The Daily Mail reports that patients are being struck off GPs' lists just for daring to make a complaint

The Daily Mail reports that patients are being struck off GPs' lists just for daring to make a complaint. The article is commenting on a report by Health Service Ombudsman Ann Abraham.

"In one case, an elderly woman and her husband were removed after she wrote to the practice manager to complain that receptionists did not answer the phone while she was trying to book an appointment for their seasonal flu jabs. In a telephone call the practice manager warned them he would ‘get you struck off for this’. Shortly afterwards they were removed from the surgery’s list."

So making a complaint is punishable by being removed from the doctor's list... I invite you to compare this mean-spirited injustice with the way that complaints are dealt with in the commercial world. If you were to complain to Sainsburys or Tesco or M & S, I think you could be pretty sure that the complaint would be investigated and that you would receive a prompt, polite response with a detailed explanation for what had gone wrong, together with thanks for drawing the matter to their attention, apology for your inconvenience and very probably a voucher as recompense. And you could be absolutely sure that you would not be threatened with being banned from their stores! Decent businesses use complaints to improve their service to the public. Not so the NHS.

GPs are, as near as dammit, unaccountable to the public who pay their bloated salaries. (UK doctors are the highest-paid in Europe.) Even extremely grave errors routinely incur neither censure nor penalty. - Read Can you trust your doctor? The non-accountability of doctors encourages arrogance and increasing careless professional negligence. - Here is my own dreadful experience of the NHS Complaints Procedures. Why do so many doctors give such poor service? - Because they can.

Our present government claims that it is seeking to provide greater patient choice. What nonsense! Patient choice in the UK is, as ever, Like it or Lump it!

Update, Wed 19th October 2011: also see today's Daily Mail follow-up article on this subject.

Bribery of doctors and other NHS healthcare staff by pharmaceutical companies may be reduced by the Serious Fraud Office

An Independent on Sunday investigation has revealed that the bribery of doctors and other NHS healthcare staff with lavish hospitality and freebies by pharmaceutical companies may be reduced by the Serious Fraud Office.

"Big drug firms have spent millions of pounds on bankrolling events and trips for NHS staff, an Independent on Sunday investigation of trust records has revealed. The catalogue of freebies includes Pfizer providing hospitality to dozens of doctors attending a meeting at the five-star Gleneagles hotel resort in Scotland, and a dinner meeting between three Eli Lilly staff and two nurses at which 22 alcoholic drinks were consumed.

Healthcare staff, who influence how the £12bn annual NHS drugs budget is spent, insist they are not swayed by hospitality. However, it has emerged that big firms such as Sanofi-Aventis, Napp and Cephalon all feature in reports by the industry's watchdog, the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA), into alleged breaches in the rules on hospitality."

I recommend reading the whole of this damning report, including the Comments beneath the report.

Doctors are over-prescribing paracetamol to toddlers

The Telegraph reports that doctors are over-prescribing paracetamol to toddlers. "One-in-four young children are being given too much of the pain relief drug, putting them at risk of liver damage, scientists found. A study of medical records of some youngsters found that a quarter between the ages of one and three were prescribed an "excessive" paracetamol dosage by their doctor."

That is an extremely high proportion of toddlers being overdosed. I have blogged with my views about giving painkillers to babies/toddlers before. No-one wants to risk their child getting liver damage from taking painkillers. Paracetamol, aka Calpol, is not harmless. I advocate comfort and cuddles for little ones, rather than pharmaceutical painkiller drugs with all their risks. Unlike drugs, a kiss and a cuddle have no adverse side-effects:

Give a kiss and a hug,
Not a painkiller drug.

NHS-funded drug-pushing continues to increase

The Telegraph reports that the amount of drugs prescribed by GPs has tripled over 15 years.

It's high time to have legal curbs put on GPs' wanton over-prescribing, with severe sanctions against routine offenders. Pharmaceutical drugs are not the pathway to health; the NHS's over-reliance on drugs does far more harm than good to most of the patients who take them.

Aqueous cream should never have been prescribed as a moisturiser. It is a soap alternative which contains emollients. Why didn't doctors know this?

Aqueous cream aggravates eczema. When used as a moisturiser it thins the skin and makes it more vulnerable to irritation. Read this BBC News report, where you will see that "it is also frequently recommended by doctors for its moisturising properties - one recent poll suggested nine out of 10 GPs recommended it for childhood eczema."

How on earth can UK doctors - reputedly the highest paid GPs in Europe - not know this? How can 9 out of 10 doctors have been recommending it for childhood eczema when it makes the condition worse? It contains sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS), a harmful chemical if left on the skin.

If you have had it prescribed or recommended for your child you may like to print out the BBC article and take it to show your doctor. This would surely not only help your own child but other children currently being damaged by the use of aqueous cream as a moisturiser.

Anti-psychotics double the risk of pneumonia in the elderly

BBC News reports that Dutch researchers find that use of anti-psychotic drugs in the elderly doubles the risk of potentially fatal pneumonia. An expert report last year found that these drugs are responsible for up to 1,800 deaths in the UK every year and Ministers have said they want to see a significant cut in their use. What I want to see is Ministers putting a legal curb on the use of these drugs, which are overwhelmingly prescribed with no benefit whatsoever to the patient/victim.

Tell me, WHY are doctors (mainly paid by the State, i.e. paid by taxpayers) allowed to prescribe these harmful drugs for no good reason, and by means of the drugs allowed to damage the health of patients and cause them to die sooner than they otherwise would?

Why aren't the guilty doctors arrested and charged with Grievous Bodily Harm or Drug Abuse or some other appropriate charge and punished with the full rigour of the Law?

Is it because the State tacitly favours ending the lives of its citizens who are no longer part of the work force? Or is the explanation even more sinister?

Danger to patients from poor prescribing by NHS doctors

10% patients are at risk from errors in prescriptions the Telegraph reports. "The mistakes included omitting drugs, wrong doses, not taking account of a patient's allergies, illegible handwriting or ambiguous orders." This dire statistic is attributed to inadequate training.

It beggars belief, doesn't it? - What do working doctors do most of the time? - You're right! - They hand out prescriptions! - Yet they are inadequately trained to do so and are putting the health of thousands of their patients at risk because of this! - And even the trainers themselves (See Professor at Teaching Hospital completely ignorant of the most common side-effects of prednisolone) are insecure in their knowledge of the side-effects of many commonly-prescribed, but potentially very dangerous drugs, including corticosteroids, HRT and antidepressants.

See amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Sodium in foods

British doctors are woefully ill-informed about symptoms of ovarian cancer

BBC News reports that ovarian cancer is being 'missed': that far from being a 'silent killer' as it is frequently described, it has several serious symptoms, including abdominal distension and vaginal bleeding, but doctors are not investigating these symptoms.

The report informs us that around 6,800 women are diagnosed with the cancer each year. Only 30% are alive five years after diagnosis, and the survival rate has not improved in 30 years.

Annwen Jones, Chief Executive of the charity Target Ovarian Cancer, says, "The UK's high rates of late diagnosis have played an important part in keeping five year survival rates low, at just 30% - amongst the lowest in the Western World."

I agree with Annwen Jones that change is long overdue. I know of someone who experienced extreme abdominal distension years ago - so much so that people she knew were asking her whether she was pregnant - and was very, very tired and in great pain. She was also bleeding heavily. She presented with these symptoms repeatedly over a space of about 18 months at her GP's and was patronisingly told that these symptoms were perfectly normal for middle-aged women! - This was someone who did not go to see a doctor with trivial complaints, yet she was treated in this dismissive, disgusting way. - She was so tired that she could no longer go to work and had to give in her notice! - Now THAT is not normal for middle-aged women and it is ridiculous and contemptible that a doctor should should insult an exhausted, gravely ill woman in that way.

It was not until she was close to death that the GP actually realised that she was ill and rang to arrange for her to go into hospital. He then told her to 'toddle along home and wait for the ambulance!' - She could not manage to walk more than a few steps along his drive and collapsed, and the receptionist rushed out to her and summoned the ambulance urgently. By the time she reached the hospital she no longer even knew her name and was very dangerously short of blood. She had to be given a blood transfusion urgently and also needed a hysterectomy, because the ovarian cancer had by this time become disseminated throughout the abdominal cavity. There was no way she could possibly recover and she died in agonising pain a few weeks later, another victim of medical negligence, so common in our lousy NHS.

I was reading online today that the NHS is so good that even the Royal Family go into NHS hospitals for treatment. - Yes, of course they do! - But they wouldn't be left to bleed heavily for 18 months first, or be insulted and not be examined till they were dying, would they? - We all - taxpayers - pay for the NHS. We don't all get good treatment. The more important you are, the better the treatment you get.

Britain's doctors should be told to take women's symptoms seriously. When a woman complains of heavy bleeding, she is not complaining because she doesn't like having menstrual periods; she is reporting serious blood loss/haemorrhage, and she should be properly examined and sent to a specialist to find the cause of the bleeding. - Heavy bleeding is not caused by being middle-aged!

30% of doctors and nurses don't want flu jab

30% of nurses and doctors 'don't want' flu jab:

Read Press Association news report at yahoo.com (UK)

and Telegraph report

Will there be Pay Sweeteners for US Doctors to ensure their critical support for a Health Care Overhaul Bill?

See taragana blog.

When Britain's NHS started in 1948 there was a similar fix. - "I stuffed their mouths with gold," said Aneurin Bevan, one of the most important ministers of the post-war Labour government and the chief architect of the National Health Service, speaking of the only way in which he had been able to silence the protests of the consultants who might otherwise have strangled the NHS at birth.

Well Britain's doctors are still grossly overpaid and are for all practical purposes unaccountable to the patients whom nominally they serve, because the NHS complaints procedures are in practice an exercise in futility and exhaustion for complainants. Yet despite all the 'gold' lavished on the doctors, we have an extremely poor health service. - Added to poor service, many of our once-clean hospitals are now dirty, and patients fear to go into them in case they catch one of the hospital acquired infections...

Anybody who believes that doctors are hard-working, all-knowing saints should read this:

Dr LeFanu's Telegraph entertaining article on stupid, arrogant doctors.

I've been interested in recent months to notice that people who complain about unsatisfactory or negligent treatment often tend to be disparagingly referred to by doctors or their retinues as 'disgruntled patients'. Bearing in mind the sort of serious matters that occasion the complaints that dissatisfied patients make - having read the Telegraph article for instance - 'disgruntled' seems a very inapposite adjective to use. It is so inapposite and disparaging, and yet so commonly used, it makes me wonder whether medical students are actually taught to use the word as a put-down to damaged patients...

Drug company freebies undermine patient trust in doctors

All 'gifts' should be banned, says a report from the Royal College of Physicians
Drug company handouts to doctors, in the shape of flights to conferences, hotel stays, meals and gifts, must end to re-establish patients' trust in prescribers, a high-level inquiry has urged. A report from a working group of the Royal College of Physicians, with members from the pharmaceutical industry as well as patient representation, found that there were widespread suspicions about the relationship between the drug companies and doctors. A picture of "relentless pressure on doctors exerted by pharmaceutical marketing, masquerading as education, is common," says the report.
Read article in the Guardian (UK)

Almost half of doctors who care for older people believe the NHS is "institutionally ageist", according to a poll.

Half of doctors believe NHS is 'institutionally ageist'
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"A total of 47 per cent thought the NHS was ageist while 55 per cent said they were worried themselves about how the NHS would treat them in old age.

The survey, of 201 doctors who specialise in caring for older people and are members of the British Geriatrics Society (BGS), was carried out for the charity Help the Aged.

More than six in 10 (66 per cent) doctors agreed that, in their experience, older people were less likely to have their symptoms fully investigated.

Meanwhile, 72 per cent thought older people were less likely to be considered for, or referred for, essential treatments like neural surgery or chemotherapy.

More than three-quarters (77 per cent) were also in favour of laws preventing age discrimination in the NHS."

Doctors and pharmacists are being warned by the National Patients Safety Agency to take greater care when prescribing or administering drugs.

Doctors are warned over drug deaths
Article in the Observer

Extract:

"Doctors and pharmacists are being warned by the National Patient Safety Agency to take greater care when prescribing or administering drugs. Eight NHS patients have died and 17,000 others been put at risk in 'incidents' involving powerful painkillers used by millions of Britons between January 2005 and December 2007.

On Friday the agency sent a 'rapid response report' - an official warning that is sent around the NHS when evidence emerges about a threat to patient safety - entitled 'Reducing Dosing Errors with Opioid Medicines'. It covers the 11 most common forms of opioids, such as morphine, methadone, fentanyl, diamorphine and oxycodone.

'Incidents have been reported to the National Reporting and Learning System concerning patients receiving unsafe doses of opioid medicines, where a dose or formulation was incorrect, based on the patient's previous opioid dose,' said the report.

Around 12 million prescriptions for opioids are issued every year."

If you want a drug-free way of reducing pain, try cutting down on salt and salty food. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/sodium_foods.html and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html

Don't treat the old and unhealthy, say British doctors

Don't treat the old and unhealthy, say doctors

You couldn't make it up, could you?

Extracts from the Sunday Telegraph:

"Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Have your say: Should lifestyle play a role in deciding who gets NHS treatment? Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone. "The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as "out­rageous" and "disgraceful"." Health care is not free. - We all pay for it in our taxes.

Doctors 'must own up to blunders' says Steve Walker, chief executive of the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA)

Doctors 'must own up to blunders'

Extract from The Observer:

"Doctors have been told to own up and apologise if they make mistakes, in a bid to reduce the £613m in compensation paid each year to victims of blunders such as wrong diagnoses, botched surgery and delays during childbirth.

A new culture of honesty and openness should see such patients receive a personal apology from the doctor concerned and a detailed explanation of what went wrong, a senior official said.

Steve Walker, chief executive of the NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA), said that patients and their families can feel hugely frustrated when hospitals are reluctant to acknowledge and explain cases of negligence. He believes that a more candid and speedy response could reduce the £613m paid out in damages each year. He made his comments in the week that Leslie Ash was awarded £5m in damages after contracting MSSA, a variant of the MRSA superbug.

Negligence lawyers say that the main reason a number of victims take legal action is to obtain more information.

'The message to doctors is: if you're aware of an error, or a shortfall in what's been delivered, you should feel free, indeed you should feel under an obligation, to tell your patients and to apologise and to explain, either verbally or in writing, even if the patient is likely to sue,' he told The Observer. 'The explanation bit is really important to many, many claimants. It doesn't matter if it heads off a claim or encourages a claim, people as human beings and patients are entitled to this and they should be getting it."

I think the culture of lying, evasion and cover-up of clinical negligence by doctors, along with collusion by the Department of Health and the Health Authorities, and partiality from the criminal justice system, has been allowed to go on too long for any meaningful change to come about without employing legal sanctions...)o: - And the uselessness of the GMC and similar bodies in protecting patient safety, rather than doctors' reputations, is well-known and notorious... - Routinely, when patients or their relatives complain about clinical negligence they are given further distress rather than a scrap of help or any sincere words of regret, apology or explanation.

Doctors in UK have never had it so good - and their threat to quit the NHS over reform plans will not be carried through - says medical student.

GPs are crying wolf

Extract from Guardian article:

"Of course the exodus from the profession will not happen. Doctors are happy to talk about thousands of people walking out in protest as long as it does not actually include them. They know when they have it good. They know that outside of London a secure job that pays more than £35,000 a year and provides a degree of respect and social standing is hard to come by.

Many senior figures within NHS management and the Department of Health have said that there are some senior doctors are refusing to attend internal and external management meetings and negotiations unless they are being paid to attend - on top of their salaries, at GMC rates that is about £100 an hour. Is it any wonder doctors are being left out of negotiations? This is scandalous and downright cheeky.

They may talk about their colleagues in law or banking earning many times the salary they do and yet they do not leave their jobs and retrain. I've lost of the number of medical students in their final year who've spoken to me of going to work in the City and the fabulous salaries they could command.

Do you know what - not one of them has taken a job anywhere but medicine. They knew and I know that if they went into my old City firm with the sheer arrogance they display as medical students they would have their bollocks chewed off by lunchtime.

I'm fed up with hearing that morale is at an all-time low when everywhere I go I see contented doctors who are happy to teach students and treat patients. They have made peace with the fact that they did not become bankers or lawyers and are happy to get on with it."

I agree with the writer of the article. Most British doctors are arrogant and overpaid, and would be unwelcome in any other workplace. In my opinion most do their patients far more harm than good because of their reckless over-prescribing of powerful pharmaceutical drugs/junk, the adverse side-effects of which they know too little, if anything.


Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

Wider implications of the flawed theory that excess calorie intake causes obesity

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

Are you being harmed by the drugs your doctor prescribes for you?

See Overdosing doctors
and prescribed steroids and prescribed HRT and amitriptyline, etc

NHS hospital consultants are 'grossly overpaid'.

Senior doctors are 'grossly overpaid'

Extract from the Telegraph:

"Hospital consultants have enjoyed annual pay rises of more than 25 per cent despite refusing to spend more time with patients, a report by MPs will claim this week.

The doctors received a 27 per cent pay increase last year, on average, taking their earnings to £110,000 a year, but the NHS is yet to see any real benefit because the Government made a mess of contract negotiations, the public accounts committee is due to suggest.

Its report will accuse the Department of Health of failing to get a commitment from the 29,000 consultants in English hospitals to work harder to improve patient care when new contracts were agreed in 2003."

Lose weight and improve your health in many ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

I've been warning for years about the catastrophic effects of drugs recklessly prescribed by ignorant doctors who do not notice or monitor outcomes.

http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3081840.ece

Special report:

Prescription medicines -

from the Independent on Sunday

Extract:

"Each year, Britons are dying in their thousands because of the side effects of prescription and over-the-counter medicines. Reported deaths are up 155 per cent in a decade – and experts are seeking new safeguards. Nina Lakhani reports

Published: 21 October 2007

Thousands of patients are dying each year as a result of side effects from pills prescribed by GPs and hospital doctors.

And while the number of deaths from suspected adverse reactions to prescription drugs has more than doubled in the past 10 years to 973 last year, medical experts warn that as few as one in 10 deaths and other serious complications are being reported.

Doctors' poor prescribing skills and repeated failures to recognise accurately adverse drug reactions in patients have seen deaths multiply by about two and half times since 1996.

Experts are calling for a revamp of the current warning systems designed to alert doctors to potentially lethal prescription drug treatments.

They believe tens of thousands of patients suffer life-threatening, disabling or other serious reactions that need hospital treatment because of a failure to spot and report many dangerous side effects and drug interactions quickly enough.

One study estimated that the equivalent of all the beds from seven general hospitals – 5,600 places – are occupied with patients suffering from drug reactions at any one time, costing the NHS more than £450m each year. Researchers believe around 70 per cent of adverse reactions could be avoided through better training, computerised prescribing systems and staff spending more time talking and listening to patients."

If you read the whole article, you will notice the efforts being made to absolve our overpaid doctors of their appalling guilt in the matter of negligent prescribing. - But the best way to remedy matters is to label this harmful prescribing for what it is - criminal negligence - and have some of these dangerous doctors in court to face criminal charges. That would stop the terrible harm being done to their innocent patients/victims. - Power without responsibility and without sanction is always a recipe for disaster.

See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html and http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html on my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.