Make some noise about going deaf | Katharine Whitehorn

There’s no denying we all suffer in some way at some time and, except in the sense of choosing certain lifestyles, we are rarely able to choose our own ailments. Some of them we inherit, some we bring on ourselves because they go with a certain job or place.

But even if we could choose our ailments, we would not necessarily choose them appropriately.

Ask someone if they would prefer to lose their sight or their hearing and the chances are they would choose hearing, because it’s so easy to envisage the awfulness of blindness – being unable to read or see beautiful things, or horrid things you can bump into. You only have you put your hand over your eyes to feel helpless.

Having noise stop, on the other hand, is often very welcome. Even people who have lived near the deaf often have no idea how it cuts one off; what it’s like when even ordinary conversation isn’t possible.

My mother, who was totally deaf but good at lip-reading, was once when she was a widow taken out to dinner by one of my father’s ex-pupils. She looked forward to it very much, but the next day she said: “It was so disappointing. The restaurant was very dark, only candles and I couldn’t read a thing he said.”

This well-meaning, highly educated man simply didn’t realise he was making conversation impossible. Ears may not always be less precious than eyes, but all too often you need both, and I suppose it’s no pity that we can’t choose anyway.

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Make some noise about going deaf | Katharine Whitehorn

If NHS data goes on-line, what will occur to the outdated and the bad who cannot entry technological innovation? | Katharine Whitehorn

Katharine Whitehorn: ‘Jeremy Hunt (pictured) trotted out figures, such as that 70% of us buy our air tickets on-line.’ Photograph: Neil Hall/PA

Well being secretary Jeremy Hunt need to have considered he was saying something cheerful when he explained that the NHS ought to learn from banks and airlines, and use engineering to make our care far more personalized. He trotted out figures, such as that a single in five Christmas presents was purchased online and that 70% of us acquire our air tickets on-line.

Definitely individuals who have income in banking institutions, fly away on vacation and have a pc or its equivalent can do all these things. But has not he observed that a wonderful percentage of individuals who are unwell are previous, and many of them poor? They may not even personal a mobile telephone or be fortunate adequate to have someone younger who can cope with such items on their behalf.

Of program there are some who are techies by nature, other folks who have laptop-wise carers here and there some groups are trying to assist pensioners with the web with all the selfless work that used to go into educating the heathen to read. I realize that even now GPs are usually getting to element in the time it will take to pay attention to, and then proper what their younger sufferers have learned on the net.

But probably there is a great motive hidden in all this: a hope of tackling youth unemployment by hiring them as technical interpreters, to bridge the gulf among the old and sick and the machines with out which, apparently, they could not be cured.

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If NHS data goes on-line, what will occur to the outdated and the bad who cannot entry technological innovation? | Katharine Whitehorn

What men can do to stop female genital mutilation | Katharine Whitehorn

The cruellest minimize: a child woman lies on a bed as medical professionals put together to complete her circumcision. Photograph: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Pictures

So we have at last some significant public concern about that horror which we now rightly call FGM – female genital mutilation. As well usually it has gone below the name of “female circumcision”, which helps make it sound as innocuous as what’s completed to infant boys, but its actual purpose has been stated as “the control of women’s libido”.

The only even slightly consoling factor I have ever read on the subject was an item in this magazine about the issues which can, in very good circumstances, go some way in the direction of repairing the outrageous harm, although how efficacious this restoration can be is not specified.

But how can it be stopped? It genuinely must not be regarded as a women’s issue only, though the bizarre factor of it is that it is other women, “cutters”, who in fact do the deed. Perhaps the males have to be brought into the argument to get the entire notion abandoned. (Here is 1 radical suggestion, not necessarily mine: that for each little one girl who suffers FGM, the law need to demand the castration of a senior member of the loved ones concerned. I realise that this is not quite most likely to obtain public approval).

It may possibly be, paradoxically, that only by involving men’s desires can it be stopped only if it is noticed to make a woman significantly less attractive to possible husbands will the mothers, ever anxious to marry off their daughters, refuse to let it take place. So males – above to you.

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What men can do to stop female genital mutilation | Katharine Whitehorn