Dr Peter Moore: Advice for the new year (some of it useless)

Here we are entering 2024.
It is one hundred years since Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison after his involvement in a coup - although he was released after nine months. These two events are not related. On a lighter note Benny Hill was born.
How will 2024 be remembered? There will probably be a UK general election and definitely an American presidential election. And it looks as though whoever is elected, the American President he will be even older than me.
For all the health problems of one hundred years ago, they did not have to cope with today’s warnings and advice coming from every direction, largely thanks to computer algorithms or threatening lawyers.
I keep getting emails asking me “do you ever wonder whether anyone reads your reviews?” the simple answer is no. I never write reviews. I do wonder whether anyone reads my column but that is not their question.
Also, whenever I have bought something online I am asked “if I liked that I might be interested in this”. I recently bought an air fryer. For several months I was bombarded with emails telling me that if I liked that airfryer I might be interested in another airfryer. I am very happy with my airfryer and use it regularly, but I do not need another one.
We are also surrounded by warnings. I suppose we should blame the lawyers. There is no law against stupidity but it is possible to sue when the problem could have been predicted by an eight year old child.
Hot drinks invariably claim “warning, this may be hot”. What do you mean “may be”? I hope it is hot. A microwave meal I bought recently had the notice “warning, this product will be hot when cooked”. I had never realised that cooking heats food up. I must be more careful. Perhaps it serves me right for buying a microwave meal rather than cooking properly.
We recently bought a dehumidifier, hoping that it might be a cheaper way to dry clothes rather than the tumble dryer. Being male I rarely read instructions but this time I opened the box, took out the instructions and opened the plastic bag they were wrapped it. The first comment was “first unpack the instructions”. How could I read the instructions if I had not unpacked them first? Perhaps they thought I would be staring at the unopened box wondering where the instructions were.
I would have assumed that most of the people at the Natural History Museum in London were relatively intelligent. Surrounding one of the hand basins in the toilet was a tape looking like a crime scene with “caution” written everywhere. Had someone been murdered? Perhaps one of the dinosaurs had escaped in true Jurassic Park style. The notice said “Caution ++. The tap is not working”. It was useful to know and I used another basin but I did not need a dramatic warning. The worse case scenario is that my hands would stay dry and not washed properly, although perhaps after Covid that would be dangerous.
Another mystery closer to home is why our local letter box is labelled “NHS priority.” Does the postie check through all the letters and any addressed to a GP or hospital is placed on an emergency shelf? Should I write on the back of every envelope “from Dr Peter Moore”? It will no longer be an NHS letter but it might mean that my first class letter will get there is three weeks rather than the usual four.
So, what would the people of Torbay one hundred years ago think of the people at the dawn of 2024? My predecessors in the Torquay Medical Society November 1923 gave real warnings asking the town council to increase the demand for clean milk. We have come a long way from warning about contaminated milk to warning that cooked food will be hot.