Quack quack quack

 

When I was a young woman I developed plantain warts on my chin.  They were virtually flat, small, and the same colour as the rest of my chin but I was very self-conscious about them.  I had pills and creams from my GP and twice had them 'freeze-burned' off in hospital.  I can't tell you how much good it did my self-image to have a bandaged suppurating chin.  Nothing worked.  At my final appointment when I refused to have them 'frozen off' again I was told that the consultant had no doubt that I'd fallen victim to warts due to my resistance being lowered by the stresses of being a working mother of small children.  So nur nur to me.

 

I also suffered from very severe headaches which nothing could touch. When I almost walked under a bus because I'd lost all peripheral vision and hadn't quite twigged that I had I was taken to A&E and seen by an eye consultant as an emergency.  He told me that I had migraines, and that the cause was stress due to my being a working mother of small children.  Stop working, take a holiday and you'll have no more headaches.  I still need to take daily sanomigran two decades later as a prophylactic.

 

One of my children had hearing problems.  Her school denied it and said it was entirely behavioural. I took her to the doctor who said that her hearing was fine but that she was doubtless attention-seeking because she was a small child with a working mother.  [Eventually in despair I took her to a child psychiatrist.  He told me it was a waste of time and to bring her back when she could hear.  When she eventually had her own (peripatetic) teacher for the deaf he told me she was the most intuitive lipreader he'd ever come across.]

 

So when I was a young woman the stock response from frustrated medics was that all women's health issues were due in some part to the inevitable stresses of continuing to work after having children.

 

Now it's smoking and before any of you nod in agreement that smoking is the cause of all human ills just wait - within 5 years the cause of all that's bad will be eating the 'wrong' food. 

 

You may be interested to know that in preparation for the government's case for banning smoking, all health stats where the patient had smoked at some point during their life was designated as 'smoking related'.  So if you smoked for 6 months as an adolescent and broke your leg 30 years later, then you're one of those stats. 

And it'll do you no good leaving out the buns and bacon from now on - they've got your number and they'll be using it against you sometime soon.

 

Doctors?  Bandwagon jumpers the lot of them.