From Phill Chadwick
Frank Furedi reports on the decision taken by the British Medical
Journal to ban the word “accident”
(25 August, p 48).
This is very disturbing. Will it develop into a new round of thought control via the
language, as in political correctness?
The new view is that if something bad happens, it must be someone’s fault and
they should pay. I have noticed this trend in the legal profession, led by the
Americans, but it’s becoming more and more widespread in the once self-reliant
but now increasingly litigious Australian community. No longer do we Aussies
“cop it sweet” and get on with life. Even injuries resulting from the patent
stupidity of the injured party are subject to claims.
All this in an era where scientific thought has well and truly shifted from a
mechanistic, deterministic universe to one where, at the most fundamental level,
probability and uncertainty underlie all physical processes. And at the
macroscopic level, chaos theory points out the fundamental unpredictability of
many processes.
Why then do lawyers, doctors and safety authorities insist that all bad
things can be foreseen and, by implication, prevented? Maybe Accident and
Emergency departments will have to change their names to “Injuries Caused by
Someone Else’s Negligence and Emergency Department”.
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Erindale, South Australia
