘Stress management’ seems to be perpetually on the rise
The wrong cuts
Jeremy Hunt is right to fight for NHS reform. But he’s going after the wrong people, on the wrong issue
A trust betrayed
Like many of my fellow junior doctors, I trusted a Conservative government with the NHS. If it’s to stay strong…
Diary
One of my constituents has been in an Indonesian prison since May. Journalist Rebecca Prosser was arrested with her colleague…
We could end HIV
A new drug could reduce new infections to zero – so why hasn’t the NHS backed it yet?
Here’s what’s wrong with the ‘public sector ethos’
Matthew Parris 14 November 2015 9:00 am
An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read…