Gerald Warner: Prejudice must not poison the testing of doctors

'IT'S my nerves, doctor." How many long- suffering physicians, in our pathologically hypochondriac society, have to listen impassively to such vapourings before scribbling appeasingly on the prescription pad that is their passport to tranquillity?

By the same token, how many ill people have to submit to untrammelled white-coated arrogance before securing minimal, and possibly inadequate, treatment for their condition?

Experiences differ wildly on opposite sides of the doctor/patient divide. The doctor may not believe the patient is ill; the patient may not believe the doctor is competent. The former is too specific a case for wider society to form an opinion; the latter is a question that needs to be resolved by objective assessment. Hence the new report from Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer for England and Wales, entitled 'Medical Revalidation: Principle and Next Steps'. The report proposes, for the first time, a system of regular reappraisal of the competence of all doctors.

There would be two separate strands to the revalidation scheme. The first would be relicensing for every doctor, based on a more rigorous version of the annual appraisal to which most of them are already subject. The second, applicable to the more senior members of the profession, would be recertification, carried out every five years and possibly including a computer simulation model. Although Donaldson's jurisdiction only runs south of the Border, the scheme would be introduced by the Scottish Government.

There is little objection to this innovation within the medical profession: airline pilots undergo as many as 100 assessments in the course of their careers, so why should similar rigour not be applied to those whose decisions are often of life-and-death significance? Common sense dictates it is essential, in an era of unprecedented and fast-moving innovation in medical science, to run regular checks on the professional skills of those who hold many lives in their hands.

Yet there are serious concerns implicit to the Donaldson proposals. We live in a time when every area of life is politicised to an unprecedented degree, and medicine is one of the battlegrounds. Is it not likely that the relicensing process could become the occasion, every year, of putting pressure on doctors to conform to the politically correct ethics that, with strong impetus from the Government, are insidiously usurping the Hippocratic code?

Further pressure, for example, could be brought to bear on doctors who conscientiously oppose abortion. Their career prospects in obstetrics and gynaecology are already compromised. Despite the conscience rights incorporated in the 1967 Abortion Act, it would be possible to require consultant appointees to perform abortions by the ploy of specifying it in the job description and notifying the health authorities. Preliminary moves against conscience rights were only defeated by the narrowest possible margin at this month's meeting of the British Medical Association.

There is also a shift within the policy-prescribing, opinion-forming elite of the medical profession towards euthanasia and assisted suicide. Last week the General Medical Council "punished" a Glasgow GP who supplied a suicidal patient with sleeping pills by suspending him from practice for six months. What message does that send to the assisted suicide brigade?

Doctors are even being conscripted into the bogus "man-made" global warming hysteria. An article in the current issue of the British Medical Journal suggests GPs should try to persuade parents to have no more than two children, as a contribution to fighting climate change. Already the global warming lunatics have put millions of lives at risk in Africa by inflating food prices through promotion of biofuels. Doctors should be physicians, not missionaries for "progressive" dogma.

If a doctor has to fight for his professional life every 12 months, it would be naive to imagine that political influences will never be brought to bear. It is essential that any relicensing and recertification procedures be absolutely transparent and rigorously confined to objective assessment of professional ability.

In the present climate, when a politically correct, viciously anti-Christian orthodoxy has seized all the commanding heights in public life, the professions and the media, it is crucial that the further progress of this hydra be obstructed. The next decade will see trench warfare conducted by Christians and compassionate humanists against the state-sponsored culture of death. It is vital that no weapon should inadvertently be handed to the forces of darkness.