Customer: "Could you remind me what they're all for? I've lost track." Pharmacist: "Sure. This one's your blood pressure." Customer: "That I knew." Pharmacist: "This one's a water pill. For the swollen ankles." Customer: "Why are my ankles swollen?" Pharmacist: "That'd be the blood pressure pill." Customer: "Oh. And this?" Pharmacist: "For gout." Customer: "I never used to have gout." Pharmacist: "The water pill can bring it on." Customer: "The white one?" Pharmacist: "Cholesterol." Customer: "And the one next to it?" Pharmacist: "For the muscle aches." Customer: "From?" Pharmacist: "The cholesterol one, most likely. And this last one protects your stomach from the one for the aches." Customer: "So how many of the seven are for something that was wrong with me?" Pharmacist: [counts] "Two." Customer: "And the other five?" Pharmacist: "Those are for the two."

When doctors go on strike, the death rate falls. It has been measured every time it has happened. Israel, 1973: doctors strike for a month. Deaths in Jerusalem drop by half. The undertakers notice first. Los Angeles, 1976: surgeons strike for 5 weeks over insurance. The county death rate falls, then climbs back to normal the week they return and the postponed operations begin. Israel again, 1983 and 2000. Same result. Bogotá, 1976. Same. A review of every strike on record found that mortality either stayed flat or went down. Not once did it rise. Here is why. Medical error is the third leading cause of death in America, after heart disease and cancer, at around 250,000 a year. It does not appear on a death certificate because there is no box for it. In Britain, 1 hospital admission in 16 is caused by a reaction to a drug the patient was correctly prescribed. Properly prescribed medicines, taken as directed, kill about 100,000 Americans a year. That figure is 30 years old and nobody has updated it, because nobody is paid to. The hospital is one of the most dangerous buildings a well person can enter, and the most dangerous thing in it is the pad. So the next time your doctor is on strike, do what the data says and stay home, eat a steak and have a lie down. Statistically it is the safest appointment you will get all year.

A man who passed his medical in 1996 with flying colours has four diseases today, and not one number in his body has changed. Blood pressure 135/85. Cholesterol 210. Fasting blood sugar 105. BMI of 26. In 1996 that was a clean bill of health and a handshake. Today the same man, with the same blood, is hypertensive, has high cholesterol, is prediabetic and overweight. Four diagnoses, and he never caught a thing. 1997: the line for diabetes drops from 140 to 126. 1.7 million new diabetics by morning. 1997: high blood pressure drops from 160/100 to 140/90. 13 million new patients. 1998: high cholesterol drops from 240 to 200. 42 million new patients. 1998: overweight drops from a BMI of 27 to 25. 29 million people go to bed normal and wake up with a weight problem. 2003: prediabetes is widened from 110 to 100. It now covers 98 million Americans, more than 1 adult in 3, for a condition the World Health Organization declines to call by that name. 2017: blood pressure again, down to 130/80. Another 31 million. Nearly half the adults in America are hypertensive. When the cholesterol targets were tightened again in 2004, eight of the nine men who wrote them had been paid by companies that make statins. No germ. No outbreak. No change in a single artery. Just a room, a vote, and a tablet waiting on the far side of every line. In every other branch of medicine you have to get ill to become a patient. In this one they bring the disease to you. The last healthy people are the ones who haven't been tested yet.