Libby Purves has had an interesting thought on health care:

The Human Race has a long history of worrying about the wrong thing, then looking back decades later in disbelief at the way it missed the point. There was a time when religious parents fretted so much about encouraging base animal nature that they would not let their babies crawl like beasts, but strapped them in upright walkers for decency’s sake; yet all the time the same poor brats were being poisoned by laudanum and stifled by corsets. Victorian England worried more about sin than gin. Early-20th-century consumers, while providing a vast market for useless “nerve foods”, calmly accepted advertisements which claimed that “Most doctors smoke Craven A” and declared tobacco a health benefit.

So an open mind should ask the question: which danger to health and society do we ignore now? We do not go short of scares, from mobile phones to trans-fats. But what are we missing?

I’m not sure I agree with her conclusion that television is the missing idea, but it’s certainly worthy of consideration: What are we missing?