"Theodore Dalrymple has spent 20 years working as a prison and hospital doctor in one of Britain's poorest inner cities - and chronicling his experiences in regular dispatches in some of Britain's best-selling magazines." "Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims they all pass through his surgery, and he uses the experience of treating them to examine life for those unfortunate enough to live at the bottom end of society. He writes with a combination of dry humour, compassion and, occasionally, anger - mostly at the inhuman bureaucracy of the system, which works against the doctors and nurses as they try to help their patients." "Second Opinion is a series of short, sharp pieces compiled from Dalrymple's regular and much-loved 'Second Opinion' and 'If Symptoms Persist' columns in The Spectator magazine - offers a compelling insight to what it's really like to work at the sharp end of modern --

For two hundred years, addiction to opiates has seemed both dangerous and glamorous. Countless writers, from Coleridge and De Quincey to William Burroughs and Irving Walsh, have invested it with deep philosophical significance. Addicts are presumed to be in touch with profound mysteries of which non-addicts are ignorant. Dalrymple shows that doctors, psychologists and social workers, all of them uncritically accepting addicts' descriptions of addiction, have employed these literary myths in creating an equal and opposite myth of quasi-treatment. Using evidence from literature and pharmacology and drawing on examples from his own clinical experience, Dalrymple shows that addiction is not a disease, but a response to personal and existential problems. He argues that withdrawal from opiates is not the serious medical condition, but a relatively trivial experience. He says that criminality causes addiction far more often than addiction causes criminality. Romancing Opiates will make you wonder if the most obvious facts about addiction have been overlooked because of myths that suit the interests both of the addicts and the addiction bureaucracy that serves them.

The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most important general medical journals in the world. Doctors rely on the conclusions it publishes, and most do not have the time to look beyond abstracts to examine methodology or question assumptions. Many of its pronouncements are conveyed by the media to a mass audience, which is likely to take them as authoritative. But is this trust entirely warranted? Theodore Dalrymple, a doctor retired from practice, turned a critical eye upon a full year of the Journal , alert to dubious premises and to what is left unsaid. In False Positive , he demonstrates that many of the papers it publishes reach conclusions that are not only flawed, but obviously flawed. He exposes errors of reasoning and conspicuous omissions apparently undetected by the editors. In some cases, there is reason to suspect actual corruption. When the Journal takes on social questions, its perspective is solidly politically correct. Practically no debate on social issues appears in the printed version, and highly debatable points of view go unchallenged. The Journal reads as if there were only one possible point of view, though the American medical profession (to say nothing of the extensive foreign readership) cannot possibly be in total agreement with the stances taken in its pages. It is thus more megaphone than sounding board. There is indeed much in the New England Journal of Medicine that deserves praise and admiration. But this book should encourage the general reader to take a constructively critical view of medical news and to be wary of the latest medical doctrines.