It was a remark by Shelagh Fogarty during Tuesday’s lunchtime programme on Radio 5.
Isn’t it getting to be the case that doctors these days have just one prescription, whatever the disease: eat healthily, take exercise, don’t smoke.
Or, even more pithily perhaps, be of higher social status.
All this research is just another way of saying what has been painfully clear for years – mortality is intimately related to occupation & social class.
And no, of course we don’t mean that either poverty or mortality is the fault of the poor or the sick. But they could do an awful lot to help themselves do better, if only they would learn.
This modern, evidence-based prescription was known even before the new philosophies threw all in doubt, but even John Donne knew that it was not enough
