I’d like to tell you a little story about my father-in-law. Back in the mid 1970s, he contracted tuberculosis. No-one was entirely sure, but the doctors suggested he might have picked it up from drinking raw milk when he lived on a farm as a child.
Anyway, as a result of that TB, he initially lost one kidney. Over the course of the next fifty or so years, his remaining kidney gradually ceased to function. For the last year of his life, he was on dialysis.
That loss of kidney function came with side effects. His doctor placed him on a course of water tablets to take care of what he called his “water works”; but those tablets made him constipated. He was prescribed a pill to ease the constipation. Which it did. But it also gave him gout. The doctor prescribed a treatment for his gout. That worked as well. His gout was gone. But he now had what the doctors called “restless leg syndrome”; his legs constantly twitching and spasming, particularly at night. As a result, he couldn’t sleep. The doctor prescribed sleeping tablets. They gave him a good night’s sleep. They also gave him severe, migraine-level headaches. He was offered painkillers to ease the headaches. But they were discovered to counteract his heart medication.
At no point was he summoned to the doctor’s surgery or to the hospital to go back to basics; to treat the original symptoms. Instead, a new layer of medication was used to pave over the cracks.
Doctor after doctor. Pill after pill. Side-effect upon side-effect. My father in law passed away earlier this year. By the time he did so, he was taking 18 tablets each day; the majority of the pills – seemingly – to counteract the effects of another pill.
At this point, you would be fully justified in asking what the Hell my father in law’s medical treatment has to do with anything. Thankfully, the answer to that question is very easy.
Replace my father in law with the demolition and construction industry; and replace all those pills, potions, medicines and lotions with legislation. Remedy upon remedy, each one piled upon the next. Some counteract and contradict; some are there purely to address that side effects of something prescribed previously.
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