Heroes Not Zombies

The UK government has announced this week that it is to roll out a screening programme – “Health MOTs” – checking blood pressure, height, weight, age, current medication, family history and whether a patient smokes and include a simple blood test to check cholesterol and, in some cases, sugar.

Patients with abnormal results will be offered advice, blood pressure drugs and/or statins.

Announcing the plans, Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, said screening could save 2,000 lives a year

This is an old but much peddled nonsense.

The mortality rate for human beings is 100%. Everybody dies. Reducing the numbers of people dying from one particular disease inevitably increases the numbers dying from something else – people don’t die healthy! But there is virtually no debate at all about this. I’ve never read a single piece of research which asks the question – if less people die from heart disease and strokes, what will they die from instead? Does anybody know? Does anybody care? Well, they should do.

Let me be clear. If there are effective interventions and treatments for any diseases, we should use them. I’m not saying it would be good NOT to reduce heart disease. However, I’d like to know two things – firstly, those who have been treated after a heart disease risk factor is picked up in screening…….what life experience do they have? What diseases are increased in this group? (do we see more cancer, more dementia, more degenerative diseases for example?) And, secondly, more specifically what is the life experience of this group who are put onto drugs for decades after screening? (lifestyle interventions are likely to have positive impacts on a wide range of diseases, but drugs for preventing specific diseases only, at best, impact on those particular diseases)

I think that we need to start thinking of health, not in the short term, but from what has been termed a “life course” perspective. Without that, we are barreling in, at best, semi-blind.

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Here’s an astonishing calculation. In England, in 2006, there were 16 million admissions to hospitals. That’s an astonishing number for a population of about 50 million!

As if that’s not astonishing enough, 6.5% of those admissions were for patients who were suffering from the bad effects of prescribed medicines. That works out at 1,040,000 patients!

At an average of £228 per day as the cost of a hospital stay and and an average of 8 days admission for each of these patients, the cost to the NHS in England in 2006 was £1,896,960,000.

Compass, the organisation which made this calculation concludes –

“Now is the time for a debate about costs and policies about which drugs the healthcare service can afford as people are paying infinitely higher prices – the drugs bill to the NHS now stands at £11bn – for increasingly marginal rewards and higher risk from adverse drug reactions.”

These figures are part of a trend. Every year the drugs bill gets higher and every year the cost of treating people for the adverse effects of prescribed drugs goes up. This isn’t a sustainable path. Is anybody thinking we need a re-think about health care?

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I think trees have a special place in human imagination. Forests have mythical status, offering protection, or harbouring threat. It’s probably partly because trees can live for so many more years than humans can. During the “great flu” early in the twentieth century which killed millions of people, sangomas in Africa, and shamans in Alaska claimed that the villages which were built around great trees had far fewer deaths from flu than those which weren’t. I don’t think that’s ever been shown to be true, but it shows how the myths of the protective power of trees is universal. A great tree can have protective powers, can be a source of healing. I could tell you a couple of really interesting stories about healing trees, but I’ll leave them to another post.

My grandfather would talk about “The Big Tree” and I have a very clear image in my head of a black and white photo of him standing under “The Big Tree”. It’s a tree growing in one of the main streets of Kirkwall, in Orkney. I also remember seeing that tree enclosed in iron railings. I always thought that was a bit sad, as if the tree was imprisoned, although I suspect the railings were there to protect the tree.

The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono, is one of my most favourite books. It’s a true hero story, a narrative of the power of one person’s actions in transforming the world. American readers are probably familiar with Johnny Appleseed, which has similar narrative characteristics. I can also recommend The Story of Yew, by Guido Mina di Sospiro, whose narrator is a tree. It’s botanically informative, opening your eyes to the amazing wonder of trees, and it’s a thought-provoking tale which makes you think about life. The third book on my bookshelf about trees is Eucalyptus, by the Australian author, Murray Bail, a kind of classic fairy tale of the man who wants the hand of the princess and has to complete the challenge set by her father to do so. The challenge is to name every one of the hundreds of Eucalyptus trees he has planted on his ground.

So, in the light of that, have a look at this photo –

I expect you can see lots of trees around Stirling Castle here, but there’s one, right up there by the castle which catches your eye, isn’t there?

That tree is one of my all time favourites. I see it probably every day. Have you got any favourite trees? Like to tell me about them?

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