TY - JOUR T1 - Poor thinking JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 466 LP - 468 VL - 56 IS - 527 AU - Norman Beale Y1 - 2006/06/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/56/527/466.abstract N2 - Werner Heisenberg died, of cancer, in February 1976. It was the month I finally found a practice, so I remember the date. In digs in Cambridge with a student of atomic physics I'd had personal tuition in Heisenberg's ‘Uncertainty Principle’. Knowing the speed of an electron meant that also knowing its location was intellectually impossible, and vice versa: one or the other but never both. With what adolescent glee we applied this to Paul's stolen bike. Small consolation, walking to lectures, that he could calculate his bicycle's velocity because he didn't know where it was. But what's all this nostalgic nonsense to do with the poor, with inequality, with health or UK general practice?My thesis is that a self-serving version of the uncertainty principle is being applied, throughout Whitehall, to inequality and health. We are being told that we must see socioeconomic inequality as a function of speed — are the poor, as a group, catching up or falling further behind? It will do us no good to try to locate deprived individuals: to do so is tantamount to voyeurism and is illegal. Outside the sancta of the Inland Revenue and Social Security there is a compulsory ‘confidentiality threshold’ for the release of economic data — 16 households or 50 persons being the smallest legal tender. This is perverse polity; whether by cock-up or conspiracy is not my concern. I want to propose that in the UK there is, staring us in the face, a tool for breaking this bureaucratic bulwark, a means of linking actual people to their socioeconomic standing. It is objective, indeed official, and not distastefully obtrusive. I believe it to be a mechanism more suited to general practice rather than is the usual pinched population thinking of public health; Dickens rather than Malthus. It could … ER -