Whilst I was on holiday...

Although Dr Crippen was only away for four days, a lot seems to have happened. I am grateful to all who sent emails. They have all been read, and here is a selection of points raised by some of them.

Dumbing-down health care does not stop because Dr Crippen in on holiday. In this case, dumbing down on the front-line.

Telephone medicine is not easy. And the less experience you have, the more dangerous you become. Two patients died in Scotland because Nurse Advisors (NAs) working for NHS 24 failed to recognise dangerous medical conditions and gave inappropriate advice.

“Sheriff James Tierney said the system had failed Shomi Miah and Steven Wiseman by not identifying their life-threatening conditions…if NHS staff had "erred on the side of caution" during their diagnosis there was a strong likelihood both patients would have survived.” BBC and The Daily Record here.

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The NHS “continues to let down allergy patients” reports the BBC. Mild allergies are common place and can be dealth with in primary care. More serious allergy problems may need sophisticated investigation in secondary care by specialists trained in the diagnosis and management of allergies.

There are no such specialists.

Well, Dr Crippen exaggerates a little, but certainly there no such specialists that he can access under the much vaunted New Labour “choose and book” system, which restricts his choice of referrals to nominated local hospitals. If Dr Crippen really wants to access an allergy specialist he has to send the patient to Birmingham or London and all sorts of time-consuming PCT permissions have to be obtained before he can do that.

It is infuriating.

The government seems to be working on it, as described here by the Department of Health.

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The treatment of asthma, particularly in childhood, is big business for Big Pharma. Worrying, then, that the independent Drugs and Therapeutics Bulletin (which accepts neither sponsorship nor advertising) reports:

"The lack of agreed standard measurements of effectiveness in trials for asthma drugs means that drug companies can pick and choose the outcomes that best matches their products"

(see report here in Medical News Today)

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And the Daily Telegraph reported here that up to a third of GPs on the new contract may contract out of giving childhood immunisations. A vexed issue. New Labour only has itself to blame. In the old days (by which I mean ten years ago) GPs were treated like professionals and for the most part did their best to make sure that all children were immunised, that the elderly had their flu jabs and so on and so on.

Now we have a government that does not trust professionals of any kind; a government that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. They have attempted to define a professional’s job as a tick list of tasks, and paid for each tick achieved. Some ticks are easier than others. Going round council estates trying to get children to have pre-school boosters is hard and unrewarding work. Doctors used to do it because they were doctors. Because they were professionals. Now we have a government that does not trust doctors to act as professionals and instead pays them on a piece-work basis. Not surprisingly, some doctors are cherry-picking the task list and only doing the tasks that pay well.

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My attention is drawn to an article in Science Direct which shows that homeopathy works in general practice.

Of course it does.

The study demonstrates that a wide variety of conditions are treatable with homeopathy in primary care. This includes conditions that are treatable conventionally as well as those in which there is limited or no conventional treatment.

Read the full paper here.

If you believe this, you will believe anything!

How does Dr Crippen feel about this article? His response is predictable and best described pictorially.



There, I feel better for that!