Letter: What goes around comes around

Letter: What goes around comes around

ANTHONY DANIELS' work as a doctor must, like Glenn Hoddle's, "require no special dealings with the disabled" if he is able to assume that (lack of) "arms, legs and a half-decent brain" translates into "paraplegia" and "the wheelchair-bound". Why does he share the view that people who use wheelchairs are less intelligent than those who walk?

In my everyday life I meet all kinds of disabled people including people like Tony Blair's father, disabled by strokes or other medical conditions, people with learning difficulties, people who are recovering from psychiatric illness, those with hearing and/or visual impairments and people with a variety of mobility impairments who use crutches or sticks to get around, but of the wheelchair users I have met, none of them have been strapped or "bound" into their chair as Dr Daniels describes.

This makes me wonder what kind of torture chamber Dr Daniels works in and what we should be doing in our lifetime to ensure that medical professionals, rather than contributing to some of the nastier aspects of contemporary life, develop the respectful attitudes that we deserve.

ANNE DARBY

Carrington, Nottinghamshire