HEART BEAT Maurice NelliganSometimes I feel like Rip van Winkle. Do you ever get the feeling that you have just woken up, and that you may have missed something of significance?
The reason for this worrying thought entering my mind was my reading an address made in 1975 by Dr Halden Mahler, who was director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO) at that time, entitled Health for all by the year 2000.
This goal remained until the mid-1980s when it quietly disappeared. At least I think it went quietly or was I asleep when this rhetorical balderdash was formally repudiated.
Did the WHO come out with a statement like: "We got that one wrong guys, the revised date is now 2020, but only, if you all behave yourselves and do what you are told." Not wishing to be controversial, such statements were even made here in Ireland.
I suppose all of this comes about when people of like interests, beliefs and aspirations come together and their enthusiasms feed off one another.
Not alone have they no possible basis in fact but the delusions entertained may actually divert resources from the treatment of real disease.
Perhaps I am being unfair here. Possibly this emission from the WHO - subscribed to eagerly and uncritically by some doctors who should have known better, and by some administrators and politicians who seemed bereft of even elementary common sense - constituted an early mission statement.
What in the name of God is a mission statement?
They have proliferated like weeds in recent years. They emanate from Government agencies, business corporations, health boards, hospitals - in fact just about any grouping.
I would not even be surprised if brothels had them.
Typically, they don't reveal very much except to say that they and their dedicated staff are totally committed to increasing the fulfilment of humanity and making the world a better place. There is no mention that they might be in this to make money, or to fool the people into thinking that they are doing what they should be doing and which they clearly are not.
It may simply be that "every one else has one so we better have one too". Sometimes they make entertaining reading if you have a few moments to spare.
Who would have guessed, for example, that most hospitals are into treating the sick, or that most schools and universities are about improving education. I would never have imagined that until I read it on the framed notice on the wall. I think there really should be a prize for the most fatuous one.
As the bloody things are apparently contagious and spread like a rash from one institution to another, it may be difficult to get a handle on them all. In any case, it is hardly necessary - it is only the flights of fancy that differ.
One can only despair, however, at the waste of time and creativity in the production of such meaningless garbage. It must divert presumably human resources from what they should be doing and are being paid to do.
Writing it on the wall does not make it true. In fact, it often only highlights the discrepancy between the aspirations and the attainments.
Perhaps like smoking, the Minister for Health should consider banning them from the workplace. This would surely contribute to the lowering of the blood pressure of those foolish enough to believe them.
If the slogan "Health for all by the year 2000" was an early example of the genre, it was a sad one, based on wishful thinking. It ignored reality. It ignored heredity, culture, environment and chance. It arrogantly ascribed to our profession powers that we do not have and may never attain.
Humility and acknowledgement of how little we really know would be more appropriate. Above all, it and similar statements, divert money to the unobtainable often at the expense of treating the real sick.
Medicine will progress mostly as it has always done - by a series of slow, methodical steps - as we try to understand the complexities of illness.
We as doctors and, above all, our patients are ill-served by dubious predictions and claims. This is still an inexact science.
Lastly, perhaps with tongue in cheek, I would like to propose a slogan/mission statement. "Let's all cop ourselves on and try living in the real world by the year 3000."
Dr Maurice Neligan recently retired as a leading cardiac surgeon