“the government’s health policy is really a programme of social control packaged as health promotion.”
“In the preface to this remarkable book, Michael Fitzpatrick describes breaking into the house of an elderly couple during a bitterly cold February. The couple had succumbed to a combination of infection and hypothermia. While waiting for the ambulance, Fitzpatrick, a general practitioner working in London, found an untouched leaflet describing the dangers of anonymous sex and the virtues of condoms. This leaflet had been distributed to 23 million homes in the United Kingdom, about half of which contained either an elderly couple or an old person living alone. At this moment Fitzpatrick reflected on the absurdity of the “everyone is at risk” campaign and the motives of a government that did little to prevent elderly people from freezing to death and yet enthusiastically supported “healthy living.”
The conclusion that Fitzpatrick reaches will surprise and enrage both those who agree and those who disagree with his view. The author is nothing if not blunt, stating “the government’s health policy is really a programme of social control packaged as health promotion.” In an era when social institutions are increasingly discredited, irrelevant, or ignored, the government has seized on personal health as a means of reconnecting with society and regulating and supervising people’s lives.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119546/
“This is an heretical book. The sacred cows of health promotion are dispatched with greater zeal than that with which the British beef herd was slaughtered at the height of the BSE crises. Breast and cervical screening, smoking cessation, ‘safe’ sex, ‘healthy’ eating, ‘sensible’ drinking, exercise on prescription, men’s health, and health inequalities policies are all put to the sword, not just because the evidence on which they are based is slender (in many instances non-existent), but because they entail recasting the role of the general practitioner as quasi-priest or moral policeman, responsible for disciplining healthy patients, rather than concentrating on the needs of the ill.”
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/3/634/736954?login=false
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