Glad tidings and sorrowful news

There’s a mixture of sorrowful news and glad tidings in the final column this year from Maurice Gueret as he rings out 2019 with a nice glass of Saint-Emilion.

Flourish & Botts

There was sad news for medics in the run-up to Christmas when we heard about the closure of Clarendon Medical, the last specialist supplier to doctors in Dublin city. For almost 30 years, they traded a vast collection of clinical textbooks, encylopedias and atlases of anatomy. They also serviced other needs of students and doctors with white coats, stethoscopes, tendon hammers and other accoutrements. Every patient in Ireland was examined with something from Clarendon Medical. The Harry Potter generation of doctors regarded it as their own Flourish & Botts or Ollivanders, where Hogwarts’ students procured books of spells and magic wands. Alas, online competition and digitisation of medical textbooks contributed to the adverse trading conditions that forced Clarendon Medical to close. A great loss for all apprentices, qualified quacks and book lovers. But, perhaps, ultimately a great loss for their patients.

Part timers

General practice in Ireland has been under siege in recent times. Just try and get a long appointment. I haven’t practiced full-time for some years now, but I keep a close eye on my colleagues, and can see that the family doctor is more demoralised than ever. One emerging difficulty is the number of part-time

GPs who are having to give up practising altogether. Experienced retired doctors would, in the past, have stayed on the medical register to do locum holiday or half-day cover for younger partners. Other GPs with families to mind can perhaps only see patients for a few half-day sessions a week. But the rocketing cost of professional indemnity insurance, coupled with paying large fees to the Medical Council, and the time demanded by new tick-box education regimes, is squeezing many doctors to abandon their profession altogether. There are now thousands of trained doctors in Ireland who are neither registered nor insured. Many would welcome a parting of bureaucratic and ludicrously expensive waters to allow them practice for a bit longer, or even to volunteer in an emergency.

Marlboro man

Now that cigarette branding has all but disappeared from our world, it’s difficult to explain to Generation Z just how important brands were to boomers and millennials who misspent their youths.

I’m a lucky fortunate who managed to kick the habit before it kicked me into an early grave. But in my heyday wheezy days, there wasn’t a single brand I didn’t try at least once. The coolest, without doubt, was the Marlboro. Its Marlboro cowboy campaign to get men hooked on a filter cigarette originally for women, was the most successful and deadly series of adverts of all time. The Marlboro Man campaign ran for almost half a century from 1955, and to this day, the brand still has 40pc of the declining American market. I was reminded of this last month when Bob Norris, the original Marlboro 10-gallon-hat cowboy, died in a Colorado Springs hospice at the age of 90. He reached that gallant age because he never smoked himself. His own kids made him feel so guilty about setting a bad example that he resigned as the Marlboro Man. Children are just about the best anti-smoking aids there are.

Irish smokers

There was welcome news on the home smoking front in the new Healthy Ireland survey, with the number of smokers in Ireland declining from 23pc to 17pc in just five years. A hugely significant drop. In real figures, the number of smokers has fallen by 165,000. Living in a deprived area increases the rate of smoking to 24pc, and the percentage of unemployed people who smoke is a staggering 40pc. It’s time to focus more resources to quit the habit on the have-nots rather than on the haves.

Safe Liver

I’d like to wish readers a very happy Christmas and a healthy passage into 2020 in the final Rude Health column for this year. For medical advice over the seasonal period, I am happy to dispense the wisdom of a certain Siegfried Farnon, a favourite fictional veterinary colleague, whose All Creatures DVDs lighten up many dark December evenings at our house. While uncorking a vintage bottle of a 1937 Saint-Emilion, Mr Farnon told his fellow vets that “One’s liver is perfectly safe in the hands of the great viticulturalists of the Gironde”. And so say all of us. As long as you are off farmyard duty or house calls.