Just because it looks right...

On the Today programme this morning Alistair Darling confidently said that the Lehman Brothers bank collapse in the States last year caused the financial crisis over there.

Well 'no', Darling. If I heard you correctly as my bathwater gurgled down the drain then this was not the cause of it. It was partly a result of it - and it happened it around the same time as things started to get really bad globally.

Similarly, most of my pharmaceutical clients keep on pouring money into various corporate websites and expensive sales rep materials - insiting that you need these if you're to have a successful drug.

Well, and I think there are a few people beginning to wake up to this now: NO. You just keep commissioning these marketing materials - and your drug sometimes does well. But one is not the cause of the other.

It's correlation at best.

You speak of ROI, Mr Client, but pretty much none of you has an idea of how to measure this. You really mean: 'does that sound a lot based on what we reckon we'll make from the drug'.

It's not even worthy of the term 'cost effective' because you don't have any end-to-end metrics in place to work out whether it was that cost that brought about the desired effect.

However, if my clients change their tune tomorrow I'd love to think that this blog post caused it.

How are you?

£1m per hour, or 10% of annual spend, is what the NHS is paying to treat diabetes and its complications, according to a BBC News article out yesterday.

Yikes that's a lot of cash. That's £24m per day. Or £8.8bn per year.

And that's just 10% of it.

So multiply it by 10 and the NHS budget is actually £88bn per year on this basis.

Although HM Treasury says that this figure is closer to £111bn.

UK GDP - a pretty good measure of how much money our economy generates each year - is estimated at just £1.4 trillion. Drilling down a bit further, total Government revenue in 2007/08 was 39.2% of this - or £548bn.

So the Government is currently paying out over 20% of ALL the money it receives from companies and individuals - many times over if you look at the combinations of direct and indirect taxes that we all end up paying on the goods and services we ultimately receive.

That's got to be more than defence. Oh yes, so it is. Over 3 times as much. Only 'Social Protection' is higher at £169bn. That's for old age pensions, unemployment and so on.

So illness, old age and unemployment make up nearly half of our taxes.

Or to put it another way, nearly half of what I pay to the government goes on looking after my health and making sure I'm able to work for as long as possible. And I'll only really be able to work as long as possible if I'm healthy - which I'll do my best to do, especially given how low the pension payments to individuals are.

So: looking after our health really is the single most important thing we can do.

No wonder most conversations start with 'how are you?'.

All change

OK. Got fed up with trying to fit ideas into a medical context, so generic observations are back.

Same rules, but more pictures.

Anyway, some recent thoughts...

I met a lovely Jewish chap in the Bell and Crown the other day who brightened up my day no end. 

I refer to his religious status up front because he wears a kippa and so this, visually at least, defines him. 

In the twenty or so minutes during which we spoke we covered the following topics: the buildings in Strand on the Green, and why there are so many 1950s houses in the middle of Victorian terraces; Fleming and the fortuitous discovery of penicillin; life on Welsh peninsulas, and German wire-haired pointers. 

Everything he noticed sparked another story, and everything became richer and more nuanced for its discussion.

He was perhaps the most intelligent and gentle fellow I've chanced upon in years. And I'll be honest with you: with all the recent hoo-ha in Israel I've not had a lot of time for Jewish sentiment of late. Extreme, I know, but there's been rather too much self-assertion of a bad type going on there. 

But this chap was how I'd imagine Rabbi Lionel Blue to be if he were to be plucked out of the radio and stuck in a pub. To my mind, the best of Jewishness (or probably anyone-ness): kind, intelligent, funny and interesting. 

Which made me sad that their Israeli brethren are giving them such a bad rap at the moment. 

Praise v. complaints

This ad prompted 458 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. Because of that, together with the legal technicality that the promotion of a prescription drug via the 'backdoor' of an application device is illegal, meant that the ads had to come down.

But I don't mind the ad. I don't find it offensive. And neither does Tony from Creative Services.

So we wondered if it would be possible to set up a rival to the ASA, or suggest to the ASA themselves that if more people wrote in in praise of an ad than wrote in to complain, then maybe the ad could stand.

Why should a few prudes from Tunbridge Wells dictate whether or not the rest of us can see something potentially useful?

Your thoughts, please...

Beyond compare

You just can't compare some things. Apples with oranges with example - well not in a meaningful way anyway. But we seem obsessed with putting everything in some kind of relative order.

Perhaps because it helps us navigate this ever more complex world - the world in which Sainsbury's now puts traffic lights on food to alert the thickies to the previously unknown dangers of doughnuts.

The wireless (seems suitable to use these sort of words when having a green-ink tinged rant) was blasting out news this morning that the Government is considering reclassifying Ecstasy as a 'safer' drug than cocaine and heroine.

Class B rather than A, and therefore one league 'above' cannabis, which used to enjoy class B privileges before it was downgraded to C. Although it might pop up again soon.

I can see why drugs need to be classified for legal purposes (assuming they should remain illegal, that is), but what this over-simplification of drugs does is actually rather dangerous.

ALL drugs have side-effects, legal or otherwise. Some are mild, some severe; some mental, some physical; some temporary (we bravely say, without that long a study having been done on longer term effects), and some permanent.

Ecstasy heats your body up as it encourages increased electrical activity in the brain; coke does likewise as it causes your heart to beat faster - but the way it does this is subtley different. Cannabis acts in a totally different way, but its longer term mental effects may be even 'worse'.

What do I mean by worse? I'm not sure. Perhaps I'd rather have a fucked heart than a fucked head. I really don't know. But I do know that it's not as simple as A v. B v. C.

It's too simple, and sometimes we need to avoid making things simple that shoudn't be.