This year's Information Market in Amsterdam was a bit of a disappointment. The weather was better than it's ever been on this day. However, unlike last year, it was not a national holiday. Only civil servants had the day off. And since it was a Friday, many may have preferred heading out of town for a long week-end. There were few booths besides ours. We shared the market mainly with political parties. 

Our most popular pamphlet again this year was the transcription of our memorial speech.

Our pamphlet on psychology drew more attention than usual this year. We almost ran out. One very friendly man told us, "I'm taking this to my daughter. She's studying psychology at university, and I've already warned her that she had better not become an arrogant know-it-all like other psychologists."

This year we continued collecting signatures against medical/pharmaceutical testing on children. Unlike last year, no one expressed support for drug testing on children. Lots of people signed even without being asked, possibly because during the previous week both British and Dutch television had aired programs about how western drug companies take advantage of poor people in India to test their products. As the booth behind ours was occupied by an animal rights group, we quipped, "If you don't think animals should be exploited for medical experiments, than surely also not children?" One man told us, "It's terrible they would do this to children. I've participated in this kind of testing myself, so I know what it's like. I was paid for it." We assured him that we have no objection to medical research on consenting adults. "Oh, but it's never really consensual," he countered. "Some of the test people in my group became so violently ill that they had to be hospitalized. The company had not told us it could be that dangerous. Quite the contrary, they assured us there was no risk involved. You know," he added, "We sold our bodies. We didn't feel like volunteers, we felt like medical prostitutes." If drug testing on consenting adults is like medical prostitution, then surely testing on children is like medical rape.

One young man asked us for help for his girlfriend who is being involuntarily treated in one of the new EU member states. We regretted that there was nothing we could do for him.

Another topic that came up at the market was the controversial AIDS nurse Tini van der Maas. She is maligned by proponents of conventional medicine and some AIDS dissidents alike. In a documentary aired on Dutch TV this winter, she was accused of persuading poor South Africans to use her (presumably quack) remedy instead of anti-retroviral drugs. "But they can't afford the anti-retroviral drugs," someone commented.

One young man told us that he agrees with our viewpoint that everybody should be medically educated. But he didn't seem to quite grasp what we mean by that. "People should learn to do massages," he said. "Massages can cure all sorts of illnesses."

Our booth was manned by MeTZelf board members Frederike and Mira. Members Anne and Lois dropped by to support us part of the day. Another MeTZelf member had suggested attracting people to our booth by giving away free candy. This actually worked. We observed that our booth seems to attract two kinds of people in particular. By far the larger group is a regular consumer of the health system, usually the mental health system. A smaller group is professionally involved with the health system. People who have little to do with the health system seem uninterested. They look at our logo, maybe sign our petition against drug testing on children, and continue to the next booth. Yet every person has a body, and every person is a patient, usually already at birth.

We hope next time you can come and see our booth for yourself. That will probably be in 2008, as next year we will have to pass due to a conflict of schedule.