Mal Fletcher comments on the British approach to handling diseases like cancer

For all its strengths - which recent reports suggest other nations are hungry to adopt - the NHS suffers from an acute shortage of resources at the level of preliminary care, where people first speak with a doctor.

Many patients find themselves sitting in GPs' waiting rooms long after their due appointment times. When their doctor finally becomes available patients have around 10 minutes in which to share their symptoms and garner a diagnosis and treatment plan.

I say 'their doctor' knowing full well that the age of having one's own doctor - which allows for a sense of comfortable familiarity - is now well and truly past. If you visit your local clinic several times in a year, which is not uncommon for people in their 50s and 60s, you may find yourself dealing with a different practitioner each time.

There's little opportunity to develop the type of interaction and trust that might make full disclosure easier.

More than a few doctors are frustrated by this increasingly production-line approach. One intimated to me recently that he might soon be little more than a pill dispenser. Little wonder big pharma companies find it relatively easy to offload new products; medicos live within a culture that, against their better judgement, encourages them to employ quick fixes.

The British are well known for their reticence to wear their hearts on their sleeves (or even to take them out and give them a good airing once in a while). There are, of course, some benefits with this.

A willingness to soak up troubles, to demonstrate self-effacing fortitude, can produce great results in face of such national threats as outbreaks of disease or war. The last thing a community needs, when it is facing an existential threat, are complainers who talk up their troubles and spread timidity, fear or despair.

Arguably, our often narcissistic post-modern culture could do with a lot less self-absorption (or self-obsession) and more dutifulness and awareness of how our individual behaviour impacts the community.

However, the stiff upper lip attitude often associated with victory in WW2, may have been celebrated too much. It may have become so much a part of our national self-awareness that, on a personal level, we would rather hide from symptoms of sickness.

Stoicism - a quiet but steely determination to endure - may be needed after a diagnosis has been made, but one can't fight an enemy one won't acknowledge is at hand.

Some people prefer not to talk about 'fighting' a disease like cancer; they prefer to speak about 'managing' or 'living with' the condition. Yet even managing a disease requires an admission of its reality - and of one's emotions about it. After all, emotions play a huge role in any treatment regimen.