Sick, thick and dangerous

As a conservative, I am against all unnecessary change, of course, but I welcome innovation that improves the quality of life. Thus I rejoice to learn that certain doctors in my neck of the woods are now conducting clinics for difficult and challenging (i.e., violent and dangerous) patients in local police stations. This will improve the quality of clinical care no end.

Naturally, the principal beneficiaries of this innovation will be the doctors themselves. They will no longer sit in fear and trembling behind their desks as their young male patients, decked out in the uniform of modern British savagery, make their unreasonable demands, compliance with which they are prepared to enforce by using their full and extensive repertoire of vileness. Few are the doctors in our cities who do not know what it is to be assaulted: and the rule is, once assaulted, twice comply.

If you had asked me when I first qualified as a doctor whether the nearby presence of policemen would ever be necessary for medicine to be practised properly, I should have thought you mad. Perhaps it was necessary in other countries, but not in ours. However, the English patient is now to medicine what the English football fan is to football.

The radical egotism of young male patients means that they cannot take no for an answer, unless superior physical force is at hand to persuade them of the meaning of the word. So long as there is a possibility that intimidation might work, they will use it; for, having grown up in a world of sluts, slobs, slatterns and psychopaths, they think that all social relations resolve into questions of power, of Lenin’s Who Whom: who does what to whom, or gets what from whom.