The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry.
The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine.
The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true.
The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either.
The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought.
The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to.
The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer.
Now it is today.
Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus.
He is confident.
He has always been confident.
The confidence has never been the problem.
The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.
A devastating day in the British countryside, as Doris continues her campaign of ecological destruction.
5:47am - Doris got up. The fell has been grazed by sheep continuously since the thirteenth century. Doris began the thirteen-hundredth year of destruction.
6:00am - Doris ate some grass. The grass is fine-leaved fescue, a component of a species-rich upland sward that exists specifically because it is grazed at this frequency by this type of animal. Without grazing, the coarse grasses take over, the fine-leaved species disappear, and the fell becomes a rank monoculture of purple moor grass and soft rush that supports approximately nothing. Doris is not aware of any of this. Doris has found some good grass near the wall.
7:30am - Doris grazed around the base of the dry-stone wall. The wall was built in 1771. It is standing because the vegetation at its base is kept short by sheep, preventing the freeze-thaw cycle from working into the joints. The wall is a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. The wall is what people come to see. The wall stands because of Doris. Doris is destroying the countryside.
9:00am - Doris grazed the section above the tormentil. Tormentil is a small yellow wildflower that requires an open, grazed sward to survive. The tormentil is surviving. This is Doris's fault.
11:00am - The rewilding expert arrived on the fell. The rewilding expert had written a report recommending the removal of sheep from the British uplands and their replacement with large predators, extensive tree cover, and unmanaged natural succession.
The rewilding expert was standing in a species-rich upland grassland containing 45 recorded plant communities and active nesting habitat for curlew, lapwing, golden plover, and skylark, all of which are on the red list of birds of conservation concern, all of which are here because Doris keeps the sward at the height they need.
The rewilding expert looked at Doris.
Doris looked at the rewilding expert.
Doris went back to grazing.
1:00pm - The skylark went up. Vertical hover. Long descending song. The fell went quiet in the way that fells go quiet when the skylarks are up and the wind drops for a moment and everything feels very old and very correct.
The rewilding expert had gone back down by then. The report was already written. The skylarks were in it as a species to be reintroduced.
The skylarks are here.
The skylarks have always been here.
The skylarks are here because Doris is here.
3:00pm - Doris was in Brian's field. The destruction continued.
Brian logged it.
Column eight: three confirmed breeding pairs this afternoon.
Doris is still destroying everything.
The evidence, so far, does not support this.
@wd6_nedal@dom_lucre Why do you need context? No CHILD should be getting married and no CHILD should be getting hit for being miserable for it - take a look at yourself