We seek a pill for every ill, but often all we need to do is change our minds, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
This unlikely scenario should be more common. Walking into the doctor's surgery, the receptionist says: "Hi, Haydn. You're looking great. Judith's ready to see you now."
"Straightaway?" you ask, accustomed to a half hour wait on a good day.
"She's been waiting for you for five minutes. She's looking forward to seeing you."
So you walk into the surgery and beat her to the cheery notes.
"Hi Judith, how's it going?" you say.
"My," the doctor answers, "you look on form. I was just reading up on some PR work. Positive Re-enforcement. Let me just mark the page. So, how's it been going? You look absolutely fantastic."
"Grand. I'm working out again."
"Too right, boy."
Fanciful indeed but there are good reasons for believing that doctors and hospitals are a symptom of ailments they can help cure by putting the prescription pad aside and being extra nice. Doctors and nurses can play a front line role in our self-esteem.
But we've no time, you can here them say. And indeed time is part of the problem, but the medical relationships we currently endure have a strong sense of sustaining an image of the human as vaguely incapable or, to give it its scientific name, helpless! The problem is set to become more pressing.
We have learned how to be helpless, and we continue to perfect our capabilities in this area. Specifically, we learn helplessness around what we eat.
There are psychologists now who diagnose "learned helplessness". It is a disease in the true sense of the word, a disease where metabolic functions are impaired. Learning helplessness is not just a sense, a psychological condition resulting from repeated failure. Repeated failure creates changes in brain function as well as in motivation.
Recognition of learned helplessness, as a disease, began, as with so many medical diagnosis, with the study of rats.
Experiments conducted by psychologists have shown how animals that repeatedly fail to achieve a given goal, particularly goals that involve avoiding danger, are inclined to give up on the most important goal of all, survival.
To put it more precisely, if a rat repeatedly fails to avoid an electric shock it will politely lie down and die. A series of experiments conducted by American psychologists led by Martin Seligman, taught rats to fail by repeatedly forcing them to cross an electric "fence" that was always on, despite the rat learning that occasionally it may be off.
The experiments involved some slight variations in the ground rules, in much the same way that in everyday life we humans do, on occasion, feel the goalposts have been moved.
The result was that when the rats were then placed in deep water they did not try to swim. They sucked in the water and willingly drowned. This most frantic and aggressive of survivors can therefore quickly be taught how to dispense with the will to live.
This is learning to be helpless and the chief fascination of learned helplessness is this:
Helplessness has physical effects that are not so easy to snap out of, climb over or get around. The adrenalin doesn't flow and the survival instinct gives way to passivity. Worse, people who learn helplessness end up with impaired brain function and disturbed metabolism, which is where the health services move in, to support us in being helpless through the use of pharmacological intervention.
People learn failure in a variety of ways, from schoolchildren who get the first few maths questions wrong to smokers and drinkers who relapse, to dieters who get trapped in the body's peculiar ability to adapt to dieting by conserving energy.
While nobody is blaming dieting for creating a nation or generation of lie-down-and-die failures - the Celtic Tiger, after all, is still purring - the implications for a generation that is now under pressure to diet should at least be of concern.
Dieting is, above all activities, the one that people are programmed to fail. Once calorie intake drops, the body adapts to a lower calorie intake, disillusionment sets in and the dieter reaches for the biscuit tin.
Yo-yo dieting or failed diets are a step along the way to serious changes in how the brain and body interact. And this problem is not one that the dieter can overcome alone.
Under a growing sense of despair the metabolic system can crash, and with it the extra edge of willpower that humans need if they are going to make significant changes to their lives.
Psychologists who identified learned helplessness say the cure is to focus on hope, creativity, optimism, happiness, courage, emotional intelligence, giftedness, genius, future-mindedness and honesty, perhaps the very things the patient in us all is seeking.
Positive reinforcement of people who have come to see themselves as patients, when in reality what they need is to change their minds about what they eat, how they look, the priorities they afford to consumerism, might start with the unlikely case of the doctor who flatters his or her patients.