- The Observer,
- Sunday June 22 2003
Expert patients should not be feared nor misunderstood. Expert, informed, autonomous patients are those who recognise their own expertise in their body and their experience of their health condition, and who draw on this to work in partnership with their health care professionals.
The self-management courses provided by Arthritis Care and other voluntary patient organisations, along with the NHS's Expert Patient Programme, give people the skills and self-confidence to communicate effectively with health professionals.
We wholeheartedly support the approach being advised by the Government in giving patients greater opportunities to question GPs about the medicines they are being prescribed.
Gill Dorer
Director of Services Arthritis Care
London NW1
More of your letters
Asylum lies
The revelation that Britain is to ship refugees to Croatia (News, last week), like Matilda's lies, makes 'one gasp and stretch one's eyes'. Let me see if I get this straight: Asylum-seekers are too expensive, so we spend a lot of money on locking them up here. Then we build a £1 million camp in Croatia. We will pay for shipping these unfortunate people from here to Croatia, and unless there are self-sacrificing men and women who will do the job for free, we'll pay guards to keep the prisoners ... er, guests, inside the camp.
This is a logical progression from forbidding asylum-seekers to work, so that we can grumble about how much they cost.
Penelope Maclachlan
London W7
Spinning Geldof
Bob Geldof is right to say he will be 'sniggered at' by economists, political scientists and the like (News, last week), but it will not be for naïvety.
Geldof's proposal for a Marshall Plan shows two presuppositions: that modernisation is taken as Americanisation and marketing is everything and everything is marketing. For him to talk of the 'corruption' of politics is gross.
'They've privatised everything,' said Robbie Coltrane. Well, Live Aid and Net Aid privatised development. What the minimalist artist Carl André called the 'fiendish brilliance' of advertising and marketing has taken the place of development, coupled with the dumbing-down of television so central to post-modernism.
'The spiv, the speculator, the take-over bidder ... the philosophy of hedonism.' That was Harold Wilson on 'old' Conservatism but it also fits the 'new Conservatism' of the Thatcher years and the 'new Labourism' of the Blair years for whom Geldof has done 'the spin'.
Peter Galpin
Oxford
Legum's legacy
The best tribute you could pay to the late Colin Legum would be to appoint another Commonwealth Correspondent. As 'A continent in crisis', your two-page spread on Africa, shows, there is still plenty to write about.
Richard Bourne
Head, Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London University
Enough whaling
Whales need the protection of an international law. To be effective, such a law would provide for satellite surveillance and naval patrols. The latter would be required to arrest vessels threatening whales, using whatever force appropriate. Negotiable agreements are fragile, as your article (News, last week) shows. Neither Japan nor Norway would suffer if they abandoned whaling: they are not poor nations. Abandoning a cruel trade would gain good will, a point Japan, especially, might consider.
C.R. Higginbottom
Bakewell, Derbyshire
A vow is a vow
A vow before God and the people cannot be 'stripped off' as today's secular society might wish (News, last week). The next sovereign may make a different vow to reflect the changes of 50 and more years, but it will still be a vow.
Anne Savage
Pinner, Middx
