The Meaning of Health

All letters are subject to editing and may be shortened. Letters of no more than 400 words should be sent to the BJGP office by e-mail in the first instance, addressed to [email protected] (please include your postal address and job title). Alternatively, they may be sent by post (if possible, include a copy on disk). We regret that we Letters cannot always notify authors regarding publication. Fuzzy logic through less interesting times, we can in humdrum routines, or the stiff, see this film as a warning from history. I unyielding logic of somatising patients. find working with a few individuals or Even if the only mortal threat we face is David Jewell finds the journal title Fuzzy enmeshed families seemingly trapped in a double espresso, Downfall is more Optimization and Decision Making a self-destructive fate hard enough, and than a history lesson. incomprehensible,1 while Richard facing it on a societal scale is barely Lehman contrasts fuzzy with logical thinkable. Steve Iliffe thinking.2 Now I have never seen this The German view may be different. FRCGP, Lonsdale Medical Centre, journal, but I would expect it to deal with Downfall is a moral tale of redemption in London. E-mail: [email protected] fuzzy logic, which far from being its different forms, as much docudrama illogical, is an attempt to adapt classical REFERENCE of the battle between rigidity and logic to fit it to deal with a world of ill- 1. Bamforth I. Götterdämmerung in a hole in the flexibility as that between good and evil. ground. Br J Gen Pract 2005; 55: 404. defined concepts. So it deals with fuzzy So many armoured characters collapse sets with borderline possible-members, that the film could be re-titled 100 fuzzy predicates such as ‘tall’, fuzzy Suicides and a Lucky Escape, yet quantifiers such as ‘most’, and fuzzy The meaning of flexibility triumphs in an ending that is modifiers such as ‘usually’. While I am optimistic. Albert Speer, the literal no sort of expert in fuzzy logic, and health architect of the Third Reich, speaks truth while many would not see it as a wholly to power, telling his beloved leader how satisfactory logical system, I would at he had disobeyed orders to destroy the Alistair Tulloch, like many illustrious least applaud the attempt to further try infrastructure of social life and catapult predecessors, has tried to do the to understand and deal with the ‘real Germany into the stone age. This impossible: to define a notional state of world’, and would think that we GPs 1 courage is rewarded with grudging being called ‘health’. Health is not a would find useful and relevant such a admiration, when lesser traitors are shot. state, it is a continuum, analogous to concept of ‘fuzziness’. The doctor so deep in the Nazi fantasy height. In one direction is ‘worse’ or that he wears SS flash on his collar has ‘shorter’; in the other ‘better’ or ‘taller’. Jeremy Meadows no wish for the people to go down with The difference — and difficulty — is, of GP Principal, Chessel Practice their master, and saves as many as he course, that height is uni-dimensional, Southampton whereas health is not. Perhaps ‘virtue’ is E-mail: [email protected] can. Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, who begins the film as a dizzy 20-something, a better comparison. It is perfectly REFERENCES ends it as an old woman describing her possible to take health’s dimensions — 1. Jewell D. May focus. Br J Gen Pract 2005; 55: 338. epiphany, not in the Russian shelling of physical, physiological, emotional, 2. Lehman R. Flora medica. Br J Gen Pract 2005; 55: 405. the Führerbunker but in a Munich street behavioural, social, and so on, each of years later. A plaque to the medical which may, fractal-like, reduce even student Sophie Scholl, executed for anti- further — and say what point on each Downfall Nazi activities just at the time when scale is more or less healthy than Junge herself was recruited to work for another. What is impossible is to reduce Hitler, revealed to her the truism that health’s multidimensional spectral nature Ian Balmforth’s review1 captured the ‘there are always alternatives’. to one or more singularities and call this mood of Downfall/Der Untergang neatly, So there are, as well as reserves of ‘health’. especially the coarsening of the German empathy and the ability to speak truth to language used by the self-appointed power. We need them in small, but Tim Paine 13 Limerick Road, Bristol cultured master race, and the banality of reliable, quantities all the time as we Email: [email protected] the cake-gobbling human wreck whose encounter the rigidities of politicians with greatest regret was that he had been too grandiose designs, over-obedient and conciliatory, compromising and kind. REFERENCE unthinking health service managements, 1. Tulloch A. What do we mean by health? Br J Gen Safe in our democracy and living our own escapist desires when trapped Pract 2005; 55: 320–323. 554 British Journal of General Practice, July 2005.

Load more