So, basically a pig in a poke
Has this been linked here yet?
I recently asked on Mastodon:
- Is the currnt UK Tory, US Republican, etc, apparent incompetence simply the result of them abandoning reason and evidence in favour of a stupid free-market-free-for-all ideology?
- Or is it the result of a deliberate strategy to undermine good government and public services, so that mega-corporations can swoop in and pick up whatever pieces are left?
- Or is it no more than grubby in-it-for-all-we-can-grab personal corruption?
I genuinely don’t know, and judging from the answers there - most of which were ‘it’s all three’ - nor does anybody else…
1 Like
All the above
2 Likes
Always worth reading Richard Murphy…
Here’s a quote that pinpoints some of ‘what went wrong’:
Nor will [Labour] talk about the bureaucracy that really needs to be removed from the NHS. That would involve eliminating every hospital and ambulance trust and all the commissioning groups, each with their own massively expensive and duplicated systems, standards, rules and accounting and reporting requirements as well as quite unnecessarily expensive management. Simply replace the lot with accountable regional integrated health authorities covering all health and social care in significant geographic areas. That’s where the reform of the NHS is required. But of course, that would make it harder for the private sector to get their hands on the service, so Starner and Sweeting aren’t going there.
I have spent thirteen years now opposing neoliberal Tories who have moved ever further right, and are now neo-fascist, as Suella Braverman makes clear by her comments, time and again.
But now I have to face the prospect of a Labour government that is both utterly incompetent, as Starmer’s comments noted above prove, but also wilfully negligent in its responsibility to its members and the people of this country.
That, IIRC, was Barbara Castle’s view in the 1970’s - to which the NHS responded in the newspapers of the day “we have a fear, our tier will disappear”
Not that I can see much of what Sir Keir said but the gist of
"Sir Keir also outlined Labour’s plans to crack down on the “bureaucratic nonsense” that patients encounter every day in the health service. “Why can’t people with persistent back problems self refer to physio?” he said “Why, if you notice bleeding, do you have to get a GP appointment, simply to get the tests that you then do yourself at home?”
Seems quite sane.
I would question the leap to "fix the NHS by binning GPs & their poxy skills at triage.
Doesn’t seem at all that Sir Keir / Labour advocates in any way ridding the NHS of GPs. That’s not in any case possible. What I do read is that, as Mr Murphy states, “GP appointments are running at double the number that they were only a couple of decades ago. So let’s start with the reform that is really required - which is the one needed to keep people away from doctors in the first place”.
Sir Keir wants, I think, patients to be better able to self-treat for minor ailments, possibly with advice from a pharmacist, rather than immediately making the GP their first port of call. It’s about reducing the numbers to relieve the sytsem, not reduce the GPs.
Dr Hammond’s point
“The NHS is the endpoint of most health problems, & delays can make them worse, but it is not the cause of them. Health is largely socially determined. To fix healthcare, we need to fix housing, heating, nutrition, sleep, stress, cruelty, education, exercise, isolation
and poverty”
is of course very true but it’s a much bigger problem and will take longer to fix than the NHS has possibly before breaking completely.
I’d go even further and say health is largely SELF determined. Nutrition? Smoking? Obesity? Alcoholism? Lack of exercise?
It’s true that UK society does little or nothing to aid the self to resolve these issues. Sadly.
I think French society does more - though not nearly enough - recognising that prevention is better than cure.
2 Likes
Too many cooks spoilt the broth.
Too many chiefs and not enough of the right people to follow the command.
Yes Sue much of what you mention is so. As a fairly poor person in London my initial
learnings and participation in nutrition and how important it is was slightly limited.
But much is to be learnt from reflexology. I am totally convinced of this.
The sadness you carry around in your earlier life can manifest in kidney disease as years move on.
Being around people who can offer support can save lives and transform fear and anxiety and create a safe and happy place to be.
This is where the social services are failing and have been for some time.
The whole medical network is not united.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m sure that reason why OH and I (generally) are doing well is because many years ago we turned to complementary therapies - meditation, sacro-cranial osteopathy, reflexology, acupuncture, homeopathy, nutrition/naturopathy. But then I had migraines from my early twenties and conventional medicine offered me nothing except painkillers, which is not what I wanted, I was fortunate - my migraines showed me I could make other choices and those choices have kept me (and OH) in good health. I realise this is a step too far for many but (for example) I used to weep over the food my brother (who had cancer) was offered in hospital. Nutrition is so important in recovery and so often ignored as an issue and at worst can positively undo the good that’s being done by the doctors.
1 Like
The bit you question ‘the leap to “fix the NHS by binning GPs & their poxy skills at triage”’ is not Richard Murphy but a quote from a doctor’s response to Starmer - and the point (although made slightly rhetorically) is that it’s dangerous to encourage people to self-diagnose persistent back pain or unexplained bleeding, because these could have many serious causes, and self-referral to a physio or self-testing may well not only be inappropriate, but lethal. This seems to me not only a valid, but a crucially important consideration - and I think its also true (as Richard Murphy does himself say) that it fits into a pattern of ill-thought-through Starmer statements.
The increase in GP appointments needs placing in the context of an ageing population and changing health needs, rather than a simplistic ‘keeping people away from doctors’. Starmer is speaking, remember, in a UK context, where there are television adverts from multinational corporations telling people not to go to their GP, but buy a test for illnesses like cancer -and also the context of the Labour Party losing hundreds of thousands of its most active fund-raising members, and labour movement affiliates, and turning instead to secretive corporate donors.
A health service free at the point of use carries the danger of unreasonable over-use, obviously - but a decent local GP network carrying out the triage function is, as far as I know, the back-bone of all effective health systems. In the UK, it needs strengthening, not circumventing.
But of course it’s true that the UK’s real sickness is out-of-control social inequality - this is what Hammond means, I presume, when s/he speaks of the ‘need to fix housing, heating, nutrition, etc’.
Opinion pollsters Omnisis just found that 61% of all voters believe the Conservatives would like to introduce new charges for certain NHS services, and a majority (51%) believe they wish to entirely privatise the service.
Just one-in-five voters do not believe that Sunak’s party would like to privatise the NHS, with only 14% saying the party does not want to introduce charges to use it.
I too had horrid miagraines very often and reflexology was my only chance.
But i was told many years ago that my kidneys were not doing so well.
Only told this by reflexologists not doctors.
I will add that i smoked untill 27 years ago and have never really drunk much…never used non
prescrption drugs and ate a fairly good balanced diet after teen hood.
I could have set up the NHS with a catering team bringing a life saving diet for patients but .
1 Like
Unfortunately @Geof_Cox , the vast majority of GP’s know very little when it comes to physio or podiatry, it would be far more useful to have these services available for self referral. One of our gp’s diagnosed my husband with planter fasciitis, which I knew to be totally incorrect, had he tried her treatment program he would have made the matter far worse. A quick visit to a podiatrist and he was correctly diagnosed and given a simple treatment plan, problem solved. It’s unrealistic to expect any GP to know everything , in any country.
1 Like
true, but GPs performing the initial triage and correct referrals is the correct way as opposed to expecting patients to self-diagnose and seek (maybe) inappropriate care plans which could be harmful.
Doctors aren’t gods (despite them believing so sometimes). I sincerely believe the difference here in France is that a patient owns the responsibility for their own health and questioning the medecin closely is not regarded as bad form - indeed it is encouraged in my experience.
2 Likes
So true Debbie no doc can ever know and understand everything about the human body.
That is why long delays in sending the patient to a specialist is so bad.
I had a major set back in UK with a private GP and a NHS GP this caused major problems delaying cancer surgery.
Really!!! Not been my experience. Precisely because they do think they are god and therefore are not to be questioned. Because I’m a batty old Englishwoman and seen as eccentric I usually manage to get them to the stage where they raise their eyebrows and humour me. Had to do that the other day with OH’s ophthalmologist who basically told him " you need a cataract op now" and was ushering him out the door when I started to fire who/what/when/where questions at him - much to his irritation.
But you can refer yourself to a private physio, podiatrists, osteopaths etc, so why not NHS ones? If in doubt then go to a GP for referral first.
Everyone should always remember that their personal experience of good or bad doctors is no basis on which to draw conclusions about ‘doctors’ in general.
For what it’s worth, my own experience of every aspect of the French health service has been brilliant - far better than anything I experienced or observed in the UK.
But of course others’ experiences might be different.
I am, however, amazed and concerned that people think self diagnosing the causes of persistent pain or unexplained bleeding is sensible.
Please - just ask your GP - such symptoms might have very serious causes totally outside you purview.
3 Likes
Ultimately I think this advice holds for most spheres (I was going to say “fields” 
) where there are practitioners who take time to learn the subject properly and build up practical experience as to what common (and not so common) problems exist and how they present - doesn’t matter whether it is medicine, law, mechanics or heat pumps.
The problem - and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else (see my dead heat pump thread) - the subject appears easy to the uninitiated (because they have not learned that it can be complex) and there is then a reticence to pay the expert his or her due - especially in the post-Gove “we don’t need no steenking experts” days.
But as Red Adair is reported to have said “if you think professionals are expensive you should see how much an amateur will cost you”.
3 Likes