For anyone of my generation, the twin colossi of doom that governments used to keep the population terrified and, therefore, subdued, were Aids and the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
Back in the 1980s, we were all warned that if we left the house without wearing a condom, the next day there would be a grainy snap of us on the front page of the Daily Star, dying in an isolation ward of a former military hospital on St Kilda, taken from the mainland by a paparazzo using a telephoto lens that made the Hubble space telescope look like the bottom end of a milk bottle.
And if Aids didn’t get us, then it would be a Soviet SS20 intermediate range ballistic missile that would take us out, without warning, when we were trying to watch Noel Edmond’s Saturday Roadshow.
The collapse of communism and the development of antiretroviral drugs forced the deep-state, population control bods back to the drawing board and, since then, they have struggled to come up with the kind of scare tactic likely to lead to a run on brown trousers at C&A.
Islamist terrorism doesn’t really cut it when you’re trying to send an entire nation under the bed covers. Granted, the sort of wheezes carried out by Johnny Jihad are no picnic, but the odds of anyone being affected personally are too high to cause widespread panic.
For a spell we thought Putin might be the answer to our nightmares. He ticked all the right boxes – mad, bad and dangerously camp – for us to imagine him holed up inside a volcano somewhere, with his chubby stump finger hovering over a red button marked “global immolation”.
But the re-election of Trump has made us realise that we’re more likely to end up dead – or at least, seriously unhappy – as a result of some madcap scheme-gone-wrong, dreamt-up by the giant orange puffball with cankles, who’s in charge of the country that’s supposed to be our closest ally.
When the cupboard marked “Project Fear” is empty, we usually revert to Old Faithful, something that has always served us well in times of crises – cancer.
When even the threat of a spat between Israel and Iran escalating into World War III – something we used to regard as a sort of apocalypse banker – can hardly raise a palpitation because the Donald’s new nickname is TACO (Trump always chickens out), the government knows it can do no worse that turn to the Big C.
Its masterstroke has been to develop something called the ‘doctor in your pocket’. This is a smartphone app that, the official blurb says, will replace a significant portion of outpatient appointments by offering automated health information, AI-driven advice, specialist consultations, and patient-initiated follow-ups.
Publicly, officials claim the app could reduce outpatient visits by two-thirds, potentially saving the NHS in England and Wales £14 billion annually. Using artificial intelligence, the app will provide instant responses to medical queries and guide users to the most appropriate care. If the AI chatbot fails to address a patient’s concerns, they can submit questions for specialists to review.
It will give patients full access to their medical records and test results, along with the ability to book vaccinations and self-refer for services such as therapy, physiotherapy, podiatry, and audiology.
The Scottish Government has plans for a similar platform but, as usual, it is three years behind everyone else.
Now if, like me, you live in the real world, you know already that the sole purpose of this device will be to allow millions of people to ask it, rather than a hard-pressed GP, if they have cancer.
As sure as eggs is eggs, a freedom of information request published this time next year will reveal that the top three queries recorded by the ‘doctor in your pocket’ are:
‘Doctor, I have a lump on my arm. Is it cancer?’
‘Doctor, I have a sore throat. Is it cancer?’
“Doctor, I drank 16 pints of cider last night and woke-up in a hedge with my underpants soaked with watery stool. Could I have cancer.”
If you interpret any item of official information as cynically as I do, you will know that the true purpose of this digital white elephant is to scare the living bejesus out of us all by pandering to our hypochondria.
There is one particular group of people for whom it may well have been created. We all know them; the self-diagnosers and self-medicators who think a few minutes of online browsing is more than adequate substitute for seven years of medical training, and who will bore you for hours at a time about non-existent symptoms for illnesses they don’t have. We even have a name for them: Dr. Google.
I don’t need the government to tell me I’m going to die from global warming, obesity or from an asteroid that’s on a collision course with the earth in 2525 and I’d far rather have ants in my pants than a doctor in my pocket, if it’s all the same to you.
