Can you trust your doctor?

Maybe, like me, you missed this investigative programme on Channel 4 last week. If so, you may like to view it here, as I have done tonight. "GPs are among the most trusted and respected of all professions. They are our first port of call for most NHS treatment with 800,000 people visiting surgeries every day. But Dispatches reveals that failing doctors routinely slip through the system."

The programme shows very clearly that many GPs lack basic diagnostic competence, even with potentially very serious conditions like bowel cancer, breast cancer and angina. Although they are very highly paid and are accorded high status in our country, there are examples of doctors not following diagnostic guidelines in cases in which prompt diagnosis can mean the difference between life and premature death. Britain has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in Europe.

Even when two health professionals, a practice nurse and a doctor, turned whistleblowers about a GP who had fallen well behind with important patient results - blood tests and the like - the PCT (Primary Care Trust) concerned did not properly inform the patients concerned. The PCT's concern was clearly not patient safety.

Nor was the GMC's concern patient safety. (The GMC is the General Medical Council.) But then when is patient safety ever the GMC's concern? Regular readers of this blog will know that the GMC is a worse-than-useless 'regulator' and that in my opinion we would be better served by abolishing it than by attempting to reform such a travesty of a regulator. I think Trading Standards or Consumer Protection would be more appropriate, since these bodies have some concern for public safety, while the GMC is only concerned about the safety of doctors. If you click on the label GMC beneath this post, you will hopefully find on your screen a clutch of blogposts I have written over the years disparaging the GMC.

However serious the incidents of professional negligence, however many patients suffer and die before their time because of lousy doctors, nothing ever improves. I sometimes think of this as the proud motto of the NHS: We will never willingly improve. - Why don't you try to get something done about our flawed healthcare system and what is, effectively, the unaccountability of doctors? - After all, you, or someone you love, could be the next victim...

I watched Fish Unwrapped tonight on Channel 4 Dispatches

I watched Fish Unwrapped on Channel 4's Dispatches tonight, excellently presented by Alex Thomson. The lax hygiene standards, poor adherence to regulations, and inadequate inspection that obtain in some of the fishing areas from where the UK sources its fish led me to conclude that consumers here cannot trust the safety of much of the fish on sale in supermarkets. If you and your family ever eat fish fingers I suggest you watch this programme using the link I have given. I think you may well decide not to eat them any more. And I suspect there will be fewer takers for prawns after watching the programme: the thought of eating prawns injected with dirty liquid to bulk them up in order to sell the dirty liquid at the same price as the prawns... - Yuk! - Dunno quite what to recommend except that getting out of the EU would be a start, since the EU favours big business and the food industry over mere consumers/taxpayers.

I watched Channel 4's Dispatches: The Truth About Your Food programme last night and it contained the usual untrue claims about food calories...)o;

The format of the programme was mainly about how when people eat in restaurants and the like, they eat more calories than they think, and the high calorie intake was blamed for the increase in obesity in the UK. Assertions like these are untrue and are not supported by any evidence. - All the evidence, in fact, is to the contrary, viz: for overweight/obese people, dieting (i.e. eating fewer calories than the body requires, in order to lose excess weight) almost always results in weight GAIN, not weight loss. - This is because obesity is caused not by overeating, but by fluid retention.

Overweight/obese people can easily and swiftly lose weight by giving up dieting and instead concentrating on avoiding salt and salty food. This reduces the fluid retention.

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.

Half of hospitals in England delay surgery to save money

Half of hospitals delay surgery to save cash

Extracts:

"Almost half of NHS hospitals across England are now deliberately delaying operations to save money.

"Minimum waiting times" have been imposed by at least 43 per cent of Acute NHS Trusts, a survey for Channel 4's Dispatches programme found. Treatments are often postponed for more than 20 weeks, despite staff and equipment being available.

Patricia Hewitt, the beleaguered Health Secretary, has vowed to resign if the NHS fails to balance its books by the end of the financial year.

Her Tory shadow, Andrew Lansley, said: "Staff are being paid to do nothing in the current quarter because Patricia Hewitt needs to get the NHS back into the black by April to save her job. Labour's NHS mismanagement has reached crisis proportions.""

"In an interview for Dispatches, Mrs Hewitt described minimum waiting times as "unfortunate and frustrating but necessary"."