[books 2012] Last two!

[inulro]

72. The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason

Another Icelandic detective story from the same series as Jar City.

A real page-turner, but my all the characters are miserable! Erlendur's relationships with his children make Wallander and Linda look like father and daughter of the year.

There's two strands to this - the present-day mystery, where a skeleton is found in a lake bed tied to 1960s Soviet radio spying equipment; and the murderer's recollections of being a young Icelandic socialist at university in Leipzig in the 1950s and becoming disillusioned with the East German state. The latter is more interesting than the main mystery.

Entertaining enough, but not at all substantial.

73. Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients by Ben Goldacre

Not as entertaining as Bad Science, probably because it's all on one topic.

Not a lot of it was news to me as someone who has read New Scientist every week for more than a decade.

However, the parts about drug reps in hospitals did make me think. When you come to work in the NHS, it's just presented as part of the landscape. Goldacre makes the (valid) observation that doctors can afford to pay for their own sandwiches, and is dismissive about administrators letting reps in after they've been bribed. In that administrator's defence, we're so badly paid that a free lunch is a huge deal, and some NHS trusts abuse the fact that drug companies hand out stationery and refuse to supply basic equipment that you can't run an office without (Post-it notes. really) and the only way we can keep the place running (do you want to tell a Alpha-male consultant s/he can't have post-it notes or a telephone memo pad? Trust me, the answer is no) is perpetuating the cycle of taking stuff from reps.

Interestingly, my first ever NHS consultant back in 1990-2 had already adopted the Goldacre attitude of not having anything to do with reps. I had the conversation with him that I got where he was coming from, and while I couldn't so much afford to have such principles myself, if he had any issues then I wouldn't take stuff from them. He didn't expect me to share his principles though, so free lunches it was.

Comments

[silentq.livejournal.com]

They've really been cracking down on conflict of interest stuff at my hospital due to new regulations - no gifts/bribes of any kind are allowed, and any compensation you get from an outside company has to be reported within 30 days.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

That's going to be universal in the not too distant future, I think. For all I know it is here too now, I've been out of the health care game for over a year.