SNAKE OIL and other preoccupations

by John Diamond (Vintage, 2001)

John Diamond’s weekly column for The Times was for many years light-hearted and confessional about his life in a fictionalised sort of way. His best pieces are anthologised here, alongside Snake Oil, an unfinished book about complementary medicine.

When he was diagnosed with throat cancer in April 1997, he made the decision to turn his “jaunty column” into something more profound. In the process he became, as he said himself, something of a minor celebrity, “the bloke who wrote that column about his neck in The Times”. The BBC made a television documentary, and he published a book, C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, which is now being used as a textbook in some medical schools to educate young doctors about the patient’s point of view.

The columns spanning the years of his relationship to the cancer, the disability, the medical process, the life and the people he treasured, are inevitably the most compelling to read. What does it mean to lose your voice? It means the loss of the ability to be “a fatherly story-teller, husbandly joke-maker, chatterer to friends, scorner of enemies”. And what important lesson do doctors dealing with terminally ill patients need to learn? “…how to bridge that two-second gap between opening the door of the room in which your terrified patient is waiting with his wife and speaking the first words. What do you do? Downcast eyes? Affected jollity? Thin, sympathetic smile? Pretend to be flicking through your notes as if they might have changed since you last looked at them? Maintain a chatty conversation with the accompanying nurse then turn to the patient – rather as those afternoon television hosts pretend to be engrossed in conversation until they notice the camera is on them?” No, dispense with the pleasantries, look the patient in the eye and tell them the truth about their results straightaway.

Diamond’s passion for truth-telling led him to write Snake Oil, a book in which he intended to take “an uncomplimentary look at complementary medicine”. In his pre-cancerous days he had investigated the claims of many alternative therapies in his capacity as a consumer journalist with The Sunday Times Magazine. And in his pre-cancerous days also, when going through “one of the routine bouts of vague and minor mental and physical distress which strike most men as they slip out of young manhood and into that age where life’s possibilities seem suddenly more limited”, he had tried alternative medicine himself. He was annoyed when his GP “looked at the blood tests and the ECG results and the hospital reports and couldn’t find evidence of the specific illness I knew must be lurking there.” He describes his visits to a clinical ecologist (read the book to find out what that means!) who was also a qualified pharmacist, and was tempted to believe he might have an allergy or candida infection. But, as he eventually concluded himself, it was a lifestyle and personality problem. He needed to slow down, eat more sensibly, sleep more regularly, be less ambitious.

Diamond makes no stout defence of the NHS. After all, modern science stumbles into the same pitfall of ‘medicalising’ life problems. Human unhappiness is now called depression – something we expect our GP to have a remedy for.

When alternative medicine is truly complementary and its therapies are used alongside orthodox medicine as palliatives, he recognises they bring healing to the mind and emotions. He himself used aromatherapy to cope with the effects of chemotherapy.

It was the deceptive and dangerous claims of cures for cancer, diabetes or heart disease that abound on the internet, which caused him concern. And also the uncritical acceptance and promotion of complementary medicine in the popular press. We seem to lap it all up unthinkingly.

Plenty has been written about the problems in the healthcare system, but of the top 50 best-selling books on alternative medicines on the market today, Diamond found only one that had anything remotely critical to say. So he thought “Let’s see if I can do something to correct that imbalance. After all, correcting imbalances is something that alternative medicine is usually all in favour of.”

He managed to write six chapters of Snake Oil before his death on 2 March 2001. His brother-in-law Dominic Lawson who compiled and edited this book, writes that “John’s study on the day after his death presented an almost unbearably poignant sight: his computer screen still switched on, and there, flickering, as with an extinguished intelligence, the last completed words of his book before he was rushed to hospital: ‘Let me explain.’ For once, he never did.”

John Diamond’s intelligence and subtlety of thought shine on through the pages of Snake Oil. I like, best of all, his ability to argue against himself.


"Snake Oil and other preoccupations" on Amazon.co.uk »