On Radio 4’s Today programme this week there was an item about a widening gap in life expectancy in England. The interviewer was John Humphrys, who is a bit of a “marmite” character, I think. John interviewed two people, one the head of the British Medical Association, the other a General Practitioner (GP) from Tower Hamlets, an area of East London.
As the Today web site says, the story is based on… “A report from the National Audit Office indicates that the gap in life expectancy between the poorest and wealthiest parts of the population in England as a whole is continuing to widen, despite a target set by the Labour government in 2000 to narrow the gap.
Speaking on the programme, Dr Sam Everington, GP in Tower Hamlets in London, said that the government needed to address the fundamental cause of ill health. “What I would argue is what you need is a much bigger and wider role for GPs, so in our centre we provide a hundred different projects which includes a job advisor,” he told Today presenter John Humphrys.
“The evidence is absolutely clear, that if you get somebody into work or if you get them trained almost in anything you will improve their health.”
The last comment by the GP, and ensuing debate with Humphrys (who, oddly, kept on insisting that Doctors should focus on doling out medicines, not than treat people as wholes, as a remedy for poor health) reminded me of comments made in a much older interview with Dr Jonathan Miller on the Dick Cavett show in 1981. Asked about the fad of alternative medicine, he discusses advances in medicine over the last 200 years, and concludes surprisingly that the skills of medical doctors have had very little to do with improvements in health, which has nearly everything to do with measures (usually embodied by law) to improve air, sanitation and nutrition – all wider than the ever-improving laser beam of scientific knowledge. It was not that there was no link, but just that the improvements in general health and well-being are mostly down to other factors. Yet we remain a society obsessed by deference to medical professionals and “hooked” on the idea of treating everything with drugs.
All this got me thinking as to whether there are parallels to draw about the role and activities of managers in business. Do we attribute economic success and happiness to (or even expect from) our management profession (is management a profession??) ?
Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog 
My grandfather worked as a doctor in the same Derbyshire town from 1925 to 1978, and told my father that, in his opinion, the thing which had most affected the health of his patients had been improvements in the standard of their housing over that period. This supports what you were saying in the blog.
Interestingly I also heard of a recent interview indicating that Tony Blair had wondered whether the favourable economy during his tenure as PM might have been all down to luck rather than skill:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1103861/Labours-boom-years-luck-Browns-economic-expertise-says-Tony-Blair.html