What's the difference between South African state police killing an innocent taxi-driver and UK state NHS staff killing innocent patients?

What's the difference between South African state police killing an innocent taxi-driver and UK NHS staff killing innocent patients?
 

Is there one? - Yes. - The South African police involved have been arrested...

Francis Report fails to deliver

The Francis Report of the public enquiry into the years-long atrocities that caused horrendous unnecessary suffering to vulnerable patients, and up to 1200 avoidable deaths, and the worst scandal in the history of the NHS, is available to download in PDF format here: http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/report - After a 31 month public enquiry costing millions of ££, the report has failed to recommend criminal prosecutions for those many, many staff who delivered death instead of care. None of the ghastly staff so gravely at fault has been 'named and shamed'. They have not even lost their jobs. Surely they should be subject to criminal charges? If there is no accountability for even 'the worst scandal in the history of the NHS' then there is no hope at all of ending the cruelty and inhumanity so widely evident in so many NHS hospitals.

We all know that NHS cruel negligence would end if the perpetrators were sacked and subject to criminal prosecution.

We have read in the last two days the most recent reports of extreme cruelty to which elderly patients have been subjected in an NHS hospital, the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch. See these reports in the Telegraph: Here, Here and Here. Yet we all know that NHS cruel negligence would end if the perpetrators were sacked and subject to criminal prosecution.

 

We all know that NHS cruel negligence would end if the perpetrators were sacked and subject to criminal prosecution. We may wonder why no UK government in all the years since the NHS was founded in 1948 has done anything useful to stop the cruelty and negligence, the damaged health, the pain and suffering, the shattered lives of innocent patients. - Why? When we all know that NHS cruel negligence would end if the perpetrators were sacked and subject to criminal prosecution. 

 

Why the official pretence that there are only a few bad (guilty) apples among a shiningly dedicated workforce? We all know that bad apples spread their rottenness to the other apples unless they are promptly removed. We all know that NHS cruel negligence would end if the perpetrators were sacked and subject to criminal prosecution.

 

Why are the most guilty (and usually the best paid) personnel moved sideways to jobs in other localities? - jobs exactly similar to those at which they have signally failed? And why are they paid golden severance settlements? We all know that NHS cruel negligence would end if the perpetrators were sacked and subject to criminal prosecution.

The Daily Telegraph investigation exposes corrupt practices in the metal on metal medical devices saga

Journalists from the Telegraph have been investigating the scandal of the faulty 'metal on metal' hip implants. These implants have caused increased pain and disability for patients, some of whose experiences are highlighted in this article. All too often the agencies that the public looks to to safeguard our health and well-being turn out, as in this case, to do the opposite - at great cost in personal suffering to the patients involved and in financial cost to the NHS and the wider economy. In this article we read:

 

"The European system of regulation has prompted widespread concern over whether medical experts are really at the vanguard of deciding which devices can be implanted in patients. 

 The Daily Telegraph and the British Medical Journal therefore decided to investigate the rigour of the licensing process, amid allegations that dozens of private companies are competing with one another to offer licences for medically questionable devices. Was profit being put before patient safety?"

And of course when you read the article you cannot but conclude that profit is indeed being put before patient safety. This is but one of the many undesirable consequences of our present membership of the EU, notorious as it is for corruption and waste. The Telegraph carries an analysis of the flawed regulatory system, written by Carl Heneghan. I urge you to read it, and to put yourself in the place of the innocent victims of this chicanery.

You can count them on the fingers of one thumb

You can count them on the fingers of one thumb - approximately - the civil servants, the Ministers and Secretaries of State, the MPs, the Select Committees, the Department of Health officials, the agents and agencies of the State, the GMC, the GDC, the powerful, the influential, the appointed ones, they who will rush, fly, speed, drift, dawdle, limp, turn to stone, in their resentful trudge to your aid when you have been harmed by that colossal injustice misnamed the NHS. - Just thought I'd clarify that.

What's the best way to prevent asthma, and by extension, prevent deaths from asthma?

Well it was reported in the Telegraph this week that doctors, by way of Dr Dinesh Saralaya, who runs a specialist clinic in Bradford, are saying that 1,000 Asthma deaths a year could be prevented if patients, even those with only mild asthma, would regularly use "their ‘preventer’ inhaler - which contains a low-dose steroid" rather than relying "solely on the ‘reliever’ inhaler when undergoing an attack. " The evidence for this claim appears to be "a poll of 333 people with severe asthma, conducted by Ipsos MORI and funded by drugs firm Novartis". Personally, I would never give much credence to research funded by companies with a financial interest in the results, and in particular to research funded by drug companies hoping to increase the sales and use of their drugs and consequently their company profits. - Would you?

But I have even stronger reasons to regard this report with scepticism. The newspaper report is illustrated with a photo of a child using an inhaler, so I'll consider in particular child sufferers from asthma. - Now I am not a doctor and I have no medical qualifications whatsoever, so if you are wanting a medical opinion you would be better looking elsewhere than on my blog. But like you I do have a brain and I can read. My personal opinion is that the best way to prevent asthma, and to prevent deaths from asthma, is to protect children from a high intake of salt/sodium. My opinion is based on the following research evidence:

In this Telegraph article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2137775/Too-much-television-is-an-asthma-risk.html, about research in Rome, Italy, led by Dr Giuseppe Corbo, despite its misleading title, the crucial finding is, "The study of 20,000 six and seven-year-olds, published in the medical journal Epidemiology, confirmed a strong link with asthma and obesity, but found that salt was the biggest risk. Those with the highest intake of salt were two and a half times more likely to develop asthma." (My emphasis.) I'll bet your brain comes to the same conclusion as mine does, doesn't it? - Protecting children from a high salt diet is the simplest, safest and most effective way to reduce their risk of developing asthma and also from any necessity to take steroid meds as treatment for asthma. (I'm not a big fan of steroid meds, especially if they can be avoided.)

This article, too, supports the wisdom of a low salt intake for children. "According to a new study published by the American Dietetic Association, high-salt foods and snacks are linked to lung changes that trigger asthma symptoms.," and that researchers in Greece found, using questionnaires, "Kids who ate high-salt foods more than three times a week saw their risk of asthma symptoms go up almost five times."

Another drug-free and very important measure to protect children from developing asthma is to avoid dosing children with paracetamol/acetaminophen (aka Tylenol and Calpol). A wealth of statistical data on this webpage http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/health/evidence-mounts-linking-acetaminophen-and-asthma.html?_r=1 suggests a link between acetaminophen and childhood asthma. Also have a read of this article from the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/3233550/Delaying-baby-vaccine-could-cut-asthma.html for another simple measure that "could halve the likelihood of a child developing asthma by the age of seven."

As well as reducing the suffering of many thousands, even of millions, of people, these simple measures could also save about £1 billion a year - nearly one per cent of the NHS entire NHS budget - that is spent on asthma. - What it would not do, of course, is boost the profits of the drug company, Novartis...

Conflicts of Interest on Stilts - or is it on Steroids?

Conflicts of Interest on Stilts - or is it Steroids? - Read George Monbiot's Guardian article. "Democracy itself is being undermined by publicly funded agencies crawling with conflicts of interest and devoid of scrutiny" I urge you to read the whole of this excellent article about how undue power is increasingly being accorded to Big Pharma and other industrial giants, while ordinary voters and other taxpayers go unrepresented on these quangos.

And here is some of what Dr Rath has to say about this: "At the time of writing, the Board of Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) contains retired senior executives from drug companies AstraZeneca and Merck Sharp & Dohme. Similarly, its Executive Board contains a former employee of Glaxo, DuPont and DuPont Pharmaceuticals who is currently an employee of Bristol-Myers Squibb; a former employee of Glaxo Wellcome and GlaxoSmithKline; and a former employee of SmithKline Beecham. Continuing this pattern, the council members on the country’s Medical Research Council (MRC) include representatives of Sanofi Pasteur and Pfizer, whilst its Global Health Group and Translational Research Group both have members from GlaxoSmithKline."

Trainee surgeon's Plastic Bones idea could save NHS cash

BBC News reports that trainee surgeon, Mark Frame's plastic bones idea could save the NHS a lot of money. "Mark Frame realised he could help the NHS cut costs by using freely available software programmes and the internet to create models of bones. A company in the Netherlands transforms 3D CT scan images into plastic models. The bones are used before complex operations to give surgeons a clearer idea of what to expect. The first model of a child's forearm cost £77, and arrived by post in a week."

There is a saving both of cash and time. And it was very good to hear on the radio that Mark Frame is providing this new idea free. He has written a guide so that other surgeons can make their own bones. The guide is being considered for publication by the World Journal of Science and Technology. He is also contactable via twitter: @3Dbones

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...

Is the unaccountability of NHS staff the greatest threat to the health of UK citizens?

Is the unaccountability of NHS staff the greatest threat to the health of UK citizens? - Certainly many people would be of that opinion - especially if they have had personal experience of serious NHS negligence or a member of their family has suffered because of it. - Until you experience the NHS Complaints Procedures for yourself you can have no conception of how useless, evil and corrupt they are: how the NHS routinely and literally gets away with murder. Read in today's Telegraph report how despite presiding over the avoidable suffering and deaths of around 400 patients at that infamous, inhuman Stafford hospital between January 2005 and March 2009, Martin Yeates is not even going to appear at the public inquiry into the scandal. Like many another overpaid apology for a public servant he is claiming to be too ill to be questioned. - That 'illness' is Cowardice.

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.

Good News about the 'Duty of Candour'

You may remember I wrote last month about Will Powell and others campaigning for a Duty of Candour (Robbie's Law) with the aim of reducing medical errors and associated cover-ups. Some of you may have signed the petition for which I gave a link. - I am delighted to report a good outcome to this long campaign:

AvMA PRESS RELEASE For immediate release
GOVERNMENT APPLAUDED FOR INTRODUCING A "DUTY OF CANDOUR"

In its response to the NHS Future Forum report published today, the Government has finally committed itself to a Duty of Candour in healthcare - an enforceable duty to be open and honest with patients or their families when things go wrong. Although the detail of how the new duty will work is not yet known, it is described as a new contractual duty on healthcare providers. Additionally, the Government has said that it will give legal force to patients' rights in the NHS Constitution, which also covers being honest about mistakes.

Peter Walsh, Chief Executive of AvMA, said:
"This is great news - potentially the biggest breakthrough in patients' rights and patient safety since the creation of the NHS. The devil will be in the detail. The duty must be clearly set out in statute and organisations who fail to comply must be held to account. But we are extremely grateful to the Government for having listened. This new duty should be known as "Robbie's Law" in honour of Robbie Powell, the young boy who became the symbol of our campaign and whose family have done more than anyone to raise awareness for the need for change".

Blackdog has written more fully about this.

Deplorable level of NHS obstetric care

Deplorable level of NHS obstetric care reported in the Daily Mail. "Peter Walsh, chief executive of Action for Victims of Medical Accidents, said: 'We never seem to make much progress with CTG failures. 'This problem has been around for years. Hundreds and hundreds of children have either been damaged or killed due to an inability to spot the warning signs of a baby in distress. I wonder if the NHS will ever learn.'"

Can there be another country that treats elderly patients worse than the UK?

Frankly, I doubt it. So many times I have blogged about elderly patients in UK hospitals being left unfed or underfed, dehydrated because no one gave them a drink of water, lying in bed in pain and in misery, humiliation and excreta, because no one had the decency or compassion to take them to the toilet or help them onto a commode or bedpan, often with bedsores or avoidable injuries because of poor nursing. Over and over and over and over again we read accounts of such awful suffering. It makes you sick to the stomach and sick at heart. This is our much-vaunted NHS! These are our healthcare professionals.

Yesterday was another of these days of shame, the news media full of the scandalous 'care' accorded to elderly patients in 3 hospitals in particular - 3 in particular out of 12 hospitals that the Care Quality Commission inspected unannounced and were appalled by. See this BBC News report. Yes, I know that not every British hospital and not every nurse treats elderly vulnerable patients in this disgracefully cruel way, but how does that excuse the ones that do?

What do we routinely hear after such sordid revelations? - It is usually a statement couched in strange jargon-ridden gobbledygook that favours weasel words and the passive voice. We are told that 'lessons have been learned' and other lies. And nothing changes. No one is arraigned and charged for their cruelty and neglect, no one is even sacked, for their dereliction of duty, for their failure to fulfil their duty of care. We all pay a great deal of money by way of taxes for our massively flawed NHS. Some of us, especially the elderly and the vulnerable, are getting a very poor deal indeed.

"The Plot Against the NHS" - This review has the ring of truth

Dr Richard Horton is editor in chief of the Lancet, and in this Guardian article is reviewing The Plot Against the NHS by Colin Leys and Stewart Player. I recognise the chicanery and deceptions that have been practised by politicians of all hues for many years in all aspects of the NHS. While I am certainly not a fan of the NHS, the deficiencies of which I have frequently drawn attention to and deplored, I see no redeeming features in the privatisation of parts of it. What is overwhelmingly needed is proper accountability by the medical profession, the nursing profession and other healthcare professionals, and by the bureaucracies and management that administer both public and private healthcare. - By which I mean accountability to patients, who both as taxpayers and as private patients, pay the salaries of the Healthcare Industry, but are grossly ill-served both by the futile Complaints Procedures and by the partisan legal system, when they are harmed by professional negligence, ignorance or incompetence.

Will Powell is campaigning with others for a Duty of Candour (Robbie's Law) in the hope that it would reduce medical errors and associated cover-ups

Among the online Comments beneath the Telegraph article about Lord Crisp's disgraceful attempts to cover up NHS hospital maternity deaths, is one by Will Powell, who tragically lost his 10-year-old son, Robbie, to gross medical negligence in 1990. Since his loss Will, whom I met some years ago at a SIN (Sufferers of Iatrogenic Neglect) conference, has been campaigning against lying by healthcare professionals, and against the cover-ups that permit them to treat patients negligently with complete impunity.

I hope you will read what Will Powell has written and be shocked by this extract: "As the law stands now, however, doctors have no duty to give parents of a child who died as a result of their negligence a truthful account of the circumstances of the death, nor even to refrain from deliberately falsifying records."

If you have not yet signed the petition for Robbie’s Law, you can access it here.

Lord Crisp, the Dept of Health, NHS hospital errors and political pressures

If you wear rose-coloured spectacles or blinkers when viewing the NHS, and if you think governments give a toss about NHS patients in any capacity other than as voters, then read this recent Telegraph article, the content of which should be electrifying. It informs us that Lord Crisp "David Cameron's new health advisor attempted to cover up a hospital scandal in which nine women died giving birth." Furthermore, "When he was permanent secretary at the Department of Health (DoH), Lord Crisp put pressure on NHS regulators to wait until after a General Election to ban the hospital from carrying out caesarean sections." This evidence was given to a public enquiry by Sir Ian Kennedy, former chairman of the Healthcare Commission. I urge you to read the whole of the article and to be shocked by it, because until people other than the actual victims become informed and seek reform of the evil system that sustains the NHS's lack of concern for patient safety, nothing effective will be done to correct it.

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.

Medical Sexism in the Midlands

When I was serving as an elected Vice-President of the College of Health, there were three serious wrongs that I was campaigning about: the cruel uselessness of the NHS Complaints Procedures, the need for a rational approach to the treatment of pain, and the sex prejudice of doctors that led to failure to investigate and treat women's physical problems. As a result, I received post from people damaged by the system. Most of this post was about the great suffering caused to women by the sex prejudice of doctors.

This is the letter I received from a woman in the Midlands:

Dear Margaret Wilde

Following the item by Peter Pallot in the Daily Telegraph I write to support your view that women, in particular, are too often dismissed as neurotic by their doctors, and no real attempt is made to find the real nature of their illness.

As a member of the Endometriosis Society - recently appointed a National Trustee - I know of many sufferers, including myself, who have for years been treated as neurotic before emergency admission to hospital has revealed the real cause of the symptoms.

Endometriosis is a very debilitating disease and the symptoms can be very vague. Many sufferers say that only when they pluck up the courage to say that intercourse is very painful that doctors do something about their problems. It is felt that when a man's pleasure is affected 'that can't be allowed!'

My own case with Endometriosis began with painful periods at the age of fifteen. I was treated with tranquillisers, over a number of years. I was told 'to pull myself together', by all the doctors in my practice. I did to some extent accept that what they said about me must be correct. (Now this makes me angry to think about it.) Just three weeks before emergency surgery in July 1971 - age 27 years - I was threatened with admission to Psychiatric Hospital if 'I didn't pull myself together'. On the day of my admission to hospital my GP said I had a pulled stomach muscle! Later that night my left ovary was removed in 'a near gangrenous state' and half of my right ovary. The surgeon, a lady, was very angry about my treatment, as I had the most advanced case of endometriosis she had ever seen.

In 1978 I began suffering again and had the galling experience of repeated visits to the doctors who still treated me as neurotic. In the spring of '79, almost 12 months later, a laparoscopy was done (to shut me up) and I was found to have Chronic Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, Multiple Adhesions and Chronic Infection. No wonder I had felt so ill!

Almost 5 years ago I began an association with the Endometriosis Society which is a self help support group. My aims were to try and do something to prevent other women going through my horrendous experiences. The most recent effort with this aim in mind has been the production of the booklet 'Endometriosis' for General Practitioners. At the moment its distribution has been limited to Coventry, Warwickshire, two London boroughs, Lincoln and Humberside, although when local groups raise the funds all General Practitioners throughout the country will receive one. Unfortunately Coventry and Warwickshire doctors have not returned the feedback sheets (only 2 out of 600) - but in the other areas the reception has been marvellous.

Thank you for doing this work on behalf of women.

Any further help you require, please contact me.

I have enclosed a copy of the booklet for you.

Kind Regards

Kay Adcocks
(Kay gave her permission for her name to be included here.)
..............................................................................................
You can read HERE about some of my own experience of terrible suffering and permanent harm done by the sex prejudice of health professionals.

Medical Sexism in the South West

When I was serving as an elected Vice-President of the College of Health, there were three serious wrongs that I was campaigning about: the cruel uselessness of the NHS Complaints Procedures, the need for a rational approach to the treatment of pain, and the sex prejudice of doctors that led to failure to investigate and treat women's physical problems. As a result, I received post from people damaged by the system. Most of this post was about the great suffering caused to women by the sex prejudice of doctors.

This is the letter I received from a suffering woman in the South West:

Dear Margaret Wilde

An article in the Daily Telegraph alerted me to your work concerning the treatment sick women receive at the doctor's surgery. I hope my story will interest you and add grist to your mill. At least that way something positive will have been salvaged from an otherwise horribly negative experience.

In short, I can vouch that sick women truly do get treated as neurotics when they actually have some real and serious condition. The doctor's surgery is a place where women can meet indifference, complacency, and downright negligence all cowering under the prejudice that the greater part of a woman's problems is simply that she is a woman and therefore must be neurotic and nowhere near as ill as she claims to be. I am allowed to use as strong words as I please because I have nearly died not once but twice and am still ill and am still battling against the old black magic called the NHS.

My story is long and complicated so I shall try to be as concise as possible. The original problem that I suffered from was not complicated at all. At 22 years old with a small baby I was suddenly overtaken with terrific pain in my back. The attack lasted for a few hours. I was alone, no telephone, no neighbours, and had to wait till my husband returned before I could see the doctor. With very little ado he diagnosed that I had an infection in my water that travelled to my kidneys, and prescribed antibiotics. Over the next six years and through repeated attacks of terrible pain he stuck to that diagnosis and kept writing out the prescriptions for antibiotics, never once bothering to confirm or deny his critical diagnosis by any test or examination or referral to another doctor. My condition of course grew worse but that didn't seem to bother him. Time and time again I was offered Septrim and Flagyl for my 'infection' and nothing else. Even at the point when I lay dying in my bed for five days with pain so bad that one doctor administered shots of morphine to me, when he, my doctor, managed to visit me, all he offered was a cheery smile and a prescription for Septrim and Flagyl and hurriedly left. The next day, though called out first thing in the morning, he breezed in at four in the afternoon. Five days I lay prostrate in my bed, the culmination of a long period of illness, and he did not consider me to be seriously ill. Perhaps he thought that young women took to their beds as a matter of course.

I was finally admitted to hospital where it was discovered that I had an Ovarian cyst that had strangulated my ovary rendering it gangrenous and causing peritonitis. The explanation for his tardy treatment was really quiite simple. He thought I was neurotic; he made me feel I was neurotic. At one stage he implied that I was wasting his time by continually visiting his surgery. He had many patients to look after and most of them were far sicker than U was. Those were his words. When my husband saw him about a sore throat he said, "It's amazing how someone like you never comes to see me unless they are really bad, when other people are here all the time over every little thing." My husband took his inference that the other people referred to meant me. A man with a sore throat is automatically assumed to be truly suffering while a woman with a persistent pain is a persistent nuisance. That he never took my suffering seriously is confirmed by the fact that he never bothered to investigate the series of infections that I was supposed to be suffering from.

The operation to remove my ovary saved my life. But it left me with a shattered digestion and a series of terrifying abdominal spasms. Down to my new doctor's again. That went on for another four years. Was it taken seriously? Was it heck. Though I repeatedly maintained that it was caused by the operation, I was told that it was my gall bladder, that I was allergic to wheat, that it was simply bellyache caused by adhesions and it was not at all serious. Why was my suffering never taken seriously? Why? Why? Why? In August last year I suffered a spasm to end all spasms. My bowel was dangerously involved with an adhesion and finally won by twisting itself around the adhesion and strangulating itself. There is no way to describe the pain of that.

Another emergency operation. Gangrene again. Lost six inches of bowel. Recovery from that operation was marred by abscesses. When they eventually disappeared I realised that I was not going to recover normally. I am in pain all the time. But what has enraged me beyond words is that I still meet with the same old cavalier attitude from doctors. My God, what does a woman have to suffer from before she is treated with the same respect as a man? If I suffered from a heart complaint I'm sure I would be taken seriously. After all it kills men. But death by adhesions though agonising is a lesser form of death. After a lot of pushing I'm finally going for a barium meal X-ray. But how I have had to push for that! I find writing this letter hard as I am still very weak and distressed. I have had two serious conditions that have been ignored by doctors till they nearly killed me. I am left to pick up the pieces of my shattered life in pain and virtually told that there's not much can be done for me. I could not have received worse treatment if I tried. A witch doctor in Africa would at least have cared for my spirit, and a money-grabbing doctor in America may not have respected my sex but he would have respected my money. I would rather be faced with the prospect of a large bill than a life of pain. But the NHS cares for neither God nor Mammon, so the likes of me get lost along the way. I am suing everybody that I can but that is no consolation either for my pain or the lost years. Most of all I wanted the world to know what can happen to a young woman who develops a simple complaint like an ovarian cyst and what the system can do to her.

Then I came across your article in the paper and suddenly felt that I was not alone. On behalf of women like me I want you to scream from the rooftops that lives are being shattered by this prejudice. My list of complaints against the NHS is endless. But the prevailing factor has been that of prejudice, the old prejudice that most of my trouble lies in the fact that i cannot cope either with my pain or my life. The fact that my distress may be genuine is the last one to be considered.

I hope you find my story appalling. I hope it will help you in some way. Here in Cornwall I shall try to do all I can to expose the complacent attitude towards women. Please write to me if I can be of further help to you. You have my best wishes.

Yours
..............................................................................................
You can read HERE about some of my own experience of terrible suffering and permanent harm done by the sex prejudice of health professionals.