The Tyranny of Health

Book info: The Tyranny of Health (Hardcover, 208 pages) – Routledge, 2000. Language: English.

Topical and controversial The Tyranny of Health exposes the dangers of the explosion of health awareness for both patients and doctors, using straightforward language to explain the latest health statistics and research findings. Michael Fitzpatrick, a full-time inner-city GP, argues from his day-to-day experience in the surgery that health propaganda is having a very unhealthy effect on the nation. Patients are made unnecessarily anxious as a result of health scares which have greatly exaggerated the risks of everyday activities such as eating beef, sunbathing and having sex. Doctors no longer seem content with treating disease but are encouraged by the government to tell people how to live more and more aspects of their lives.Michael Fitzpatrick concludes that doctors should stop trying to make people virtuous. He argues that we need to establish a clear boundary between the worlds of medicine and politics, so that doctors can concentrate on treating the sick - and leave the well alone.

'The Tyranny of Health expresses with great clarity and precision the growing sense of unease that many people, both inside and outside of the medical profession, are begining to experience.' - Social Issues Research Centre

'This is an heretical book. The scared cows of health promotion are dispatched with greater zeal than that with which the British beef herd was slaughtered at the height of the BSE crisis.' - Dr David Wainwright, International Epidemiology

'A thrilling account of the problems encountered by doctors in present-day medical practice and is highly recommended to be read also by nurses.' - Nursing Ethics 2003, 10 (3)

'A thrilling account of the problems encountered by doctors in present-day medical practice ... highly recommended to be read also by nurses.' -Nursing Ethics 2003, 10 (3)