Medical science aiding people with excuses

Though I most definitely don't have any interest in returning to the United Kingdom for anything other than business, given that the United Kingdom is a planned future market for my magazine, I find it expedient to keep abreast of current affairs, hence why I often find myself reading BBC News Online.

Another reason why it is expedient for me to read up on current affairs in the United Kingdom is the fact that sometimes, it gives stylish and sophisticated Frenchwomen such as myself excuses to feel good about ourselves and look down on less stylish and sophisticated British women.

I just came across one such excuse at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24402163 .  This article talks about how lots of people are wrongly labelled as having food addiction when in reality, they are just greedy and gluttonous.

I can't stand the way people in the Anglo-Saxon world constantly try to attach medical explanations to everything to justify human shortcomings.  In the USA, yuppies have enjoyed wasting psychiatrists' time when they knew perfectly well there was nothing wrong with them.  This nonsense has been around for a very long time.  I recall George Webber (the protagonist of the film "10", played by Dudley Moore) visiting a psychiatrist for frivolous reasons: - this film was released in 1979!

Examples abound everywhere.

Dyslexia is middle-class for thick: - middle-class Anglo-Saxon parents don't want to admit their children are actually thick as two short planks, so they get quacks to diagnose them with dyslexia.

Autism is also middle-class for badly-behaved.  Michael Savage, one of the few Americans with any common sense at all, was noted for saying, "Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know what autism is? I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, "Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot.""  The Anglo-Saxon medical establishment, rather than admitting that it over-diagnoses people with autism spectrum conditions turned on him and persecuted him.  On the other hand, whilst the Anglo-Saxon world remains in ignorance, French people know all about how to raise children properly: - a lady named Catherine Crawford from Brooklyn, New York finally admitted that we French know best when it comes to raising children in her book "Why French children don't talk back" (a parody of Mireille Guiliano's "French women don't get fat").  However, she is a very rare breed.  Most of the time, rather than admit that we French know best about everything, the Anglo-Saxon world chooses to slag us off, e.g. this article about France's supposed autism treatment shame at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17583123 .  There is also a documentary in post-production called "Shameful" produced mainly by Alex Plank, an American autism advocate and film-maker, which attacks France's supposed poor record when it comes to autism treatment.

The truth is that we French, in our effortless perfection, recognise that sometimes, medical explanations are attached to human shortcomings to try unsuccessfully to justify them.

This is not to say that there aren't people out there with genuine binge-eating disorders, dyslexia, autism etc.  In fact, another reason I dislike all these phoney medical diagnoses is the likelihood that this will lead to the few people who do genuinely have binge-eating disorders, dyslexia, autism etc not being taken seriously, given that for every one person given a correct diagnosis, the medical profession probably gives 50,000 wrong diagnoses.  If the medical profession is not willing to stop phoney diagnoses on the basis that they are just excuses, it should stop phoney diagnoses on the basis that they make a mockery of people who really have the conditions.

Anyway, rant aside, because according to Zoë Williams, French women don't rant like this: - instead, we just light up another fag and say, "bof".  MDR!

Anyway, back to the main point.  Why won't people in the Anglo-Saxon world just realise how effortlessly perfect we French are and slavishly replicate our wonderful example?  We don't pig out on food and then blame it on phoney psychiatric illnesses.  No, what we do is we take responsibility: - we only eat the daintiest quantities of food of the highest quality, use the stairs rather than the lift, walk rather than take the car (though I have to admit I use the TGV for Paris-Marseille journeys, given that the distance is almost 750km, MDR) etc.

If one is overweight and does not feel "bien dans sa peau", one can do no better than refraining from seeing a psychiatrist and looking to the effortless perfection that we French display.