It has been playing on my mind, a sentence uttered on Wednesday by the Hip Surgeon. He’s a good man - indeed the Hip team and the Neuro-urology team have been faultless in doing their jobs, having treated me with respect and undertaken the necessary investigations in a timely manner.

If you’ve been around these parts a while you may have read of the “Pattern of Stupidity” Theory. In brief this asserts that there is probably not a great conspiracy afoot in our world but a remarkable Pattern of Stupidity, a result of the same mindset ruling all areas of our life. With its consistent ignorance of truth appearing in all the same places, this mindset creates events and attitudes that are convincing of a conspiracy which does not exist. Indeed it asserts that this ignorance makes conspiracy, if not impossible, very unlikely to succeed.

“Mr Jee you have a problem”, said the hip surgeon, “we are trained as doctors to look for things that are in the textbooks, then do something about them”. He continued “you are not in the textbooks so we have no idea what to do”. I guess that is why the nasty and manipulative “Rehabilitation Consultant” - against whom I have issued a complaint with the General Medical Council - decided it must be principally in my behaviour that the problem lay. I was under the impression that doctors used their skills to investigate problems, establish what was wrong, and then see if something could be done. In this it seems I was fundamentally mistaken.

But hold on a minute - there were no textbooks one thousand years ago (excluding ancient texts not used by western medicine) and many of the techniques in use today were undreamt of only one hundred years ago. The “if it doesn’t appear in the books it must be in your mind” attitude I have been bullied an manipulated with would, if universally applied, have precluded medicine making any progress whatsoever.

Clearly there must be some doctors out there who are actually intelligent, open, interested and honest. Those must be the people moving medicine forward.

I think I am starting to understand the problem with rest of these people. You have to be in the top 1% of measured “intelligence” to enter med school: how incredibly dull it must be to be one of these people and to be stuck doing the medical equivalent of making Victoria sponge cakes only from Delia’s recipe. No room for manoeuvre, no chance to add a cherry here or a slug of brandy there, no room to experiment, progress, move forward. No wonder their minds become so ossified and stuck, no wonder some become nasty and manipulative.

Cooking in Britain has undergone a revolution of new ideas and talent over the past twenty five years. If only our great medical men and women could learn these lessons. An old boss of mine once said ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’. It seems you can in medicine, all you have to do is plead ignorance and let time take it’s toll: the eggs will break themselves eventually.