Soaring drugs bill 'threatens to bankrupt NHS'

I have copied and pasted the following, with the Comment paragraph, from Dr Rath's newsletter. I fully concur with Dr Rath's views on this matter. My personal strongly-held, sincere belief is that pharmaceutical drugs do far, far more harm than good and are the cause of most of the avoidable illness in the world. They are a major cause of obesity, and in particular, of morbid obesity. They have certainly done me great harm: destroyed my life, health and happiness, and I would urge caution on everyone contemplating taking prescribed medication. Check it out as thoroughly as you can before deciding whether to take it.

The NHS risks bankruptcy from a soaring drugs bill which is outstripping Britain's GDP growth according to a report. The report, by the pressure group Compass, calls for regulation of the pharmaceutical industry to curb prices. The coalition of academics, campaigners and union leaders also warns that the billions spent by big pharma on seminars and conferences gives companies undue influence over doctors.
Read article in the Guardian (UK)
Comment: If the health service in the UK - where the government can still negotiate drug prices - is risking bankruptcy, what chance do other countries stand of avoiding a similar fate? In the U.S., for example, the government has already capitulated to the pharma mafia and essentially pays whatever the drug cartel wants. Meantime, whilst its annual sales now total 773 billion dollars, adverse reactions from the cartel’s drugs continue to kill and injure millions of innocent patients each and every year. In the U.S., it has been estimated that a staggering 2,216,000 hospitalized patients have serious adverse drug reactions (ADRs) each year, whilst 106,000 have fatal ADRs. This means that such reactions are between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in that country. Meantime, the drug cartel spends billions of dollars every year disingenuously marketing its drugs to doctors under the guise of "continuing medical education", whilst, at the same time, omitting to mention that most of them cause a multitude of new diseases as a result of their known long-term side effects. And, of course, as if all this were not bad enough, the cartel is holding over six-billion people hostage by doing everything it can to eliminate the non-patentable natural alternatives to its products. To learn what you can do to fight back, visit the NT-2 website and support the call for a second ‘Nuremberg’ Tribunal.

The NHS Will Have to Cut Down on Spending

The BBC News website reports that the NHS will experience severe financial cuts after 2011.

The NHS Confederation cites rising costs within the health service, and new treatments and the ageing population as two of the factors causing the inflation in the health service. They suggest a cap on the budget for new drugs and the possible exclusion of care such as IVF, homeopathy and elements of dentistry.

I have some further suggestions to make:

1. A complete ban on psychotropic prescription drugs for children under 18.
2. A complete ban on antidepressants, since they don't work. - See Anti-depressants 'no better than dummy pills'
3. Massive cuts on all prescription drug budgets to curb reckless, damaging over-prescribing.
4. An end to breast enlargements and gender re-assignment operations on the NHS.
5. Put strict legal limits on the amount of salt/sodium that food producers are allowed to add to their products and that food retailers are allowed to sell. This would improve most people's health very quickly indeed.
6. Make it a legal requirement that salt levels appear on the labels at the front of all processed foods and and sandwiches, etc.
7. Have all retail packs of table salt labelled with the information that added salt damages the health of most people, especially children, pregnant women and overweight/obese people.
8. Put a heavy tax on table salt.
9. Abolish higher awards/merit awards for hospital consultants, which, at the top, can double pay to nearly £200,000.

Above all, however, health professionals need to tell the truth about obesity. The lies need to be admitted and the truth told. This would almost instantly improve the health and happiness of millions of users of the NHS and very greatly reduce chronic illness in particular. See
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations.

Obesity is mainly caused by sodium retention/fluid retention/salt sensitivity, not by eating too much food. It can be easily reduced by cutting down on salt/sodium and salty food. The calorie explanation for obesity (eating too many calories and not taking much exercise – i.e. greed plus laziness) is clearly wrong because many – possibly most – people can eat as much as they like and not become overweight, even if they take very little exercise. – They are what I call on my website ‘the lucky people’. – They are the slim people. – They are the people who have healthy veins and kidneys and are not sensitive to salt. They simply excrete in the urine any excess salt and its attendant water, so they do not gain weight by fluid retention.

The reason they do not put on excess weight from fat retention when they overeat is that they simply excrete in their faeces any excess fat/calories they eat. (Faeces tend to contain a lot of fat/calories, which is why animal dung is used as fuel in many countries.)
A few years ago BBC2 showed a series of programmes called “The Truth About Food” and I learnt about some Danish research which throws light on this. – See http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/humanbody/truthaboutfood/slim/calcium.shtml where you will read: "a high calcium intake increases the excretion of fat in the faeces". – There is the necessary information! – In fact, the researchers found that twice as much fat was excreted on a high calcium intake as on a low calcium intake – and this was independent of calorie intake. – They also found that dairy calcium (they suggest yoghurt) is a particularly good source for this extra calcium.
Even the frequent claim that fat deposits in the bodies of fat people are there to be drawn upon 'in leaner times' is a pure guess and is not correct. - The fat deposits are caused by the altered body chemistry (depletion of calcium and other essential minerals in the body) resulting from excess blood volume/fluid retention/salt sensitivity.

So to reduce fat retention, if it is present, the most important thing is to alter the diet to reduce the fluid retention which is the initiating cause of excess weight and the primary reason for fat people being short of calcium and for fat people ‘dieting’. That means reducing sodium intake and ensuring plenty of fruit and vegetables in the diet (because their high potassium content helps to displace sodium from the body).

And specifically it also means having a higher intake of calcium, especially, if possible, from a dairy source like natural unsweetened yoghurt. – It is also necessary to ensure sufficient vitamin D intake, as this is needed to metabolise the calcium. There is increasing research evidence that vitamin D deficiency is associated with being overweight - and insufficiency of vitamin D is quite common, as is widely reported, e.g. here - http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp

In my personal opinion it is neither necessary nor desirable to adopt a low fat diet. Low fat intake can be harmful, especially for small children.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.
Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers
Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions
and FAT RETENTION

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

NHS chiefs and Whitehall officials enjoyed taxpayer-funded "away day" at one of Britain's must luxurious hotels as the UK economy slid into recession.

NHS chiefs enjoy taxpayer-funded away day at luxury hotel as recession bites
article in the Telegraph

Extract 1:

"As private firms cut costs and laid off workers, nine senior managers from the NHS and the Department of health spent two days at the Great Fosters hotel near Egham, Surrey.

Great Fosters is a moated Elizabethan house with 38 rooms costing an average of £200 a night.

The Departmental Board of the Department of Health - which includes the NHS chief executive and the chief medical officer - were there on Thursday 11th and Friday 12th of September this year."

Extract 2:

"Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "It is totally wasteful for NHS executives to live a life of luxury at taxpayers' expense. This money was meant to improve the experience of people stuck in crowded hospital wards, not to house bureaucrats in top notch hotels. It is an outrage that while everyone else tightens their belts, the public sector just keeps on spending.""

Millions of pounds have been wasted on NHS schemes which have not treated any patients, the Govt's own figures reveal, the Sunday Telegraph reports

Millions wasted by NHS on clinics which never opened their doors
article in the Sunday Telegraph

Extract 1:

"Almost £20 million has been spent on contracts which were axed last year soon after a shift in policy following the appointment of Alan Johnson as health secretary.

Close to £7 million was spent by the Department of Health (DoH) on plans to build clinics to perform basic operations and tests which were later abandoned.

A further £12.5 million was paid to private firms, after negotiations for other clinics were halted, or centres closed just months after contracts begun.

Doctors and opposition politicians described the revelations, buried in the DoH's annual accounts, as a "scandalous" waste of taxpayers money which should have been spent treating patients."

Extract 2:

"Earlier investigations by Health Service Journal have revealed that close to £220 million may have been wasted among existing private centres who were paid "block" rates by the NHS, regardless of how many patients they treated.

The latest revelations about wastage among units which did not even open their doors shocked experts.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance said: "This is yet another example of taxpayers being left with the bill for gross mismanagement in the NHS.""

The Department of Health is the pits in so many ways, but you've got to admit that it's absolutely ace at wasting money...)o:

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, 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!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods

The National Health Service pay deal was rushed, went over budget and has produced little benefit for patients

King's Fund: NHS pay deal failed to deliver for patients and staff - Independent

Extract:

"The overhaul of National Health Service pay was rushed, went over budget and has produced little benefit for patients, the Government will be told today.

Under the new system, more than one million NHS employees - including nurses, midwives, porters and most managers - were put into one of nine salary bands in an attempt to harmonise pay across the country.

But the King's Fund, an independent health think-tank, has delivered a damning verdict on the pay structure, which was finally introduced after five years of negotiations with unions.

It concluded that transferring staff to the Agenda for Change system became "an end in itself" for some NHS trust managers rather than a way to deliver benefits such as treating patients more quickly.

The fund found nurses were unhappy with the pay structure and it warned that the costs of the new system, which exceeded its budget by £220m, were more obvious than the benefits."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

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.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and Associated health conditions

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

NHS spending priorities: loadsamoney for managers (and doctors)...

NHS manager's payout is nearly £1m - Telegraph

Extract:

"An NHS manager has been given a redundancy package worth almost £1 million in what was described as "a lottery win rather than a payout".

David Johnson, the former head of a regional strategic health authority, was one of about 70 staff who left the organisation when it was abolished as part of a restructuring programme.
The 50-year-old received a package worth £899,810 including salary and pension arrangements. The re-organisation was supposed to save £250 million a year in administration costs. However, the NHS is thought to have spent at least £320 million on redundancy packages to those who have lost their jobs.

The Royal College of Nursing is concerned that NHS managers are creaming off large sums of money in settlements that should be spent on patient care."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
How to Lose weight!

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.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods
and Associated health conditions

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

The government has agreed to provide £220m a year from the NHS budget to resolve a row over long-term care costs

NHS cash to tackle row over long-term care - Guardian

Extract:

"The government has agreed to provide £220m a year from the NHS budget to resolve a long-running row about who pays for the continuing care of patients transferred from hospital to nursing homes.

Ivan Lewis, the care services minister, said yesterday that the decision would help up to 10,000 people with severe dementia or other incapacitating conditions, who were liable to pay for intensive support to carry out the basic routines of daily life.

Mr Lewis said the aim was to eliminate a postcode lottery whereby older people in some parts of England were provided with free care, while others who might be in greater need were denied it."


Lose weight, lower your risk of vascular dementia and stroke, lower your high cholesterol level and your high blood pressure, reduce your risk of heart disease and heart attack, and benefit your health in countless other ways by eating less salt! - Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! -

How to Lose weight!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

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

Will NHS treatments be rationed?

Doctors admit: NHS treatments must be rationed - The Observer

Extract:

"British doctors will take the historic step of admitting for the first time that many health treatments will be rationed in the future because the NHS cannot cope with spiralling demand from patients.

In a major report that will embarrass the government, the British Medical Association will say fertility treatment, plastic surgery and operations for varicose veins and minor childhood ailments, such as glue ear, are among a long list of procedures in jeopardy."

If the truth were to be told about obesity, the health of the nation would be immeasurably improved and the need for treatments would be greatly lessened! - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html

Read my Mensa article Obesity and the Salt Connection

All that is necessary to curb the growing incidence of obesity is to tell the truth about what causes it! - Obesity is NOT caused by overeating. It is caused by fluid retention, frequently because of taking prescribed medications, especially steroids such as prednisolone, prednisone and HRT, and anti-depressants such as amitriptyline. (When doctors prescribe drugs that cause sodium retention and water retention they should warn the patient not to eat salt, or food containing salt, while taking the medication. When they do not give this warning, the inevitable consequence is considerable weight gain.)

Read here about the groups of people who are vulnerable to salt: Vulnerable Groups

Obesity can be easily reduced by seriously reducing your salt/sodium intake and eating plenty of fruit and fresh vegetables. - It is important not to restrict calories. - 'Slimming' or 'dieting' is unnecessary, ineffective and often harmful.

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

A "disastrous failure" in the government's strategic planning allowed NHS trusts to indulge in reckless recruitment of extra staff.

MPs criticise 'boom and bust' NHS planning - Guardian article

Extract:

"A "disastrous failure" in the government's strategic planning allowed NHS trusts to indulge in reckless recruitment of extra staff causing unsustainable pressure on the pay bill, a Labour-controlled Commons select committee said yesterday.

Between 1999 and 2004 the number of nurses employed by the NHS in England increased by more than 67,000 - about 340% more than the Department of Health intended. Over the same period the number of GPs grew by 4,098 - or 105% more than the official plan.

The health select committee said: "It was too easy to throw new staff into the task of meeting targets rather than consider the most cost-effective way of doing the job. Large pay increases were granted without adequate steps being taken to ensure increases in productivity in return." Increases in the NHS budget were seen as "a blank cheque for recruiting new staff". This caused the NHS to lurch "from boom to bust"."