 Well, ladies and gentlemen, once again it's a great pleasure and honour to thank Gulshin and Hans for their magnificent hospitality, especially the year like this which has been rather difficult and which apparently has discouraged some people from attending. Now, as usual, ladies and gentlemen, Shakespeare cast some light upon my topic because he cast light on almost every conceivable human topic. In Henry IV, part two, the splendidly fat and cowardly knight, Sir John Fullstaff, who always runs away from battle, says, I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse. By consumption he means a chronic wasting disease. I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse. Borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable, which means, of course, he could be the leader of any Western country. But as well as being a coward, Fullstaff figures out a solution to his problem. I have wars for my colour, he says, and my pension shall seem the more reasonable in other words, I shall be paid for my service in the war, which of course in his case was absolutely nil. A good wit will make use of anything. I will turn diseases to commodity. What he means is I will make an income from my diseases, and this despite the fact that they are his two diseases, one is pox and the other is gout and they're both the result of his self-indulgence, and of course he doesn't have any injuries because he's never fought, but nevertheless he will claim injuries. Well, Fullstaff was well in advance of his time, for it is we who live in the golden age of turning diseases to commodity. In fact, we do better than Fullstaff. We turn diseases that we don't have to commodity because they don't exist. I first realised this quite a few years ago when an insurance company sent me a man to examine who claimed to have had such severe whiplash injury after a very slight car accident that he, because of the psychological and physical trauma, would never be able to work again in his entire life and therefore the insurance company would have to pay for him to live for the rest of his life. Well, it so happened that this man was a Syrian refugee, and this was back in the good old days of the first Assad, Hafiz Assad, when it was still possible to understand who was massacring whom. And this man had, according to his own account, been a torturer in Assad's army. But for some reason he had failed to give satisfaction in that capacity and ended up being tortured himself. And in Europe the expropriators are expropriated and in the Middle East the torturers are tortured, and that's the main difference. Well, he sought asylum in Britain and he was granted it. But what he said, what this man said was that what had made his life truly unlivable had ruined it completely was that a man had run into the back of his car at about five miles an hour at a roundabout in Wellingarden City. Now, those of you who have been to Wellingarden City will perhaps sympathise with this man just a little, because Wellingarden City is a pretty terrible place. Although the fact is that the worst thing that can happen to you there, and in fact will happen to you there, is that you have nothing to do. And that's the permanent condition of the people of Wellingarden City. And you can divide British towns into those towns and cities where the population takes heroin and those which take amphetamine. And you can tell by the housing, if it's Victorian housing, old Victorian houses or tower blocks, it's heroin. If it's small houses in suburbs, it's amphetamines. But that's not really the point. However, even boredom in Wellingarden City can hardly compare with torturing and being tortured in Syria. And we may well ask, how is it possible that a man claimed to have his life ruined by so trivial an accident? And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, is in the Anglo-American Torps law system, which miracles are usually taken to mean that saints' relics cause miraculous improvements. But the tort law system causes miraculous deteriorations in people. According to this law, if a person does you wrong by act, or mission, or negligence, and you suffer from it, you are entitled to compensation. And this sounds like natural justice. But as we know, anything that can be corrupted by perverse incentives will be corrupted by perverse incentives. There's no excuse, of course, for driving a car into the rear of another car. I know this because I've done it myself. So in this case, the wrong done was established beyond all doubt. But the harm done was more problematic. For it is in the power of any man to exaggerate what he has suffered and continues to suffer. And in this case, the injury, or the alleged injury, namely whiplash, exists only in those countries in which the sufferer from it can legally be compensated for it. It does not exist in those jurisdictions where it is not recognised as an injury that can be compensated. Apart from a slight soreness of the neck for a day or two, in other jurisdictions, people get better straight away. But not in England or America. And I must here recommend a wonderful book. It's good knock about stuff by a psychiatrist. It didn't get the circulation it deserved. It's by a man called Malison. And the book is whiplash and other useful illnesses. And in my hospital, I should say that we had, in the outpatients, we had a little television which relayed advertisements from local lawyers telling the patients, there was one jungle that said, remember, where there's blame, there's a claim. And this is before you, the doctor had even seen them. So, however, we should be careful not to conclude that all claimants for whiplash injury are or were simply fakes or frauds. The human mind, as I'm sure you appreciate, is a wonderful instrument. And what is at first imagined can soon become genuinely experienced. Moreover, in Britain and America, recent legal doctrine states that psychological injury is to be treated on exactly the same footing as physical injury. A doctrine that, of course, is an open invitation to fraud, as well as opening endless employment opportunities for lawyers, which is a very necessary thing since our universities produce so many of them these days. And unemployed lawyers are a very dangerous class of person. Here, perhaps, I should point out that psychological injuries of all things the easiest to prove and the most difficult to disprove. For if you add up the prevalence of all the alleged psychiatric disorders given in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, it is possible to conclude that the average adult in the Western world suffers from at least two and a half psychiatric disorders a year. And if you suffer from two and a half already, it's easy enough to add one or two more. Well, I'll give you an example of the corruption without corruption that has entered our system. By corruption without corruption, I mean what is morally and legally corrupt, sorry, not legally corrupt, what is morally and intellectually corrupt without it being corrupt in the sense of people taking money illicitly under the table, which, of course, is a much better form of corruption. A man was exposed to a noxious gas by some very minor negligence on the part of an employer, the kind of negligence that we might all be guilty of. At first, he suffered no ill effects, but gradually developed them until they were said to be incapacitated, said by him to be incapacitating. And as is often the way in such cases, almost usually, he claimed that his career had just been about to take off when he was exposed to this noxious gas. And thanks to the exposure, his career did not take off. It had shown no signs of take off before, of course. Among his symptoms were constant headaches, extreme nervousness, and an inability to concentrate. At his trial in which I acted as a witness, it was proved conclusively that he had suffered no symptoms at all until he had looked up the effects of the noxious gas on the Internet. This was proved beyond doubt and it was accepted on all sides. And I thought, well, that is the end of the case. There's nothing else to argue. But no, it was held that the effects of looking up the effects of exposure to the noxious gas on the Internet were to be treated in exactly the same way as if they had been directly caused by the noxious gas, because the man would not have looked up the effects on the Internet unless he had been exposed to the gas. Then the man went into the witness box and was cross-examined very ferociously by an advocate for the defence for nearly two whole days. Never once in this time did he lose his concentration. And it only stumbled slightly when there were questions which, quite clearly, he didn't want to ask, such as whether, despite his extreme nervousness, he had gone on holiday in South Africa, which is not really a destination these days for the timid. The documents in the case were several thousand pages long and he showed that he had mastered them perfectly and he could refer to page 396 in file 7. Despite the evidence before his own eyes, the judge believed a report from psychologists that the man had suffered from organic brain damage from the gas that had made it impossible for him to concentrate, despite the fact also that he hadn't suffered any lack of concentration until he looked it up on the Internet. But in his final judgement, the judge awarded him one twentieth of what he was claiming against the defendant. Well, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways, wrote Elizabeth Browning in Sonnet from the Portuguese. Let us count the ways in which this case illustrates the legalised corruption of the Anglo-American law. First, I've already alluded to the corrupt doctrine of easily faked psychological damage being treated on the same basis as physical damage and the associated doctrine that the effects of looking up the effects of a noxious gas are the same as the effects of the noxious gas itself. Second, the judge preferred to believe scientific evidence that it was obviously ridiculous rather than the evidence of his own eyes and ears. Third, he drew no conclusions whatever from the fact that the plaintiff must have grossly exaggerated his claim. Indeed, the only explanation of that claim, which he maintained over years, was that he was lying. So far from being awarded any money at all, he should really have gone to prison. And fourth, from the very beginning, the man who brought the action had nothing personally to lose by bringing it, except a bit of time and effort because his lawyer was allowed to take all the risk and actually was able to reinsure against that risk. So here we have a man who has only the possibility of gaining, not of losing, and this surely is against natural justice. Well, we may ask how and why such an obviously unjust situation should have arisen. I don't want to sound like a campus radical, but it isn't very difficult to see certain interests in play here. In a society with ever greater numbers of lawyers and ever weakening informal bonds between people, the population must be encouraged to and never discouraged from taking legal action. And this explains why straightforward lying in our civil courts is dealt with in a completely different way from how it is dealt with in the criminal courts. But it's not only the law that corrupts and creates both bogus diagnoses and diseases, but also insurance companies and social security. And let me here point out that I'm aware that the bad effects of any system do not in themselves argue for its abolition if the good effects outweigh the bad or not as bad as any other conceivable system that might replace it. And there's no doubt that the tort system does sometimes result in justice. It does sometimes result in justice. But that's no reason to disregard or to deny the bad effects. There is a condition or at least a pattern of behavior that is known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Some of you in England, it's often known called ME. In this syndrome, the person claims to be fatigued by the slightest effort and indeed making any effort at all has a disproportionate fatiguing effect on him and he has to go to bed for several months. Now many, if most of those who suffer this syndrome or exhibit its behavioral pattern believe that it is caused by the lingering effects of a viral illness. And certainly there are illnesses that exhaust sufferers afterwards for weeks or months. But the diagnosis is one of exclusion. You cannot have it if an organic cause is found. Nevertheless, those who believe it, who believe that they are organically ill and it's possible that they are right, believe it very strongly. Not everything in medicine is known, so they might eventually be proved right. It's impossible to prove a negative. On the other hand, it's very possible that they are wrong and that actually their syndrome or pattern of behavior or whatever you want to call it is of psychological origin and even contains an element of willfulness or bad faith. Again, there is quite a lot of evidence of psychological origin. But I think you might be interested to hear that this evidence is largely suppressed not by the government. It's suppressed in the public mind by an effective form of censorship, which in this case is exercised by a pressure group. For despite having little energy individually, those with the syndrome have a lot of energy collectively and it would be hardly too much to say that they persecute those who take the opposite view of their condition to the one that they take themselves. And so effective is this persecution. They constantly telephone opponents, produce them on the internet, try to have them dismissed from their posts, lobby politically against them and so on. That few people with opposing views now put their heads above the parapet. It's just not worth it. This is asymmetrical intellectual warfare because for opponents of the organic viewpoint, the question is only one amongst many. They don't really care terribly deeply about it. Whereas for supporters of the organic view, it is the question, just as for Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler was always the woman. The argument in public therefore goes by default. Monomaniacs will always outmaneuvered the balanced. Now you may ask, well why is the question the theoretical, what seems a theoretical question, so very important to those who have the condition or behave in this way. Obviously there is a psychological investment in the answer, but also a lot of money is at stake. So long as the condition is recognised as a real one by social security or insurance companies, payments that make a way of life possible are assured. If it is believed to be in any way a voluntary condition or even merely a psychological one, payments become insecure. And a physical causation makes payment more secure than those of a psychological one. And there's an analogy with the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the United States where the director went to Congress to say that addiction is a chronic brain disease. He said this, he didn't believe it was true. He knew it wasn't true, but he knew that Congress would only give money for research if it was presented to it in that light. So this chronic fatigue syndrome is a field ripe to be reaped by the outright fraudulent. An insurance company once sent me a young man who claimed to have the condition. And there is of course no objective test for it, except that all objective tests for it are negative. And as this particular young man was strikingly athletic looking, but he had prepared his ground well. He had an insurance policy that would have paid him out for the rest of his life if the diagnosis was confirmed. He had gone to his own doctor for several months complaining of overwhelming fatigue. This is the groundwork that he performed, of an inability to do anything, even make a sandwich or have a shower without utterly exhausting himself. I didn't believe it, of course, and I noticed that he'd once tried to obtain such payments from an insurance company a few years before on the grounds of chronic low back pain, which is another rich field for fraud because it's a symptom that can indicate anything from impending death to fraud itself. Outright swindle. But there was no evidence that he wasn't as he said he was. And so I had to write to the insurance company to say, well, according to the criteria, according to the checklist, he had the condition. But I also telephoned the insurance company's chief doctor and told him that I suspected the claim was false. And I didn't think any more about it until about three months later, I received a video from the insurance company with a letter asking me whether what was shown on it was compatible with what he had told me. And of course, what it showed was this man up on roofs, repairing roofs. I tell it, so I wrote, of course, to the insurance company to say, no, this was not compatible with what he told me. And I telephoned the doctor once again and asked him whether the insurance company would now prosecute the man for attempted fraud. Because there was no other, this was not a form of conduct that could be anything other than a conscious fraud. No, he said. And why not? I asked because he said our customers wouldn't like it if we sued people for fraud, prosecuted people for fraud. Your honest ones would, I said. But of course, that was, there was a presumption that there were such people. Well, he said, we just don't. And I said, well, in that case, you are complicit with his fraud. Now, of course, insurance companies must be well used to fraud and must factor is into the cost of their premiums. In fact, I have a couple of wonderful books from the 1870s and 1890s. The same book, second edition is twice as large as the first about frauds practiced on life insurance companies such as false burials and all kinds of things. So this is not a new and entirely new phenomenon. But I think it's true that insurance companies are not very much concerned in it for and that it can even increase their profits because the costs are simply passed on to the people who pay their premiums and provided, of course, there's a cartel of insurance companies who all have more or less the same policies then the whole system can keep going. The uncovering of the fraud in this case was not quite the end of the story, however, the association of insurers to which this insurance company belonged had made a rule that stated that any claim on a policy for income that had been rejected was to be paid while a complaint or an appeal by the rejected claimant was investigated. And the young man knew this and probably it is only people who intend to commit fraud who ever read their small print of their insurance policies. And he duly made a complaint about the way in which I had examined him. He made no complaint about the examination itself, only the fact that he had been made to wait 15 minutes in the corridor outside my room. Now, this complaint was footling, of course, but he knew that a giant bureaucracy, such as a large insurance company would not get around to dealing with it for several months. And and it wouldn't be it couldn't be, according to their rules, dismissed out of hand. So during these months, he would be paid the amount that he would have received had the claim being accepted. And he also knew that under the rules, this payment was irrecoverable by an insurance company and not only in practice, but in principle. They never tried to get the money back. Well, let me just summarize some of these points then and leave to leave you to your despair. First, Anglo-American tort law can conjure diseases out of next to nothing. And there have been other cases like repressive strain, injury, Gulf War syndrome. There's another one coming up on called aerotoxic syndrome, which is crews of aircraft are now trying to sue airlines because they claim that the air that is recycled through through the aircraft contains noxious chemicals, which, of course, makes them unable to work ever again, et cetera, et cetera. And they they persecute they persecute researchers into this condition. But once a condition has entered jurisprudence, it's very difficult to remove it. So it becomes real in a sense. Second, the law itself can be corrupted without having without anyone having to bribe anyone else. And indeed, it seems in Britain and I'm sure in America to encourage dishonesty to its to the advantage of its own practitioners. Third, where psychological diagnosis is concerned, it reflects the needs of him who makes the diagnosis far more than that of the patient diagnosed except where the patient is suing someone. Lastly, third party payment of any kind breeds fraud. And the remarkable thing is not that there should be frauds, but that there should be anyone honest left other than the people in this room, of course. And the question I ask myself is, is this am I complaining of anything remediable or merely about a human nature? Am I complaining about human nature? And I think it's probably a bit of both. And having lamented both law and human nature, I will stop.