While on holiday recently I read a book on the neuroscience of pleasure (David Linden, The Compass of Pleasure). The idea came to me that in some sense the policy to abolish practice boundaries and extend patient choice is actually ‘brain damaged’.
In this sense: the book discusses the way in which various pleasures (sex, certain foods, drugs, behaviours like gambling) activate discrete parts of our brains, which we then experience as pleasurable. The author highlights situations where, under the influence of certain pleasurable experiences (such as falling in love) there is a distortion of our critical faculties, a ‘deactivation of the prefontal cortex’, the judgement, planning, and evaluation centre. Money, cocaine, heroin activate these pleasure centres.
It occurred to me that possibly the thought of choice, the promise of choice, somehow activated the pleasure centres, and led to a deactivation of the prefrontal cortex, a distortion of our critical faculties.
This is perhaps just a metaphor. But it certainly seems to me that certain policies from the DOH appear to be ‘brain damaged’, that is to say that important thinking steps are simply left out.
One GP's Protest 
Do you think hypnotic suggestion works in the same way?