Steroid Victim Campaigners: Babs Diplock and Janice Fairbridge - How Eagerly MPs Strove to Help Them!

You've got to be joking! Read this archived article from The Northern Echo of 1 December 2003 and see how these two very ill, very courageous women got precious little help from MPs in trying to prevent other people from suffering as they had done, from the many appalling side-effects of prescribed steroids.

I've experienced the same kind of 'help' from the dozens of MPs to whom I've written on the subject, e.g. a pre-printed House of Commons postcard dated 18 July 01, which says:

The Rt. Hon. Menzies Campbell Q.C. MP
acknowledges with thanks the receipt of your communication of the
July 2001
the contents of which have been noted.

Well that was a ton of help! - MPs of all three main parties were similarly useless, though I remember there were some kind hand-written words from Charles Kennedy and from Boris Johnson, both of whom had realised that I was a human being.

Innocent British citizens are still being transformed into steroid victims in their thousands every year, even though I have informed MPs, journalists, broadcasters, doctors, etc precisely how to prevent this, but nobody does a damn thing about it, and most sufferers from drug-induced morbid obesity and its attendant host of chronic illnesses and disabilities are treated very poorly indeed by health professionals who are scandalously ill-informed about these matters and routinely add to the problems and suffering of the victims.

I urge you to read http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page. And if you are intending to vote in the forthcoming election you may like to think about how/whether your favoured candidate/party would act to put an end to this wholly unnecessary suffering. My MP, Nick Clegg, has done nothing effective about the matter as yet, though I have written to him many times about it.

See also prescribed steroids and HRT

Further correspondence with Nick Clegg, MP, Leader of the LibDems

First read my recent blog post about Nick Clegg.

Yesterday I received a letter from Nick Clegg, dated 25 February. It says:

Dear Mrs Wilde

I understand from my caseworker that you became very upset during the conversation she had with you today.

I am sorry for this. I believe she was trying to explain that my diary commitments make it impossible for me to come to visit you again and that there are limits to how much pressure I can put on the food industry and on Government to improve the information given to people on the damage that salt in the diet can cause.

She apologises for any misunderstanding caused.

Yours sincerely

Nick Clegg

Today I responded with an email to this email address: libdemleader@parliament.uk
I wrote:

Dear Mr Clegg

Thank you for your letter of apology, dated 25 February 2010. It really is incredible that, after all the letters and emails I have been sending to you since 2005 even before you were elected to Parliament, you still, apparently, have not actually read enough to know what I am wanting your help with! - I have not wasted my scant energy as a steroid victim writing to you countless times in order to ask you to "put pressure on the food industry"! Good grief! I've not asked you to put pressure on the food industry! - Have you never read any of my letters?

It is abundantly clear that the leader of the LibDem party is not interested in helping me or the many thousands of other suffering victims of drug-induced morbid obesity in this country, nor in preventing thousands of other people from becoming new victims of reckless prescribing by some NHS doctors so ignorant of the side-effects of the powerful drugs that they do not give the VITAL warning that while on the medication the patient should avoid eating any salt or food containing any added salt.

What use is a constituency MP who doesn't bother to read any of the letters from a disabled constituent who needs his help? No use at all.

I've got the message. The LibDem leader doesn't care about steroid victims.

Yours sincerely

Margaret Wilde (Ms)

Nick Clegg? - I don't think he'll be getting MY vote!

The other evening I had a phone call from a pleasant person called Angela, who was hoping to secure my vote for Nick Clegg, the incumbant LibDem MP in my constituency. I explained that although I had voted for him previously, I was not inclined to do so again because he had done nothing effective to help me as a steroid victim, and by extension had done nothing effective to help the scores of thousands of other victims of NHS medical negligence who suffer drug-induced obesity but have not been given the vital information they need to reduce or to prevent it. Patients are not being warned to avoid salt and salty food when taking steroids and HRT and the many other drugs that cause sodium and water retention, and so these drugs initiate morbid obesity and a host of other grave and painful health problems in the innocent patients.

My understanding of how Angela and I left it at the end of the phone call was that someone would ring me to arrange for one of the LibDem local councillors to come to see me to discuss the matter, because as a steroid victim I am too ill and disabled to go to see him at his 'surgery'. Instead, unfortunately, I received this afternoon a most unpleasant phone call from one of Clegg's staff, who clearly has a personal agenda and holds an entrenched position, and does not want people to know the truth about steroids and salt sensitivity and how obesity is caused. I asked her never to call me again as I had found the phone call very distressing. I suggest that such an abrasive, combative person is wholly unsuitable to ring ill, disabled people, and furthermore I find it disgraceful that a party worker should seek to deny a disabled constituent a visit from her MP or from one of her local councillors. Goodness knows we all pay a great deal of money for these privileged political beings who, we are told, "work for us", and we should at the very least be assured of courtesy and proper help.

If you would like to help me in my mission to prevent/reduce great and needless suffering you might like to write to my MP, Nick Clegg, at nickclegg@sheffieldhallam.org.uk asking him to visit me, Margaret Wilde, as soon as possible and not be in a rush as he was when he came in 2006.

If you want to read more about the politics of this matter and about Nick Clegg's previous involvement, see my 'political' page.

Clueless Nick Clegg all wrong on pensions. - Out of touch with older voters...

Nick Clegg 'out of touch' and all wrong on pensions
Article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"Asked by a caller to a local news television programme whether he knew how much state pensioners received, he tried to dodge the question, before finally mumbling: "I think it's about £30 quid now, isn't it?"

In fact, the basic pension is £90.70 a week for a single person and £145.45 for a couple, with more available for those claiming tax credits.

Mr Clegg's error, during an interview with ITV Westcountry, threatens to overshadow his keynote speech which will close Liberal Democrat conference.

He was speaking in response to a question from viewer Wally Cotgrave, a retired blacksmith from Sidmouth, Devon, 69, who afterwards said he was unimpressed with Mr Clegg's answer.

Mr Cotgrave, who himself claims the state pension with his wife Maureen, 73, added: "People like him make the right noises and say the right things when they want your vote, but they don't actually know anything. They're all out of touch.

"He's been talking about pensions this week but he doesn't know the first thing about the subject.""

No-one as clueless as this about pensions should have the cheek to talk on the subject and isn't credible as a party leader. I'm one of his constituents and I'm in need of his help. I wrote to him many times and he eventually came to see me but he hadn't read any of my letters so didn't have any grasp of the matter. His office had printed out some of what I had written and he'd apparently walked from the car giving it a glance or two hoping to get the gist of it, and when I opened the door to him he explained that that's what he'd been doing. - I gathered that by smiling and being friendly and charming that was supposed to make up for not having a clue what I had written to him about...)o:

It was impossible for me to cover a complex subject in the half-hour I had and he was clearly anxious to get to his next appointment. - I said I needed to see him again but he hasn't been to see me again. (I am too disabled to go to see him.) - He went through the standard routine of writing a letter to the Secretary of State for Health.

Here are extracts from the email I sent to Nick Clegg on 8th September 2006:

"Thank you very much for your letter dated 09 August 2006 and for sending me a copy of the letter you sent to Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health, and a copy of the reply you received from the Department of Health...

I was disturbed, but not surprised, at the complacent tone of the reply you received from Andy Burnham. - If you were to write to the Department of Transport about traffic signals not working, you would not expect a reply that stated that traffic signals should be working, nor would you find it a satisfactory response. - But you wrote about the need for patients taking steroids or certain other medicines to be warned not to eat salt while taking the drugs and the reply was, "Where appropriate, doctors and pharmacists should advise patients on the need for any modifications to their diet (including salt intake) and/or lifestyle when taking medicines." - Stripped of circumlocution and ambiguity, this reads, "Doctors and pharmacists should warn patients not to eat salt when taking these drugs." - This reply is arrant nonsense! - Patients are NOT being warned to avoid salt and salty food when taking steroids and HRT and other drugs that cause sodium and water retention and thereby initiate morbid obesity and a host of other grave and painful health problems for the innocent patients they are prescribing the drugs for! - If they were, there would not be the many thousands of steroid victims (people with steroid-induced Cushing's Syndrome) that there are! - Nor, to the best of my knowledge, is there any reference to the importance of avoiding salt and salty food while on the medication in the PIL (Patient Information Leaflet) which accompanies the medicine and which I take leave to guess Mr Burnham has not checked up on.

I didn't think much to the website www.medicines.org.uk. There appears to be no warning about salt/sodium re steroids there either, and for amitriptyline, they say, "Increased appetite and weight gain may be a side effect of the medicine or may be due to the relief of depression." - Whereas the cause is sodium and water retention...

This is a tragedy and a scandal similar to that perpetrated by the tobacco industry, which for decades lied/avoided telling the truth about its harmful products. People need to be told the truth about steroids and other medications, and doctors who are so ignorant about the ghastly and extremely common side-effects of the drugs they far too readily prescribe should not be ALLOWED to prescribe them. - The endocrinologist who was largely responsible for the harm done to me by the HRT I was inappropriately prescribed for nearly ten years confessed to me that she had never even HEARD of sodium retention until I showed it to her in a copy of the British National Formulary I had obtained!!!! - It is the most common side-effect of the HRT and is the direct cause of most of the other side-effects of HRT. - She'd never even bothered to look the HRT up in the BNF! - She wept on my shoulder and urged me to sue her for negligence, saying she was well insured, but I have almost as low an opinion of the Law as practised in this country as I have of medicine as practised in this country and did not want to waste my scant energy and money I needed to cope with all my disabilities by suing her."

And I drew Nick Clegg's attention to some of my blog entries about all this. I have not received a reply to my email and I have not heard from Nick Clegg that he is pursuing the subject, and despite my repeated requests for him to come to see me again so that I can better explain the matter to him, he does not appear to intend doing so. (I am too ill and disabled - because of sustained NHS negligence - to go to see him at his surgery.)

I voted for Nick Clegg but it was clearly a wasted vote.

UK Doctors to face regular competency tests and General Medical Council stripped of some powers. Also Nick Clegg, Andy Burnham, complacency...

Doctors to face regular competency tests

Extract:

"Doctors are to face checks every five years to check that they are competent to continue working, under new plans announced today.

The Government is also to strip the doctors' regulatory body of a key powers, in a move likely to anger medical professionals.

The General Medical Council will lose the right to adjudicate in fitness to practise cases when complaints are made against doctors.

The GMC will still investigate concerns about doctors but the final decision on what happens to a doctor is likely to pass to an independent tribunal.

The Government's White Paper is part of a response to the Shipman inquiry, which was heavily critical of the GMC. "

Well it's certainly high time for the GMC to be stripped of its adjudication of complaints about doctors since it has always so scandalously favoured doctors over complainants. But I question the procedures that will comprise the competency tests. - Consider the following:

The high prices of new drugs is claimed to be necessary to pay the huge costs involved in the research and testing that by law has to precede the launch of a new drug. - But this 'justification' rings very hollow to me, a steroid victim.

The British National Formulary is a reference book doctors are assumed to use to look up important information about the drugs they prescribe. - For well over 20 years certainly, and maybe even longer, sodium retention has been among the side-effects listed for the drug that made me a steroid victim. - Because of this side-effect of sodium retention, all patients who are prescribed this medication, or any other of the many medications that result in sodium retention, should be warned not to eat salt or food containing added salt/sodium while taking the medication. - I was not given this VITAL warning and I do not know of even ONE person who was given this warning! - In consequence there are scores of thousands of steroid victims in this country - made needlessly and gravely ill and disabled because they were not given a simple piece of information, which surely, is the very reason that for all the expensive testing... - What use, then, all the testing? all the vast expense? all the laboratory animals that suffered to provide information for the researchers? - ARE ANY OF THE MANY, MANY DOCTORS WHO PRESCRIBE STEROIDS (INCLUDING PREDNISOLONE AND HRT) ET AL IN THIS NEGLIGENT WAY COMPETENT TO PRACTISE? - NOT IN MY OPINION. - THEY ARE CERTAINLY NOT COMPETENT TO PRESCRIBE OR TO MONITOR THESE DRUGS. - The drug companies themselves must have long known of the need to avoid salt while taking these medications and must also have soon become aware, as the numbers of steroid victims grew, that doctors were not giving the warnings, but there was no warning on the packs of drugs with which I was issued...

When is this scandalous situation going to be remedied? - My MP, Nick Clegg, wrote to the Secretary of State for Health about it last year but received only complacency in the response from Andy Burnham, and no promise of any action. See Individuals and agencies who are responsible for the 'Obesity Epidemic' - I hope you will read the whole page.