The number of invitations that come through my door increases the older I get.
A few weeks ago I was invited to visit that big, white, sinister looking caravan that sits menacingly in the car park of my local supermarket. Having no wish to submit myself to the excruciating embarrassment of stripping and having various bits of my naked anatomy poked or prodded or squashed or otherwise scrutinised, followed by an anxious wait of several weeks for the results of the examination, I declined.
I also decline the sort of invitation that asks one to attend the local “health” centre, strip from the waist down, lie on a couch, spread the legs (one is supplied with a minute square of paper to “protect” one’s modesty – too little, too late, is all I can say) and have a doctor give you what is called an “intimate examination”.
Yesterday I was invited to collect samples of my own excrement (that’s st to you and me), smear them on pieces of paper and then send this foul, smelly faeces/paper concoction, by post, to an NHS lab. (One really has to have sympathy for postmen these days – the things they are expected to handle are stomach-churningly revolting. I mean, can every one who takes samples of their own excrement be trusted to ensure that they don’t smear the outside of the envelope as well? It’s not a tidy business collecting your own st, after all, and accidents will happen. Even if the envelope looks clean on the outside, it’s perfectly obvious to the postman what it contains……)
Should I take the NHS up on their s**tty invitation, I then have an anxious wait for results. And as the leaflet informs me, there’s no guarantee the results will even be accurate. They might be false-positive, false-negative, or just plain negative or positive. But a negative result doesn’t let you off the hook. For example, you still have to undergo testing at regular intervals because a cancer may develop in your bowel later. And even if you don’t have cancer, you might still have polyps, and they could become cancerous at a later date. On the other hand, if the test is positive, heaven help you because you are then subjected to a colonoscopy i.e. an exploratory probe (a long, thin tube with a camera attached!!!) is inserted into your backside to take pictures………. I mean, c’mon!!! Inserting probes into private places is the sort of thing that aliens are supposed to do when they capture you and take you to their spaceship for examination, not one’s own species!!!
As you can no doubt tell, I have serious doubts about these practices. But what could be wrong with them, they’re all for one’s own good, aren’t they? No, I don’t think so.
Firstly: when the medical profession persuades people to constantly examine their own bodies, and undergo tests, for cancer, it blithely ignores the “voodoo effect”. In other words, it could be one’s very obsession with cancer, of being highly susceptible to the suggestion that cancer is a real threat, that causes one to contract the disease in the first place.
Secondly: constantly being on the alert for cancer and frightened of contracting the disease, not to mention all the anxiety involved in undergoing the regular battery of tests for the various forms of cancer, put one under enormous levels of stress. Stress has a bad effect on the immune system and this weakening of the immune system may result in the cancer that one is so anxious to avoid.
Thirdly: the medical profession are counteracting the good work done by the Darwin Awards! And yes, I am actually making a serious point here.