A schoolboy comes home with a bad mark in chemistry. The moment he walks through the door, he loudly tells his parents that the whole class got low marks, that he wasn’t the only one who didn’t study, and that everyone else did the same. So in his eyes, nothing bad happened — because “everyone is like that”, it must be normal.

This is exactly how many of us treat our own health. Be honest — who has ever been told they have gastritis? And who actually controls it, treats it, or even follows it up? I doubt it’s the majority. More like a whole class full of poor marks…

I often hear the same excuse: “I’m not the only one, the whole country is like that…”

And here in Scotland, when you ask someone about diagnostic checks, you hear sighs and groans — “the healthcare system is bad”, “the doctors didn’t find cancer at stage one”, “and now I’ll have to die at stage four”.Harsh? Cynical? I agree. But can the truth really be ‘too harsh’?