The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs, review - a fascinating and sincere experiment
“It’s worth remembering that all medicines do harm,” Chris van Tulleken told a group of parents and grandparents at the start of The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs (BBC One). Episode one of this thought-provoking two-part experiment – a follow-up to van Tulleken’s 2016 programme about over-prescribing for adults – explored why we are giving our children three-and-a-half times as many drugs as we did in the late Seventies.
He found a nation of parents hooked on pills as a response to a “crying baby” or “misbehaving child”, and an industry apparently exploiting parents’ emotions for profit.
The likeable TV doctor, who spent 10 years working in the NHS, visited a mother who had bottles of Calpol – paracetamol dissolved in a sweet tasting syrup – in almost every room just in case. One GP’s assertion that “Calpol is the heroin of childhood” seemed apt. There were more syringes in her kitchen drawer than Ewan McGregor had in Trainspotting.
Of course, this being pop science, van Tulleken had to visualise for us the £64m we spend each year on Calpol by filling plastic containers with 5,000 litres of pink gloop and taking them to an autumn fayre to show families how much of the stuff is bought every single day. It was fun but not particularly illuminating.
More startling were the sequences involving some of the more than 60,000 children in the UK who are taking drugs to deal with Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Many of them are prescribed regular doses of the stimulant methylphenidate (better known under the trade name Ritalin): possible side-effects – personality change, stunted growth and sleeping problems.
Van Tulleken met Amsterdam University professor Susan Bögels, who has been treating the disorder with mindfulness meditation techniques, and was doing a session in the UK for the first time. It was chaos. “I stopped caring…” said van Tulleken. “I just wanted it to end.”
Six weeks later, though, the results seemed transformative. It is parents and practitioners, though, who have to be convinced, and drug use is rising. Van Tulleken’s documentary, which next week tackles the prescribing of anti-depressants for teenagers, was a fascinating and sincere attempt to offer an alternative.
