Widening obesity crisis
How much influence does the fast food industry and its farm-gate base have on the politics of today (The chicken shop mile and how Britain got bigger, 19 February)? Australia, too, has an obesity problem. It relates directly to the introduction of fast food joints in the 1970s. Every strategic suburban point has been gobbled by these conglomerates. Tasty: sure, but the brisk walkers of old are replaced by slow-moving wobblers. I’m watching this ungainly parade from a hospital foyer. Visitors and patients with laden torsos shuffle by. Obese patients are wheeled out of theatres with bandaged stubs for legs. Tragic: the end game of type 2 diabetes. Sadly, the weight gain extends to the staff.
Here in Australia, health authorities warn that obesity and its related conditions will break the country’s free health system. We need, they say, a multifaceted approach including a junk food tax. Sadly the industry lobbyists have been at work, subverting the obvious. Our politicians’ response? Horrors: “We can’t have a nanny state.” Would they rather a broken state?
Warren Tindall
Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia
Care for the dying
Improvement in NHS care for the dying (12 February) is often highjacked by a denial that a patient is dying. The “formidable challenges [of] when and how to let people die when it is clear they are not going to recover” is a very alarming statement. This suggests that the patient is not at the centre of their care, but is being misunderstood and therefore mismanaged.
As a nurse of 40 years’ experience with a keen interest in care for the dying, I think professional confidence is often lacking in this area. The situation is not helped by the cultural reserve about dying and death (in England) and the belief that medical technology can somehow “save” people. The recommendations described in the article will help to create a more robust and supportive environment for patients when they die in hospital, and the confidence to accept that a patient is approaching death.
Erin Kohler-Ockmore
Buckfastleigh, Devon, UK
Will tourism take flight?
So the left hand of the United Nations, which organised the Climate Change conference in Paris where many of its members signed up to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, does not know what its right hand, the UN World Tourism Organisation, is up to (Terrorists must not be allowed to destroy travel as a celebration of life, says UN tourism head, 5 February).
In which world is tourism carbon-free? Nearly all of it involves flying, which has one of the highest carbon impacts of almost anything on the planet. The aviation industry has been very successful in keeping this understanding out of our heads.
It will be an enormous challenge for countries that rely on tourism to continue lifting their people out of poverty when we all stop flying there. In my own neck of the woods, the Pacific Islands particularly face this problem. I had huge sympathy for Fiji when their prime minister set out the threat of climate change to the Pacific Islands but he did not mention that stopping tourist flights is essential, or how his economy will deal with that. The UN is not alone in its failure to join the dots.
I feel hypocritical for urging a halt to all leisure and most business flying, as I have done a fair bit of it in my time. But I have stopped. I will not be boarding a plane ever again.
Jean Wignall
Auckland, New Zealand
Mind and body willing
Oliver Burkeman’s article, Therapy wars: the revenge of Freud (29 January) certainly draws attention to the ever changing fads and fashions in psychotherapy. But, in my opinion, there is one reason why all future variations will continue to fail the ultimate empirical test. At the midpoint in my lengthy career as a therapist, I came to the conclusion that the most influential figure in the field was actually René Descartes. His misguided little cliche, “I think, therefore I am” has led us to believe that the relationship between mind and body is unidirectional. This proposition assumes that our embodied feelings, emotions and memories can be conveniently manipulated by cognitive intervention.
I am convinced that the underlying “truth” of our experience is not mental but somatic and any form of psychotherapy that regards the body as a gullible repository is no more than what American psychologist Albert Ellis called “horseshit”.
Perhaps the time has come for us to move beyond Cartesian dualism by modifying his tenet to read: “I think, therefore I am stuck in my head.”
Gerry Fewster
Duncan, British Columbia, Canada
• In documenting the comeback of psychoanalysis after being eclipsed by cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), Oliver Burkeman misses the point for me. Much more common than either of these approaches is counselling, a word which does not appear in the entire article.
In the last column Burkeman writes: “What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist and a patient committed to change.” Counsellors have clients not patients, a term implying more agency. They do not need years of training in psychology. Rather they need training in compassion. Competent counsellors demonstrate acceptance of their clients and their experience as they are, empowering the clients to accept themselves as they are and accept their past experience.
As I see it, if CBT is losing credibility as a panacea this does not imply the return of psychoanalysis. Modern therapists use a wide range of models and skills to understand and help their clients. Burkeman has created a false dichotomy here which he then labours to justify.
Edward Butterworth
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Briefly
• How long do those proposing a nuclear storage and disposal facility in South Australia (19 February) think it will remain viable, with western civilisation intact and people there to manage it? The dumped radioactive waste would be a danger to life for “many hundreds of thousands of years”. The Egyptians, Greeks, Mayans, Romans and other ancient civilisations didn’t bury and forget toxic stuff likely to kill generations of those who followed. Or maybe they did and we just haven’t stumbled across any yet?
Lawrie Bradly
Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
• The social disruption and human suffering in Colombia (12 February) arising out of the trafficking of drugs and associated criminality is well known as we read about it in the news media. The country can do with all the help it can get from outside its borders, including the magnanimous “aid” in the form of billions of dollars from the US, to help with overcoming the problem. We also are informed that it is the citizens of the US who consume most of the cocaine that Colombia produces. What comes around, goes around.
Bruce Martin
Point Lookout, Queensland, Australia
• While I applaud the new French law forcing supermarkets to donate surplus food instead of spoiling it (12 February), surely the statistics quoted in the last paragraph speak for themselves. The French government’s energies should be channelled into heightening the awareness of consumers; after all, it is they who are wasting two-thirds of the 7.1m tonnes.
Patsy Pouvelle
Reims, France
• Short memories? Larry Elliott’s article Fourth Industrial Revolution brings promise and peril for humanity (29 January) takes me back to the birth of the Third Revolution when in the early 1970s the bright and shiny computer industry promised to change our lives with the end of drudgery and a gift of 20% extra leisure time. There followed newspaper articles worrying what we would get up to. I now look at my children’s generation working double the hours, missing a meaningful family life and still struggling with a mortgage. Some promise!
Antony Harvey
Braidwood, NSW, Australia
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