Radio Ga-Ga

Medicine surrounds us. Like a second atmosphere it's every. where, permeating into everything. Go to work, it's medicine. Come home and read the paper, there's medicine on the front page. Open a magazine, there's illness everywhere. Turn on the television, and a thousand fly on the wall docu-soaps scream out at you. Sleep medicine, breathe medicine, eat medicine. We're a nation truly obsessed, unable to live for the present, and running frantically from the inevitable. So perhaps it's not so surprising that even the most innocuous of things have been caught up in our tangled medical lives. I just never realised until recently how bad the situation had become.

Two weeks ago, cruising south on the M6 motorway, surrounded by a thousand irate drivers and the hiss of a thousand stomach ulcers, I suddenly noticed the number plate ahead of me, and the three letter code TIA. Suspicious, I looked around. To my left and clearly visible were the letters MRI. To my right, ECG. Aghast I realised that yet another bastion of day to day life had fallen prey to the ever more aggressive advances of medicalisation.

It was then that I flicked the radio on to calm my nerves. But as the sounds seeped from my tinny speakers, what should permeate the noise of my broken exhaust but the very song I was dreading: "It's My Life" by Dr Alban. It was then that I knew that medicine had reached my radio. I had long suspected that those radio jocks were up to something. It had to be more than a coincidence that songs from Black Grape were the only ones audible that day in the haemorrhoid clinic. And I'll never forget the morning in radiology when "Pump Up The Jam" came on just as the barium enema nurse walked into the room. But at the time I thought nothing of it. I didn't bat an eyelid when the consultant psychiatrist whipped out his old Madness tape, nor when the anaesthetists started singing a medley of "Every Breath You Take" and "Take My Breath Away" in the middle of intensive care. Not even my visit to biochemistry when the Chemical Brothers were all I could hear made me think anything peculiar was happening.

But the more I think about it now, the more I realise how even our music has been swallowed up by our medicine.hungry minds. It's a desperate situation. Over at the diabetic impotence clinic they have the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' classic album Blood Sugar Sex Magic on continuous loop play. In the resuscitation room the casualty officers go about their business humming the Jackson Five classic "ABC." In ophthalmology they love Robbie Williams's album Life Through A Lens. REM are a favourite in both the sleep disorder clinic, and in palliative care where their favourite track is "It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine." Meanwhile, the cardiac transplant surgeons favourite tune to croon has become George Michael's number one, "Last Christmas (I Gave You My Heart)." And in the epilepsy clinic, if you listen carefully, the House of Pain's hit "Jump Around" is clearly audible. Unnerving as it all is, I do think that I'm getting used to it. In fact I think it could even be helpful. For now I'll just stick close to the doctors and hum U2's "I Will Follow" while the consultants warble "Pride." I just hope that none of us ever have to sing the Verve's "The Drugs Don't Work."

Marc Gutenstein, final year clinical student, Queens College, Oxford


studentBMJ 2000;08:89-130 April ISSN 0966-6494