What sparked Haydn Shaughnessy's overwhelming concern with health is enough to make anyone take more than a passing interest
Four years ago I walked into the Bons Secours hospital in Cork having left at least three pints of my blood at home. Over the next few hours I would lose at least the same again (the hospital records are contradictory - two sets of figures were kept), all a result of a minor operation that was not properly finished off that morning.
So why do I write about health?
I'd been bleeding internally and knew little about the botch up until blood came pouring out, by which time I was home alone. Losing it.
Half an hour or so after settling into a narrow bed in the intensive care unit a group of nurses approached, in a hurry. One, I remember, had a reassuring smile. Why did I need reassuring all of a sudden? My blood pressure had dropped suddenly and from feeling a little cold my body began to shake uncontrollably. I was going into shock.
I never want that experience again but during winter the cold days spark the fear that it is indeed happening.
I asked the consultant responsible for the error on the day what he intended to do.
"Well, it has to stop," he said, (the logic seemed to be that corpses don't bleed after all), and off he went to Dublin to attend a wedding, thereafter prescribing blood transfusions from his mobile phone.
So one reason I write about health is I obviously believe the health system is let down by a small number of complacent, arrogant doctors who become negligent.
That is only one reason and far from the best.
Health seems to me the number one political issue of our times. Health is diet related and diet is formed by the perverse system of agriculture - dominated by wheat and meat - we have unfortunately created; diet is by the day becoming more central to our culture through diet fads and through haute cuisine; health is politics - now we have wealth, can we also have health; it is about knowledge and certainty and therefore philosophical; and health is integral to big businesses like tobacco and pharmaceuticals.
Big business works according to rules that do not necessarily benefit customers. Conspiracy theory? Not really.
The health system, like all human systems, is irrational. Any systematic attempt to co-ordinate the activities of millions of people is doomed. That is just part of life. The best you can hope for is to keep alive as many debates as possible about the best way to do things and to encourage radical people to force accountability onto those in positions of power.
A fluid situation where parameters, values and ideas are changing is good. This seems to me the ethos of the HealthSupplement and why I enjoy writing in it. The supplement is not prescriptive and it doesn't pretend to know. It allows me to explore ideas.
Of all the things I want to write about, here, with perhaps an insight or two into why, are the top 10.
1. Medical science is based on evidence and evidence-based conclusions are the nearest we ever get to sensing the truth.
Look at other areas of science though and the most striking feature is the degree to which scientists routinely disagree and the acceptance that their conclusions are a stab at the truth, a best guess.
Medical doctors, on the other hand, have to make decisions with a sense of certainty and they have to communicate complete confidence. They are forced to overestimate the legitimacy of science, dramatically, giving it an aura of infallibility. These contradictory demands would test most intellects. But then there are those who take the pharmaceuticals' shilling and compromise the basic principles of objectivity anyway.
2. Food is a mess. People want to trust the food industry to supply food that contributes to health. The food industry finds it strange that health should be part of its agenda. Cooking is a primitive and important activity that has now become vogue. Unfortunately, people generally don't know much about the relationship between what they are putting together and their health.
I talk to people frequently about what they eat and a surprising number of times they are suffering a diet-related illness. Often their discomfort is expressive. The way they move in their seats, the problems with wind when they talk, the way their bodies are doing battle with their food.
In one conversation recently a man told me that doctors had widened his oesophagus artificially because the scars from regurgitated digestive acid had narrowed it so much as to make swallowing difficult.
I have suffered this problem. I was chronically ill for 10 years with digestive problems, including bleeding from the duodenum. It was a career wrecker rather than life threatening but that's bad enough. It took five years for me to find the curative diet, with the help of a pharmacist who didn't believe in medicines. With his help I discovered that the illness was caused by what I used to eat and that the problem is therefore curable through diet. Few people I speak to want to believe that.
3. So number three in my list of priority issues is that many people don't accept responsibility for their health and therefore become patients.
4. The executives of pharmaceutical companies like those of tobacco companies should be rewarded for shrinking their businesses, for dismantling them, for making themselves irrelevant. But nobody ever thought to incentivise management to do away with industries whose growth is symptomatic of, and in cases like Ritalin, SSRIs, Cox II anti-inflammatories, antacids and the general rejection of integrative cancer treatments, contributory to the atmosphere of spiralling health problems.
5. Health has always been related to income and status. Low-income families in a world where traditional knowledge has gone down the plughole are tempted into too many bad eating decisions. People at all levels of society are forced to put up with the kind of jackass who abuses position and power. We need new ways of thinking about both problems.
6. We have a culture that is over-dependent on consumption and entertainment rather than on learning, yet our biggest problems stem from lost knowledge about how we should interact with the environment around us.
7. Alternative health cures, vitamin and mineral supplements are the last place people should look if they want to improve their health. The first place is the dinner plate.
8. The English-speaking world has forgotten good parenting. The ethical environment we've created for our children is impoverished. The degree of alcohol addiction and the types of casual sex that appear normal to them, the way reality TV raises everyday life and its decisions to a form of entertainment indicate moral confusion. Not that we don't know what is right or wrong but that we are not sure about the role of morality. We hardly dare speak it.
9. We should be partners with the medical profession in acknowledging our limitations and exploring more rounded approaches to health.
10. And finally. The objectives we should set for the health system are that it should decline and prosper. It should transform from a system for sustaining hospitals to an ethical and cultural resource, a guide to how we should live.
Fanciful?
No doubt. But as the Chinese say: Every great journey starts with the first step. Unless, they forgot to add, you don't know which way you are heading.
The HealthSupplement serves a regular diet of Haydn Shaughnessy's articles on food and health in his Extreme Cuisine column and articles with an occasionally bitter taste. He nurtures a patch of burdock-root in Co Cork.