Deluded Dentists?

Women with agonising toothache in the 1980s used to encounter daftnesses like these:

Saying that you are in such agonising pain that you are contemplating suicide, proves you are 'really' depressed. You do not need your imaginary pain to be dealt with; you just need antidepressants.

"Prescribing antidepressants to someone who is contemplating suicide because of the intensity and long duration of pain is a life-saving measure and I am proud of saving lives in this way." - A belief (about their women patients) commonly held by GPs in the 80s.

"He wasn't being rude to you. Speaking like that is just his way." - This was Miss Anne Atkinson's response when I told her that Mr Reg Dinsdale had repeatedly addressed me as "You Fat Depressives" (plural), instead of by my name. These two misguided health professionals worked at the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital. Mr Dinsdale was an 'eminent' oral surgeon. Miss Atkinson was a Senior Lecturer in dentistry who claimed to be trying to help me.

When I told my then GP, Dr Hazel Radley, of Mr Dinsdale's insulting way of speaking to me, she described it as "Shock Treatment", intended to 'shock' me out of believing that I was in pain!

Miss Atkinson demonstrated her own mastery of daft dental logic by insisting to me that I was not really in pain, I only thought I was in pain!

And when Mr Dinsdale was performing an apicectomy on my UL2, he told his student assistant that Depressives did not actually feel pain, they only complained about being in pain! - And when bone failed to regenerate after his poorly performed apicectomy, which had left me in greater pain than before, he told the student who was looking at the X-ray with him that 'neurotics' were very poor at regenerating bone! - Very clearly, this man was deluded. An 'ordinary dentist', a general dental practitioner, did a re-apicectomy on the UL2 the following year, and this time the op was done properly and the infection was properly removed so that the bone did at last regrow.

I was sent by Roger Heesterman - Community Dental Officer, I think his title was - in a further stage of the cynical game of pretending that something was being done to help me, to see a Mr Hirschmann, another high-up dentist at a dental hospital in another city, (Heestermann could, and should, in my opinion, have helped me himself. He was a qualified dentist after all. But I suppose there was some Dept of Health rule that people complaining of dental negligence must on no account receive any actual help, only exhausting hassle so that they'd give up their struggle.)

Hirschman said that no doubt I did have some dental problems, but that the real problem was depression. He said that he wouldn't indulge me by taking any X-rays and that none of the dentists there would help me, but possibly one of the students could be spared after the summer holidays...

In contrast to all this daft dangerous misogynistic nonsense:

I had an article published in Mensa magazine about my great suffering at the hands of high-up dental drips:  Cruelty, Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS: Fighting the System. Someone sent a copy of the article to an academic health campaigner, and she wrote to me to commend me for my "excellent piece in Mensa about customer complaints". She continued, "I have been fighting the medical attitude to consumer complaints - especially from women - for years - as a member of a Regional Health Board, then Chair of the Patients Association, now as a lay member of the General Medical Council.

I certainly remember a number of cases from my days at the Patients Association of patients with intractable dental pain who were treated as neurotic or frankly loony - and all women. They were laughed at, insulted and generally had a rotten time."

She went on to suggest that I should write a similar article for the British Dental Journal to get to the professionals directly. - I did, in fact, do this, but the article was rejected, as you might, perhaps, have guessed it would be.


The very top man in the whole world on the subject of pain used to be Professor Patrick Wall of University College, London, who died in 2001. In a personal letter to me some years ago, he wrote: "Simple-minded doctors and dentists (the majority) have a built-in scale of how much pain they expect for how much damage. If you fall outside their norm, you are labelled as mad. It is they who need their heads examining. They also need to read and think."

Well done to the Daily Mail for campaigning about the appalling care provided to far too many elderly patients by our unaccountable NHS!

As readers of this blog already know, the NHS Complaints Procedure does nothing about complaints except make life harder for the complainants; it is a sheer waste of time and effort making a complaint about poor or negligent treatment. And Kenneth Clarke, the Secretary of State for 'Justice', is proposing to remove clinical negligence from the scope of the civil legal aid scheme, so no help there either for anyone brave enough to take on as adversaries the extremely experienced legal eagles employed by the NHS and the healthcare professionals.

So very well done to the Daily Mail for campaigning about the appalling care accorded to far too many elderly patients by our non-accountable NHS, and for making a large donation to the Patients Association, a charity that tries to help victims of poor NHS treatment.

13% increase in written complaints about NHS and community services

The Patients Association reports a rise of over 13% in the number of written complaints about the NHS and community services, and Katherine Murphy, Chief Executive, deplores "stories of neglect, misdiagnosis and a distinct lack of care and compassion," and states that the number of complaints between 2008/9 to 2009/10 rose from 89,139 to 101,077, and that this is certainly a massive underestimate of the number of people who actually want to complain. She says, "We need a fundamental review of the complaints process. As a first step every person that makes a complaint should be asked to rate the response and that information should also be published. That will also enable us to pick up those Trusts making no effort to learn. At a time when the NHS is facing budget constraints, we want to make sure that the quality of care patients receive is not compromised and that staff and management become more open and more accepting of complaints and respond constructively when something goes wrong."

A previous Chair of the Patients Association told me years ago that she did not know of even one case of a complainant being satisfied with the response to their complaint. My own experience of the NHS Complaints Procedures is that the complainant is actually punished for making the complaint, and nothing at all is done to help the complainant or to prevent appalling treatment from happening again. Indeed, that the healthcare staff complained about are routinely protected from censure or sanction, ensures that poor treatment will be repeated.

We should pay heed to the words of Katherine Murphy, Director of the Patients Association

In this Telegraph article we read that "Two of the bosses of the company at the centre of the out-of-hours GP scandal have gone on to other jobs running similar patient services for the NHS." These two bosses are GPs. You will remember that Andrew Lansley, Secretary of State for Ill-Health, who infamously refuses to ban the addition of transfats to food products, despite NICE's recommendation to do so and save up to 7,000 premature deaths a year, is planning to put £billions into the money-grubbing hands of entrepreneurial doctors like this pair.

Extract from the article:

"Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: "It never ceases to amaze me that people can move from one senior post to another without having to justify their failures or be held to account.

"It is appalling that these individuals are involved in out-of-hours again. Where is the accountability and what message does that send to patients and the taxpayer?"

She added that it 'raises many issues' about the government's NHS reforms and plans to put GPs in charge of commissioning care.

Ms Murphy said: "I wonder if the Secretary of State [is] reconsidering some of his plans for GP commissioning now.""

Health Charities criticise Labour's Record on Health

See report about a letter to the Sunday Telegraph. Among the signatories, "Katherine Murphy, from The Patients Association said: “When the public hears that money is being made available for a specific purpose, like carers, or Alzheimer’s, or children’s health, they think that is where it will go. I think people would be so shocked and saddened to realise just how often this has not been the case.”"

I would certainly agree with the points made in the letter, which currently appears online on page http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/7599337/Parties-must-be-more-specific-about-health-care-funding.html

But I would criticise all the parties with regard to their policy on Health. I believe they all make claims like 'The NHS is safe with us' or similar. - Frankly, it's not the safety of the NHS that I care about; it's the well-being and safety of the vast numbers of patients who have suffered, or continue to suffer, appalling treatment at the hands of a bureaucratic, callous, arrogant, ill-informed, self-serving, drug-pushing, shockingly expensive, almost completely unaccountable State machine that has the gall to call itself a National Health Service.

See my Mensa article on Cruelty, Clinical Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS

and my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Details of the appalling nursing care endured by many elderly patients in NHS hospitals

BBC News reports on some of the individual personal accounts of suffering and neglect brought to public attention earlier this week by the Patients Association.

Details of these individual case studies are indicative of the appalling standards of healthcare offered to too many unfortunate sick people in NHS hospitals.

I find the tone of the comments by the spokespeople for the hospitals chilling. There seems to be no real appreciation of the horror these patients/victims have endured at the hands of the 'caring' professions. The indefensible is defended with shocking complacency.

Some further individual accounts, reported in the Telegraph:
Ann McNeill
Colin Purkiss
Thomas Dalziel.

And here is a young doctor's concerned account of a personal recollection of lack of care and compassion on NHS wards: Dr Max Pemberton writing in the Telegraph.

The government has responded with Statistics not Care.

The Patients Association highlights appalling standards of NHS hospital care for the elderly, giving examples of patients left dehydrated or lying in faeces, blood and urine.

BBC News reports that many elderly patients are receiving appalling care in NHS Hospitals.

The Patients Association highlights appalling standards of NHS hospital care for the elderly, giving examples of patients left dehydrated or lying in faeces, blood and urine.

Claire Rayner, formerly a nurse, now President of the Patients Association said: "I am sickened by what has happened to some part of my profession of which I was so proud. These bad, cruel nurses may be - probably are - a tiny proportion of the nursing workforce, but even if they are only one or two per cent of the whole they should be identified and struck off the Register."

Government chief nursing officer Chris Beasley said: "All patients deserve the highest quality of care from the NHS and the poor care received in these cases is simply unacceptable." Apologists for poor standards of NHS 'care' customarily add, as Chris Beasley adds here in this report, that the 'vast majority of patients experience good quality, safe and effective care."

I am willing to concede that possibly a slight majority of patients are reasonably satisfied, but to claim this to be a 'vast' majority is way off the mark. Most people put up with a lot of substandard care, knowing that complaints are unwelcome and tend to provoke reprisals, this being particularly the case with the more vulnerable and elderly, frail patients.

NHS: Indefensible incidents of cruelty and neglect, and the harm done by target fixation and uncaring bureaucracy

The Telegraph reports on cruelty, neglect and indefensible incidents in the NHS.

I believe that the treatment patients receive should be the treatment the health workers would feel happy about receiving if they themselves, or their loved ones, were the patients. This, however, is far too often not the treatment vulnerable, ill, suffering patients receive. Too many health workers find it all too easy to disregard the agonising pain of a fellow human being in their care.

The Patients Association, a charity, "has drawn up a dossier detailing failings in health care which it says are suffered by thousands of people each year, with many left to die in pain or stripped of their basic dignity.

More than 5,000 people contacted the Patients Association's helplines last year because they or a relative had experienced poor medical care."

These would be only a small fraction of the many who suffer at the hands of the NHS. Patients are especially at risk if they have no relatives to visit them. Sometimes even with relatives visiting and trying to draw attention to faults and get them remedied, the poor treatment continues, but without relatives visiting, the patient who is being harmed is pretty powerless against the poor treatment. That was my own experience when I had the misfortune to spend a month as an inpatient with a badly broken right elbow 2 years ago in Sheffield's Northern General Hospital. That I was in excruciating pain from the pressure of the splint was effectually disregarded except to try to bully/pressurise me to take powerful painkillers I knew would not help me. The operation to repair the arm should have been done as soon as possible, as the splint was causing extensive nerve damage to my right hand and also massive swelling, but there were inexcusable delays and it was almost a fortnight before the operation was done. This has left me with permanent intense pain and nerve damage and it was months before I was able to use the right hand at all after leaving the hospital. And because of the ulna nerve damage caused by the long-sustained pressure of the splint on my forearm - not even noticed or looked for by the medics for almost a year despite my repeated reports of continuous intensely painful pins and needles all over my hand - that hand is wasting away and is expected to become a hook.

Certainly many of the staff were caring, kind and skilful, but that does not make up for the harm done by ill-informed, arrogant doctors, who know themselves to be, for all practical purposes, safe from censure or sanction, and so the bad practice continues.

In the wake of the Stafford Hospital scandal, The Sunday Telegraph is launching a campaign to avoid any repeat of such a crisis

Overview of the Stafford Hospital Scandal and suggested measures to prevent its happening again
article in the Sunday Telegraph

You may also like to visit

The Patients Association

If you are interested in Patients' Rights you may like to consider signing a petition, which can be found here:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/patientrights/

And you may be interested to look at the list of current petitions to Number 10 Downing Street in the "Health, well-being and care" category. They are here:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/list/open?cat=557

Sir Richard Branson criticised "horrific" hospital infection rates, accusing politicians and health bosses of "tinkering" with the problem.

Sir Richard Branson accuses politicians of failing over hospital superbugs
article in the Telegraph

Extract:

"The Virgin tycoon, who was recently appointed vice-president of the Patients Association, called for all hospital staff to be screened for the superbug MRSA and receive immediate treatment if infected.

He has also said managers at failing NHS trusts should be fired.

Infection rates for MRSA are falling across the UK with the most recent quarterly figures showing a 33 per cent drop year on year, but Sir Richard is calling for more to be done.

The entrepreneur - whose daughter Holly is a doctor - told the BBC: "There have been some improvements, but the facts speak for themselves - and the facts are still horrific.

"It feels like they have tinkered with the problem rather than really got to the heart of the problem. The hospitals are there to cure people. They are not there to kill people."

He said the NHS could learn from the airline industry about how to avoid mistakes and improve.

"In the airline industry if we had that kind of track record we would have been grounded years ago," he said.

"In the airline industry if there is an adverse event that information is sent out to every airline in the world.

"And every airline makes absolutely certain that that adverse event doesn't happen twice."

Sir Richard is helping to organise an international conference on infection control and patient safety early next year."

I'm pleased he is not afraid of speaking out about these important matters. He sounds as though he is an appropriate person to be vice-president of the Patients Association.

Claire Rayner has some well-justified criticisms of the NHS and some suggestions to improve it.

NHS at 60: In the end I had to go private
Article in the Sunday Telegraph

Extracts:

"In 1988 she suffered chest pains. Efforts to contact a local doctor at 3am led instead to a locum service, which insisted she find her NHS number before any help could be given. "In the end we gave up and got through the night, but next day we signed up with a private GP," she says.

The chest pains revealed a hole in her diaphragm, while arthritis has since resulted in her having five knee operations and surgery to both shoulders. In 2002, breast cancer led to a double mastectomy. She used an NHS hospital on two occasions and was infected by the superbug MRSA.

"The tissue on my knee suddenly split, and I had to go to Accident and Emergency," she says. "For four hours, I was left in a highly infected room with a totally exposed wound. For at least an hour I could see the doctor sitting gossiping with a colleague.

"When she came over her hair wasn't tied back, then she used the wrong kind of gauze to patch me up. I felt so angry. When I discovered afterwards that I had MRSA I was appalled, but I wasn't all that surprised."

Now, she and her husband, Des, who is 80, avoid the NHS. "I have a list of hospitals with lower infection rates that I would go to if I was desperate, but we avoid it when we can. I'm embarrassed and ashamed to admit it, but I had to put my health first."

Determined to use her public profile as Patients Association president to achieve better services, Mrs Rayner urges the NHS's political masters to learn from the values and standards she saw in the service's early years."

"Now, as the NHS is about to turn 60, Mrs Rayner offers hospitals a three-point prescription to return the service to robust health.

"Firstly I would get rid of the nurses' station on the ward. It is a hiding place for them to hang around gossiping. Secondly, I would get rid of the targets. Third, get rid of all the middle layers of management and all the deceit to meet targets that happens as a result.""

More than 30,000 hospital beds have been lost in the decade since Labour came to power, with record cuts in NHS wards last year.

NHS hospitals lose 32,000 beds in a decade

Extract from the Telegraph:

"More than 40 per cent of maternity units turned away women in labour last year because they had no room.

Meanwhile, ambulances have been forced to queue outside overstretched hospitals, treating patients in car parks just yards from accident and emergency departments. The new statistics, revealed in response to a parliamentary question by Ed Vaizey, the Conservative MP, show that almost 32,000 NHS hospital beds went between 1997, when Labour took office, and 2007.

More than 8,400 beds were cut in the year ending March 2007, the largest fall in 14 years. One in six beds has been closed over the decade. There are now 167,019 beds in NHS wards, compared with 198,848 in 1997.

The figures emerged as health authorities are drawing up plans which will see the likely closure of dozens of district general hospitals. The East of England health authority has admitted that two accident and emergency departments and a maternity unit could close.

Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said the Government's financial mismanagement had forced hospitals to make cuts which could risk lives. "These bed cuts were financially driven: the sharp rise in the numbers closed happened at a time when the health service was under desperate pressure to clear a massive deficit."

Katherine Murphy, from the Patients Association, said: "This is a national scandal. More than 30,000 beds have been lost at a time when demand is increasing."

In the same decade that the beds were cut, death rates from the infections MRSA and Clostridium difficile rose five-fold. Investigations into the biggest C. diff outbreak in Britain, which killed 90 patients at hospitals run by Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells trust in 2005 and 2006, found that overcrowding amid pressure to meet hospital waiting targets was a factor behind the infection's spread.

More than 2,000 maternity beds have been lost since 1997. Research by the Conservatives found that last year, 42 per cent of maternity units had refused to accept women in labour on at least one occasion."

Patients are losing faith in the NHS.

Patients losing faith in the NHS, claims survey

Extract from Sunday Telegraph article:

"Keith Pollard, of the information website Treatment Abroad, who carried out the study, said: "Despite huge investment in the NHS over the past 17 years, patients from the UK are voting with their feet and travelling abroad."

A fifth of those questioned by the Patients Association identified a reduction in waiting times as their main priority.

Fifteen per cent said cuts in hospital infections would make the greatest difference to them and 14 per cent wanted to see more staff on duty.

The findings follow the publication of official figures which show the Government is failing to meet its target for reducing the spread of hospital infections.

Cases of C. diff increased by seven per cent in hospital patients over the age of 65. Cases of MRSA fell by 10 per cent from a high of 7,096, but this was not enough to meet the Government's pledge to halve the rate by next year.

However, despite grave concerns over the NHS, the Patients Association survey found a clear majority rejects any move towards creating an insurance-based health care system on US or French lines.

More than 40 per cent support the current method of funding the NHS through national taxation. Twenty four per cent of those who took part, however, back a tax deductible insurance policy as a way of paying for treatment.

The survey, shows an overwhelming majority want an end to Britain's healthcare "postcode lottery" where availability of drugs and treatments depends on location.

Our findings on the growing number of health tourists provoked an angry response from the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson.

In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph he states: "Most of the treatment carried out overseas is either minor cosmetic surgery or dentistry. Little of the treatment is for general elective surgery, and where it is the majority of people accessing it would probably have gone private in the UK anyway."

The Patients Association is still collecting responses to its survey at www.patientsassociation.org.uk."

In my opinion, the hugely expensive and extremely flawed NHS should be scrapped.

Lose weight and improve your health in many ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Go on! - 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

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.

Patients groups have criticised GPs over cost of phone calls

GPs criticised over pricy phone codes - Telegraph

Extracts:

"Patients groups have criticised GPs for switching their phone numbers to expensive 0844 dialling codes.

Although the phone numbers are not technically premium rate they are around four pence per minute more expensive than a standard local call.

Campaigners have called for an end to the practice saying it is unfair on elderly patients who can run up large bills calling their surgery regularly.

It is understood that 1,200 GP surgeries have switched to the new numbers and argue that it allows them to provide a better service.

Getting through on the telephone to GP practices can be extremely difficult as some surgeries operate a system where appointments can only be booked on the day, causing a rush of calls in the early morning.

However, the telcoms watchdog, Ofcom, has said it is not appropriate for public sector organisations to use the more expensive phone lines.

Joyce Robins, co-director of Patient Concern, said: “It is quite ridiculous. People should not pay more for their calls to their GP. I thought this had been stopped by the Government, but they have obviously found a loophole. "

"Two years ago the Department of Health banned the use of 0870 numbers in GP surgeries which are premium rate and cost 10 pence a minute to call. "

"But the Say No To 0870 campaign against chargeable numbers said that patients were put in a queue system when using the 0844 numbers which cost them money without talking to anyone.

And Michael Summers, chairman of the Patients Association said it was disgraceful and immoral to charge sick and vulnerable people more than necessary to call their GP practice.

He said: “It is a scandal. It is another way to extract money from the people who can least afford it. We have got excessive car park charges at hospital, bedside telephones and now this new one.

“These people are ill. These are not the people who should be targeted to have money extracted from them. It is immoral.”"


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...

Elderly nursing home residents left in pain by care staff

Scandal of elderly left in pain by care staff

Extract:

"Elderly people in nursing homes are being left in "shocking pain" says a survey today, with two in five saying they are in constant agony, and others admitting to having suicidal thoughts.

The research, conducted confidentially among residents whose average age was 82, reveals the extent to which the frail and vulnerable are made to suffer unnecessarily.

It was carried out by the Patients Association, the independent lobby group led by Claire Rayner, a former nurse and midwife and well-known agony aunt."

Many painful conditions, e.g. osteoarthritis, can be improved and made less painful by reducing salt intake. See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html

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.)

UK Hospitals fail to report spread of new superbug 'more dangerous than MRSA'

UK Hospitals fail to report spread of new superbug 'more dangerous than MRSA' - Report is here and here are extracts:

"The shambolic state of infection control on wards is exposed in a survey by the Patients' Association. It found only about a quarter of trusts are gathering data on Clostridium difficile (C. diff), the bacterium that experts say poses more of a risk to public health than MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus)."

"The findings from 500 infection-control nurses and managers follow mounting concern over the threat to patients' health from C. diff, which can cause severe illness and death in those with weakened immune systems, particularly the elderly.

The bacterium, which spreads easily through unhygienic and filthy wards, is the major cause of infectious diarrhoea, but it can also cause high temperatures and severe inflammation, and comes with a death rate of about five per cent."

"Katherine Murphy, of the Patients' Association, said: "Collection of data about this very dangerous infection is haphazard to say the least, and we are not getting the true picture. How can patients have confidence in their hospitals if the real threat posed by C. diff is being played down?"

Dr Mark Enright, a microbiologist at Imperial College London, said that the government agency's monitoring scheme was flawed because a new and more dangerous strain of C. diff had emerged in the past year or so, striking patients aged 40 and over."

The Department of Health retains its usual complacency. - "A Department of Health spokesman said clean, safe care was not an "optional extra" for the NHS, adding: "Infection control should be a core activity for trusts.""

The South Bank Show. Claire Tomalin speaking to Melvin Bragg about her biography of Thomas Hardy.

I watched the South Bank Show that ended some minutes after midnight - Claire Tomalin spoke to Melvyn Bragg about her new biography of Thomas Hardy, A Time-Torn Man. She had also been filmed visiting key locations and landscapes in Dorset, Cornwall and London. It was an excellent programme. Tomalin has a rich, expressive voice and obviously such a deep love of Hardy's poems and novels, and encyclopaedic knowledge of his writing and his life, and she chose to read and to offer insights into illustrative passages from Hardy's work, and I was moved again to feel as I feel when I read Hardy, as his words and insights again worked their magic.

About thirty years or so ago, I remember watching Melvyn Bragg on TV, speaking about Thomas Hardy, and in particular about Jude the Obscure, and Bragg is clearly also an expert and a lover of Hardy's work. I enjoyed hearing these two knowledgeable people putting flesh onto the bones of what most of us know of Hardy, with telling anecdotes and explanations about his life, his marriage and his writing. I can never these days bear to read again the story of Tess, because its terrible sadness and and inexorable tragedy move me to so many tears, and I shed tears for poor Tess of the D'Urbervilles again tonight.

Bragg commented on the sexual double standards to which Hardy was drawing attention in this novel and he and Tomalin spoke of Hardy's compassion and love for the fictional Tess and the complexity of Hardy's characters. Sexual double standards were, of course, the underlying reason for Tess's unjust and horrifying fate.

But we still have double standards in Britain today, though much less so in the field of sexual morals, of course. I am thinking of the sexism so often seen in the medical profession. Sheena McDonald did some TV work on this in the 90s. - The sort-of standard 'joke' to which I seem to recall her drawing attention, was that when a male patient goes to the doctor he is asked, "And what is the matter with you?" - Whereas a woman patient will be asked, "And what seems to be the matter with you?" And I remember Jean Robinson, former Chair of the Patients Association and former lay member of the GMC (General Medical Council) saying to me in the 80s, when we both were vice-presidents of the College of Health (I was limited to a year as an elected VP, Jean was a long-serving appointed VP), that when men go to the doctor in pain, the doctor tends to prescribe pain-killers, but when women go to the doctor in pain, there is a tendency for the doctor to prescribe anti-depressants...)o: - I shall no doubt return to this topic in this blog in future posts. Medical sexism has equally dire consequences of terrible harm to women as had the cruel double standards of sexual morality did in the past.

I visited the Equal Opportunities Commission in Manchester for an afternoon in the 80s, to bring to their notice the inequality of health care provision with regard to the sex/gender of the patient - health care provision for which both sexes pay by way of taxes, but health care provision that favours men patients over women patients. - They were sympathetic to my mission and said they had heard from a number of women who knew themselves to have experienced medical treatment inferior to that of men, but that the EOC was unable to take up medical sexism as an issue because it was outside the EOC's remit, the conventional wisdom being that doctors are not prejudiced and that men and women are treated equally and that there is no stereotypical thinking among healthcare professionals! - Well, as I say, I shall no doubt return to this topic in a future blog entry...