I died 10 years ago, but the press didn’t get the story.

I read today a piece of research in Denmark in which they followed a group of folk who, previously healthy, started to takes NSAIDs like ibuprofen.  Seems that straight ibuprofen increases your risk of stroke by 30%, while diclofenac (voltarol) comes in at an 86% increase!  I used to chew these like sweeties and it seems I should have died some time ago. 

I really worry about:

1. The effects of the different medications and their interactions on folks’ health, particularly those children who are still in their developmental stage.

2. The wish of everybody to live in a total risk-free society; stuff like kids mustn’t go on school trips, they can’t use a lathe in schools.

.. but how to reconcile these two contradictory positions is the problem.

Frankly, I was subjected to some really high risk activities in my schooling, but I knew of nobody killed or even injured.

Is this just the effect of the media on peoples’perception of risk? One child in 10 million at school is killed and it’s all over the press. It’s a tragedy for the family and those who knew and loved the child, but the other 9,999,999 now cannot go on a skiing trip or a canoeing expedition. Cumulatively we are producing a generation who have not been stretched or given the chance of broadening experiences that all preceeding generations have had, what might be the effect of that?

I can recall many elderly folk  on my patch, when I worked, who lived in fear because somebody had broken into an old person’s flat. They had read it in the papers (Quote “We didn’t read this in the papers when I was younger” – which can be read two ways!) and were now frightened to answer the door. The incident having occurred 300 miles away did nothing to calm their fears. Was this incident an example of our society crumbling as a result of the rising lack of respect for elderly people, as seemed to be their interpretation, or was it that communication now is so fast and so omnipresent that this story made it to the dailies, when it wouldn’t have done 20 or 30 years ago – when it may be that the prevalence of this sort of crime was higher? I don’t know the answer, do you?

Yes, I want medications to be there when my granddaughter is ill. I want it to work wonders and to have no side effects. But I also want her to climb trees and take a  gap year working with the less privileged. But I know there would be risks both ways. Nothing is perfect. If I die on an operating table at some time in the future, I hope that my family will not institute a claim against the surgeon. I’m sure she will have done her best; and the fact that the knife found a blood vessel not normally where one would run and I died is no measure of negligence, it’s just “one of those things”.  Life is risky and folk are human and make mistakes. There is no point hounding that surgeon so that she declines to do that operation ever again and thus 2o people die when that operation could have saved them.

And I reckon a teacher who loses a child on a school trip feels bad enough anyway so doesn’t need pillorying and chasing out of a job. Keep him or her, I say! You’ll never have a better leader for groups after they have had that experience.

Well, I have ranted on enough. Any chance of an audition for Grumpy Old Men?