I have to see a cardiologist about Atrial Fibrillation

I've had AF (Atrial Fibrillation) for years but I've never seen anybody about it before. Maybe you've read about GPs frequently assuming women are healthy when actually they have heart disease. (See also Unconscious bias: why women don’t get the same care men do.) - I'm hoping that some of this massive excess Blood Volume can be removed and thus relieve the pain of all the swollen veins (caused by taking inappropriately prescribed drugs in the past). - Fingers crossed I'll not be expected to take drugs for the condition. I'm very anti-pharmaceuticals because they have caused me such harm.

Depression, Mental Illness, Women's Mental Health and their Sex/Gender/Social Rôles

The relationship between women's mental health and their sex/gender/social rôles.

This was a discussion paper I wrote years ago when I was studying Women's Issues. Some of it is rather dated, therefore, but I hope that readers will recognise the continuing relevance of most of it, e.g. here.

Introduction.

Let us consider what constitutes 'mental health' and 'mental illness'.

In Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, (British Edition, 1974), Professor Thomas Szasz notes that mental health lacks the integrity of a scientific definition and has simply come to mean conformity to the demands of society, viz. "mental health is the ability to play the game of social living, and to play it well." But in Schizophrenia, (1979), he concludes that it "has a great deal to do with competence, earned by struggling for excellence, with compassion, hard won by confronting conflict; and with modesty and patience, acquired through silence and suffering." This seems a good definition to me.

The orthodox psychiatric view of mental health is that the brain is organically and functionally healthy. The 'anti-psychiatric' (Laing, Foucault and others) view is of an authentic or true self.

Similarly, mental illness is variously attributed to social deviance, variation from the norm, organic brain defect, organic brain disease, problems in living, criminality, dangerousness, etc.

Certainly it is the case that mental illness or madness manifests itself in contexts peculiar to the society/culture which contains it.

A woman's gender rôle encompasses the attitudes, qualities and abilities expected of her by the society in which she lives and the social rôles she is expected to take on, e.g. wife, mother, nurturer rôles, exhibiting compassion, selflessness, passivity and other 'feminine' traits.

Since these gender rôles are in the main learned and culturally determined, they can impose stresses on women, extrinsically by being arduous in themselves, and intrinsically when they are at variance with the woman's personal needs, aptitudes and aspirations.

Development.

Because of my personal interest in medical/psychiatric oppression, especially of women, I should .like to start with this as a particular topic and then broaden the discussion later.

Throughout Szasz's writings he asserts, and I agree with his assertion, that there is no such thing as 'mental illness.' "Psychiatry is 100% juridical," he stated in a television interview with Jonathan Miller. When there is something organically wrong with the brain, as in tertiary syphilis, this should be called organic brain disease. This is not what is usually meant by the term 'mental illness'. Problems in living should not be called illness, should not be medicalised, should not be treated with drugs or incarceration. These responses are unjust and inappropriate.

In the Autumn term of 1985 I attended Tim Kendall's Politics of Madness course run by Sheffield University's Department of Continuing Education, and there I learned that it is only relatively recently in the history of civilisation that madness or deviation from a supposedly desirable norm came to be thought of as a medical problem. Up to the 17th century Court Jesters, for instance, with their 'madness', fulfilled a social rôle and were considered wise in many ways. Madness was often thought of as a creative gift. Also villages might have their village idiots but they were not excluded from the life of the village and their foibles were tolerated.

With increasingly crowded urban groupings and with the growth of capitalism and the profit motive, and the parallel growth therefore also of pauperism and the desire of wealthy rate-payers to keep down charges on the rates, social 'dregs' began to appear. These were variously placed into 'hospitals', workhouses, madhouses, etc. e.g. the Hôpital Général in Paris. Within months of its opening, 1% of the population of Paris was in it. No longer was it acceptable for people to be odd. And their oddnesses took on an ethical hue. Anyone who did not fit in - criminal, mad, sex offender, etc. - was incarcerated.

At first there were manacles and chains for the mad. Gradually these were replaced by different forms of restraint. At the York Retreat, for example, moral restraint imposed silence; there was no dialogue with the mad. There were observation and assessment, reliance on self-discipline, perpetual judgment and reassessment by the Guardians.

Responsibility and authority came into play: tone of voice, etc. Doctors as respected members of society tended to be appointed Guardians. Thus came about the medicalisation of madness and the birth of mental illness. During this period of recent history, medicine has been a patriarchal and paternalistic profession, except for midwifery and the wise women with their herbs and folk medicines. Rowbotham in Hidden from History, 1973, writes:

"... women healers were increasingly associated with witchcraft and the practice of the black arts. As medicine became a science, the terms of entry into training excluded women, protecting the profession for the sons of families who could afford education."

The barring of women from access to medical schools and universities effectively stopped them from entering the medical profession until the end of the 19th century. More women are now being admitted to training as doctors, but because of the hierarchical power structure of the medical profession and because of the prevailing male ideology and authoritarianism this is not as helpful to women as it might be.

The management of health and sickness is effectively almost a male preserve. The profession is dominated by men. This means that the medical system is strategic to women's oppression. As Ehrenreich and English, in Complaints and Disorders, 1974, state:

"Medical science has been one of the most powerful sources of sexist ideology in our culture. Justification for sexual discrimination - in education, in jobs, in public life - must ultimately rest on the one thing that differentiates women from men: their bodies. Theories of male superiority ultimately rest on biology.

...Biology discovers hormones: doctors make public judgements on whether "hormonal imbalances" make women infit for public office. More generally, biology traces the origins of disease; doctors pass judgement on who is sick and who is well.

Medicine's prime contribution to sexist ideology has been to describe women and sick, and as potentially sickening to men."

As far as women are concerned, medicine's spurious scientism still retains covert and overt sex prejudice.

Women's' physical problems such as painful periods, heavy periods, pre-menstrual tension, exhaustion after childbirth, fatigue from too much caring for others, etc. are nowadays more likely to be diagnosed as psychological than to be physically investigated. If men consulted the doctor about heavy bleeding, excessive clumsiness, exhaustion, etc. it is far more likely that they would be physically examined and physically diagnosed and helped.

To this existing plethora of medical sexism, Freud and the other psycho-analysts added their new 'diseases' with their respectable Latin names - hysteria, neurasthenia, et al.

Societal reaction theorists (says Gove in The Labelling Perspective in The Labelling of Deviance, 1975) have found that people who have little power and few resources are those least able to resist labelling. And, says Erickson (Notes on the Sociology of Deviance, 1962) in our culture, labelling is almost irreversible.

Women in our society often are those very people 'who have little power and few resources' and are therefore easily labelled.

Put together then the long sexist prejudice and oppression of women by doctors, the evolved rôle of the doctor as an agent of social control, the fashionable predilection for ascribing more and more problems to psychological causative factors, the widespread urge to label, the relative powerlessness of women, and you have in part the explanation of why women, rather than men, are so often labelled 'mentally ill', if they get into the hands of doctors. - And women 'get into the hands of doctors' more often than men, necessarily, because of their biology and their child-bearing (child-bearing in our society being a medical matter). Many women are also by now conditioned to see themselves as mentally ill.

Williams in Women, Sex-Rôle Stereotyping, ed. by Hartnett, Boden and Fuller, 1979, in her summary of the findings of Gove, 1972, and Landau, 1973, tells us that:

Compared with men, women are significantly more likely to seek help and be treated for mental disorder, and this applies whether the diagnosis is neurosis, psychosis, transient situational disorder, or attempted suicide.

The incident rate of these disorders in women has been increasing in the last few decades.

These findings seem mainly related to the types of social rôle women are expected to fulfil.

Let us now therefore look at Social Origins of Depression: A Study of Psychiatric Disorder in Women, by Brown and Harrison, 1978, which examines the social rôles of women as causative factors in mental ill-health. They write:

"We have concentrated on demonstrating that there is a link between clinical depression and a woman's daily experiences."

One description of depression: Feeling worthless, outside world meaningless, future hopeless, easily reduced to tears by fairly trivial matters, feeling of sadness, loss of interest in things and people, restlessness, indecisiveness, weariness, possibly suicidal thoughts.

Loss and disappointment are the central features of most provoking events which bring about depression. Long-term and not short-term threats are important. Separations or deaths seemed the most unpleasant events.

Ongoing self-esteem is crucial in determining whether generalised depression develops.

Failure to work through grief can lead to clinical depression. So can denial of the loss, failure to weep and failure to talk about the loss. (Young children do not readily mourn, and reaction to later losses is influenced by earlier reactions. This may account for the increased vulnerability to depression of women who lost their mothers before the age of 11.)

The main lesson which emerges from this study is that the causes of women's depression in our urban society are largely social and largely the result of being wives and mothers as such. The authors found that there are vulnerability factors which predispose to depression, these being: having three or more children under the age of 14 at home, losing one's mother before the age of 11, paucity of close confiding relationships with ready access, low self-esteem, a negative cognitive set and lack of work outside the home. Clearly most of these are part and parcel of the rôle of wife and mother which is forced onto many women. And equally clearly it is wrong to diagnose an individual woman as suffering from a medical complaint, viz. mental illness, and to give her medication for it, when what is really the case is that social, economic and cultural reforms are necessary.

Social factors are clearly causes of depression. Attention to a person's environment may therefore be effective in treating it.

Working class husbands tend to view housework and childcare as easy and thereby trivialise them and lower the wife's self-esteem.

It is probably fair to say that the working class wife and mother is the female 'norm' in our society. The work of Brown and Harris shows that being a working class wife and mother is a literally depressing rôle.

Typically, a woman's conditioning would tend to leave her with lower feelings of self-esteem and mastery than a man. Also her great involvement in interpersonal relationships, again the result of conditioning, means she will tend to be more affected than a man would be by separations and deaths, which we have seen are the most unpleasant life-events. Among people clinically diagnosed as depressed, there are from two to six women for every man (Arieti, 1979, and others).

(Also on a political level, sexual discrimination and inequality lead to economic and legal disadvantage and dependence on others, in turn leading to low self-esteem, low aspirations, low achievement and a tendency to depression.

It is the poor, the unproductive - in terms of a Capitalist economy - the rebellious, the disadvantaged, the unhappy, the social misfits, and the socially inept who tend to be labelled as mentally ill. Women are often in these categories.

So women are likely to be given demeaning labels and to have their suffering trivialised rather than receive real help from the patriarchal society which fostered their distress in the first place.)

Brown and Harris, despite their evident compassion, fail to appreciate that the label 'mentally ill' can bring a depressed woman extra problems in its wake. They do not think it really matters whether depression is called mental illness or not. - But it does matter.

"Mental illness designations are highly stigmatising and thus impose reductions in power and social standing." (Schur, The Politics of Deviance, 1980).

He goes on to say:

Psychiatry has been attacked by women's liberationists on a number of grounds - for adopting and perpetuating untenable theories of basic female passivity and dependence: for over-diagnosing women's problems as being personal rather than institutional in nature: for treating women as though they should, in all situations, be the ones to 'adjust'. Even if these critiques have not yet led to substantial changes in psychiatric practice, they have publicly exposed the previously latent gender politics of psychiatry.

As we have seen above, the medical system is a prime source of sexist ideology and a reinforcer of sex rôles.

Broverman et al. 1970, (1) and Abramovitz et al. 1973 (2):

(1) Traditionally there has been an almost mythological belief that mental health is contingent on the successful adoption of the appropriate sex-typed personality characteristics.

e.g. (2) that passivity, dependence, nurturance are healthy female attributes and that assertiveness is a sign of neuroticism would seem to prevail among mental health professionals.

If any conclusion can be reached, it is that whereas the adoption of sex-appropriate traits in males as associated with mental health, the same does not hold for females. High levels of femininity in women are positively associated with anxiety and negatively with adjustment, ego strength and autonomy.

The results of a study by Spence, Helmreich and Stapp (1975):

showed that high androgynous people were the highest in self-esteem, followed by those high in masculine qualities, and then those high in feminine qualities, while those who were low in androgyny were lowest in self-esteem.

It can be speculated that women who possess a high level of feminine traits are likely to deal effectively with interpersonal relationships and have a passive orientation to many aspects of the environment - both these factors contributing to a reduction of stressful life events. In contrast, women who possess a high level of masculine traits are likely to have an active orientation to the environment, and also be less likely to deal effectively with interpersonal relationships - both these factors contributing to an increase of stressful life events. The possession of high levels of both masculinity and femininity in the high androgynous (HA) group lead to effectiveness in both expressive and instrumental domains and is reflected in the low life stress reported in this group.

Androgyny then gives a woman a flexible, wide repertoire of behavioural possibilities and a more autonomous life. But typically, women are not brought up to be androgynous, autonomous people.

'The primary source of women's pathology is social, not personal: external, not internal.' (Rawlings and Carter, 1977a, quoted in Women: Psychology's Puzzle, Rohrbaugh, 1979.) As we have seen above, the overwhelming causes of women's depression are social and environmental, yet depressed women are treated as individually mentally ill medical cases.

David Hill in The Politics of Schizophrenia, 1983, emphasises that this individualisation of social disadvantage masks the need for social change programmes and keeps women subjugated in a patriarchal society. Psychiatrists are basically white, middle class males who seek to maintain the patriarchal status quo. He says that assertive females tend to be 'punished' by psychiatrists by being diagnosed as mentally ill because they have stepped outside their 'normal' sex rôle. But the normal subordinate female rôle leads to low self-esteem and the likelihood of depression.

Conclusion.

Women's traditional sex/gender/social rôles in our society militate against their mental health, and mental health professionals tend to reinforce those very rôles which are damaging to the self-esteem and autonomy of the individual woman. The medical model of mental illness as individual pathology often serves to hide social injustice and the need for reform. This is particularly the case when we think of the social causes of depression in women.

Along with political goals of more and more equality of opportunity and equal pay and status for women, an end to sexual prejudice in all its forms, we need personal goals of more autonomy and self-fulfillment for women. This means in particular educating parents, future parents and teachers to avoid sexist conditioning in bringing up children.

Feminist re-appraisal of mental illness would help not just women, but all the disadvantaged, oppressed by psychiatry. It would be more caring of sufferers. It would be more sensitive in treating them - i.e. it would eschew the idea of "treating" them as such, and more expressly set itself the task of helping them. This might mean social help like being re-housed, say. It might mean personal help in the form of assertiveness training, say. Where medical help is offered it should be autonomous psychotherapy (if desired by the patient) rather than psychotropic drugs.

As we move towards a more equal society made up of more autonomous citizens, so women's lives will become less dictated by their gender, and their mental health - whatever we mean by that! - will improve.

Margaret Wilde © 2011

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.)
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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
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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 North East

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 North East:

Dear Margaret

I'm so glad that at last someone is going to do something about women's ailments being called PSYCHOLOGICAL. I myself have had this label put on me for the last twenty one years. For five years a lot of years ago I was told that the bleeding and terrible pain I was getting was all in my mind and given all drugs for nerves. At last someone listened to me. One examination revealed I needed a hysterectomy. I was told afterwards my womb was like a fishing net. It was full of holes. The disease I had was ENDOMETRIOSIS. It had eaten its way into my stomach. About a year later I had terrible pains. I was told nerves - more nerve tablets. I was like a zombie with them. My memory is still terrible. I blame all the drugs I was given over the years to shut me up. Anyway I was rushed into Hospital. I had adhesions. Then it happened again. I was rushed into Hospital. I was told I had mass adhesions Bowel Bladder and Intestines, which I still suffer with. Yet when they flare up I'm told it's wind. I get blockage of Bowel and Bladder. One doctor years ago had the nerve to say to my mother-in-law I was too tense to pass water. I was in Hospital next day with stoppage of Bladder. I've been on water tablets years. I've been in Hospital more times than enough with blockages and stoppage yet I still have that label on me. Four years ago I was getting severe pains neck and back. I was told for six months it was nerves. Seen a consultant Private. He showed me X-rays. I had severe spondylosis plus two discs out in my neck and three out in my spine. Even though I have a very good doctor now I feel when I go he takes notice of my Records which have that label all through them. There is much more I could tell you but I soon weary. But the medical profession has robbed me of the best years of my life. My four sons have never had a healthy mother. I'm divorced. If I'd been healthy this might never have happened. Spelling which was my best subject has gone, along with my memory. I'd love to get my Medical Records with some experts and correct all the times when I was really ill so I could lose that label. I still feel I'm treated like a Hypochondriac.I now have an abdomen with four horrible scars and a lot of pain. I can't do Housework or anything much. All I want to do is feel strong enough to look after my sons, do housework and go back to work in a shop, which I loved. There have been times I could have ended it all. Only my Faith in Jesus Christ kept me going and the strength he sent me to bear the pain. One night I was in agony with my back pains and the doctor came in and said, "Get out of bed; the pain's all in your mind." He sent me to three psychiatrists who said there was nothing wrong with my nerves at all and told me to throw the tablets out as I did not need them. The next time my back went he said I wanted to be ill but it was so deep-rooted I did not realise it. He wanted me to be put under hypnosis to prove this. I changed my doctor. I wish now I had to prove him wrong. I'm now 44 years old. 21 years of my life have been spoilt. Thanks be to God I do have some good days but I'm never without pain altogether. I get mobility money and severe disablement but money does not make up for 21 years of life.

God bless you in your work. I wish I could help you.

Please excuse writing. I'm tired. Thank you.

Forgot to tell you when I had my third son I could not look after him for 8 weeks. I was delirious for days and in bed for weeks. Was told it was a virus. I've never been fit since. This was 22 years ago. I was strong as a horse before that. Worked full-time. I'm sure something was left in me that caused my later problems.
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You can read HERE about some of my own experience of terrible suffering and permanent harm done by the sex prejudice of health professionals.

Fighting the System: NHS Complaints Procedures

The first feature article I wrote for Mensa’s monthly glossy magazine was about medical and dental negligence and the uselessness, cruelty and bias of the NHS Complaints Procedures, and was entitled ‘Fighting the System’. In the years since then there will have been changes to the Complaints Procedure, but I am confident that it still harms complainants rather than helping them or reforming the system.
This is a slightly shortened version of the article:

Fighting the System

An abscess flared up on one of my front teeth. Talking was difficult and sleep impossible. My dentist said there was nothing wrong. So I went to the Dental Hospital. The pain – sudden, acute, accompanied by swelling, most severe when biting – was exactly characteristic of an acute abscess. But the pain was discounted and the abscess not treated.

When you have toothache you chew in strange ways to avoid exacerbating it. This puts unnatural pressures on teeth and it is easy to crack them. This happened to me. A cracked cusp, a separate agony, went untreated. Tooth-brushing was an ordeal and could not be as thorough as before the pain. Decay started, causing further severe toothache. This also went untreated. It was almost a year before the abscess was treated. It was over two years before I obtained treatment for all the dental disorders causing the toothache!

If consulted by a man with an abscess and weeping in agony, surely the most negligent dentist would take note of the signs and symptoms and would treat the abscess in its acute phase, ending the pain. In a full year of many attendances at the Sheffield Dental Hospital I was constantly insulted and left in agony. One consultant called me ‘You Fat Depressives’, plural, instead of using my name. It was clear that he habitually addressed suffering women in this way.

I eventually found a dentist brave enough to try to put things right. He dealt with the gross infections, etc but tragically much of the pain had by this time become chronic, which often happens when the cause is not dealt with promptly.

I heard from other women who had had their pain derided or been told that it was ‘nerves’ or ‘all in the mind’. One Rotherham woman had endured agony from trigeminal neuralgia for 13 years before someone (a neurosurgeon in private practice) took her pain seriously and operated. The pain then stopped. Trigeminal neuralgia mainly attacks women and its only symptom is pain. It is not uncommon for people to kill themselves because of severe toothache or because of trigeminal neuralgia, so intense is the pain.

Thirteen years of needless agony. Why does such cruelty flourish? The answer is many-faceted, of course. It includes ignorance and arrogance. Pre-eminent, however, is the health professional’s demeaning attitude towards women, coupled with the scandalous fact that in this country doctors and dentists are accountable to no-one, not to the patient, not to the hospital, not to the NHS.

Women are sub-human, second-class citizens whose voice need not be heeded. Everyone knows, don’t they, that whatever a woman complains of, the ‘real’ cause is usually psychological, and instead of investigation and treatment all she needs is a brusque injunction to pull herself together and a prescription for tranquillisers and anti-depressants. That’ll settle her!

In my desperate efforts to obtain the treatment I needed I turned to every health agency. All pretended that negligence does not occur. No-one insisted that my teeth be examined and my agonising toothache dealt with. The health agencies and the people to whom complainants must address complaints are financed by the DHSS or the NHS and by definition not impartial. The Complaints Procedure routinely adds to the difficulties of complainants rather than dealing with their complaints of negligence.

Why are the legislators not moved to effective remedial legislation? There are many reasons, I suppose; laziness, fear, the myth of medical infallibility, the desire to keep in with medics and their retinues, the fact that most MPs use private medicine rather than the NHS and that when they do use the NHS they get preferential treatment. Surely, also, a lack of imagination – failure to comprehend the scale of the suffering, the profound and terrible difficulties of damaged victims – trapped in pain and distress and worry, trapped in misunderstanding, trapped in bewilderment that those to whom they turn for help and from whom they have been led to believe they will receive it, adopt a confrontational stance. There is no-one in the entire edifice of the Health Service from whom victims of medical negligence can be assured of receiving help. They do not know where to turn.

In the Sheffield Star of August 20th 1986, the Administrator of the Sheffield Family Practitioner Committee is quoted as saying of complaints that most of them ‘were dealt with amicably, although in some cases the patient was struck off’. Dealing with complaints is clearly thought of as a matter of smoothing ruffled feathers or of placating/punishing the complainant, rather than of examining faults that need to be put right. If you made a complaint about trains, you would not consider it resolved by being forbidden to travel by train any more, would you? Why should a complaint about a doctor be considered resolved by crossing the complainant off his list?

When in the press someone criticises the medical profession, another person is certain to write in to protest that they themselves received wonderful treatment. e.g. the dreadful way that Sue Arnold was treated at the Moorfields Eye Clinic in London, reported a few months ago in her column in the Observer magazine. The following week someone wrote about their wonderful treatment there. If you publicised finding a dead mouse in a loaf, no-one would dream of writing to say that they had had a loaf from the same shop and it hadn’t had a dead mouse in it! Officials aver that the public makes few complaints about the Health Service. Like saying that most of our loaves don’t contain dead mice.

The official claim disregards the justifiable fears many people have about making a complaint. You risk being struck off a doctor’s list (and often the family of the complainant is also struck off) and may find it difficult to get a doctor at all.

The main reason for outraged complaint is being treated as sub-human. As I was. Callously left in agony which could easily have been treated and which I clearly could not treat myself. Agony for which it was impossible to get relief without the treatment that was being denied me. Abscesses and caries cannot ‘get better’. There has to be professional intervention.

By allowing medics to insult people under the guise of diagnosing them, by allowing honourable people to be treated in this appalling way, humanity is defiled. By categorising the person who then complains as a nuisance who must be pacified if possible and quelled if not, no-one is safe from such defilement.

There are moves to tinker with the Complaints Procedure. The Primary Health Care leaflet, with the Government’s proposals for discussion on health services outside hospital, suggests that there should be informal conciliation procedures to settle less serious complaints quickly and effectively. Again the ruffled feathers syndrome. Complainants do not want conciliation, they want remedial action taken about the complaint. Officially, negligence does not occur. So nothing is done about it.

It would be salutary to cause to be published a sample of the complaints of the last year and what the Complaints Procedure did about them. This would show it up for the charade it is. One only hears of anything being done if the matter is given publicity, which seldom helps.

That suffering, ill, exhausted people damaged by the medical profession have the right to redress in the civil courts is no right at all. Only 3% or 4% of cases get to court and they take a minimum of 4 years to get there. Everything is weighted against the victim, especially the hostile attitude of the Health Authorities. In any case, action in the civil courts has only individual relevance. General reform cannot result.

What victims most need is remedial treatment. There is no provision for this. What can be more important than the right to urgent remedial treatment when you have been harmed by hospital personnel? Gross medical negligence is compounded by the implacable unhelpfulness of the Health Authorities.

The NHS should be accountable to the consumer – i.e. the patient. Medical and dental staff have absolute power to give or to withhold necessary investigation and treatment to patients, to treat them with insolence, to defame their characters in privileged communications, etc. provided only that they call this the exercise of ‘clinical judgment’. (Compare this with, in recent times in Parliament, the ritual incantation that a matter is one of ‘national security’ and as such no-one has the right to question it.) Such power is clearly dangerous, is open to abuse and is clearly being abused. Terrible suffering like mine would be totally prevented if medical and dental staff were accountable.

Negligence

There can be nothing in this country more heinously unjust than the lack of help for the suffering victims of medical negligence. Patients have no protection whatsoever from the ignorance, incompetence, negligence and sometimes sheer malice of doctors and dentists. People who are not victims of the system are unaware of the situation. That negligent doctors and dentists incur neither censure nor sanction from the system ensures that negligence flourishes.

It is a moral imperative for caring people to do what they can to bring a speedy end to this cruelty.

The Complaints Procedure needs to be scrapped and replaced by a system providing immediate help for the victim of negligence (I don’t mean money; I mean remedial treatment and support) and an independent inquiry into the negligence with the purpose of apportioning responsibility and instituting reform to protect potential future victims. I stress that I am not interested in legal redress. I am asking for legislative action to remedy a national scandal.

The Health Ombudsman defines instances of medical negligence as matters of clinical judgment, and matters of clinical judgment, conveniently for negligent doctors and dentists, are outside his terms of reference. So he does not help. His reply to my letter made clear that he had given scant attention to my arduously compiled material. My evidence was ignored.

This state of affairs is independent of who the individuals are who become victims, being only dependent on the deficiencies of a system which allows the magic phrase ‘clinical judgment’ to override reason, humanity and justice. Clinical judgment cannot, by definition, obtain, where clinical diagnostic procedures have been waived. To pretend otherwise is an abuse of language, an abuse of trust, effectively an abuse of power and in practice a physical and psychological abuse of individual victims.

These abuses are systemic and must be rooted out. The powerless and suffering need protection from such cruelty.

There was a public inquiry about Wendy Savage, a doctor neither negligent nor incompetent, and about whom no patients had lodged complaints. There are no inquiries into real cases of negligence, initiated by the victims. Health professionals would be much more careful if their actions were to be subjected to public scrutiny.

Margaret Wilde

The uselessness and cruelty of the NHS Complaints Procedures: FIGHTING THE SYSTEM.

The first feature article I wrote for Mensa's monthly glossy magazine was about medical and dental negligence and the uselessness, cruelty and bias of the NHS Complaints Procedures, and was entitled 'Fighting the System'. In the years since then there will have been changes to the Complaints Procedure, but I am confident that it still harms complainants rather than helping them or reforming the system.

This is a slightly shortened version of the article:

Fighting the System

An abscess flared up on one of my front teeth. Talking was difficult and sleep impossible. My dentist said there was nothing wrong. So I went to the Dental Hospital. The pain - sudden, acute, accompanied by swelling, most severe when biting - was exactly characteristic of an acute abscess. But the pain was discounted and the abscess not treated.

When you have toothache you chew in strange ways to avoid exacerbating it. This puts unnatural pressures on teeth and it is easy to crack them. This happened to me. A cracked cusp, a separate agony, went untreated. Tooth-brushing was an ordeal and could not be as thorough as before the pain. Decay started, causing further severe toothache. This also went untreated. It was almost a year before the abscess was treated. It was over two years before I obtained treatment for all the dental disorders causing the toothache!

If consulted by a man with an abscess and weeping in agony, surely the most negligent dentist would take note of the signs and symptoms and would treat the abscess in its acute phase, ending the pain. In a full year of many attendances at the Sheffield Dental Hospital I was constantly insulted and left in agony. One consultant called me 'You Fat Depressives', plural, instead of using my name. It was clear that he habitually addressed suffering women in this way.

I eventually found a dentist brave enough to try to put things right. He dealt with the gross infections, etc but tragically much of the pain had by this time become chronic, which often happens when the cause is not dealt with promptly.

I heard from other women who had had their pain derided or been told that it was 'nerves' or 'all in the mind'. One Rotherham woman had endured agony from trigeminal neuralgia for 13 years before someone (a neurosurgeon in private practice) took her pain seriously and operated. The pain then stopped. Trigeminal neuralgia mainly attacks women and its only symptom is pain. It is not uncommon for people to kill themselves because of severe toothache or because of trigeminal neuralgia, so intense is the pain.

Thirteen years of needless agony. Why does such cruelty flourish? The answer is many-faceted, of course. It includes ignorance and arrogance. Pre-eminent, however, is the health professional's demeaning attitude towards women, coupled with the scandalous fact that in this country doctors and dentists are accountable to no-one, not to the patient, not to the hospital, not to the NHS.

Women are sub-human, second-class citizens whose voice need not be heeded. Everyone knows, don't they, that whatever a woman complains of, the 'real' cause is usually psychological, and instead of investigation and treatment all she needs is a brusque injunction to pull herself together and a prescription for tranquillisers and anti-depressants. That'll settle her!

In my desperate efforts to obtain the treatment I needed I turned to every health agency. All pretended that negligence does no occur. No-one insisted that my teeth be examined and my agonising toothache dealt with. The health agencies and the people to whom complainants must address complaints are financed by the DHSS or the NHS and by definition not impartial. The Complaints Procedure routinely adds to the difficulties of complainants rather than dealing with their complaints of negligence.

Why are the legislators not moved to effective remedial legislation? There are many reasons, I suppose; laziness, fear, the myth of medical infallibility, the desire to keep in with medics and their retinues, the fact that most MPs use private medicine rather than the NHS and that when they do use the NHS they get preferential treatment. Surely, also, a lack of imagination - failure to comprehend the scale of the suffering, the profound and terrible difficulties of damaged victims - trapped in pain and distress and worry, trapped in misunderstanding, trapped in bewilderment that those to whom they turn for help and from whom they have been led to believe they will receive it, adopt a confrontational stance. There is no-one in the entire edifice of the Health Service from whom victims of medical negligence can be assured of receiving help. They do not know where to turn.

In the Sheffield Star of August 20th 1986, the Administrator of the Sheffield Family Practitioner Committee is quoted as saying of complaints that most of them 'were dealt with amicably, although in some cases the patient was struck off'. Dealing with complaints is clearly thought of as a matter of smoothing ruffled feathers or of placating/punishing the complainant, rather than of examining faults that need to be put right. If you made a complaint about trains, you would not consider it resolved by being forbidden to travel by train any more, would you? Why should a complaint about a doctor be considered resolved by crossing the complainant off his list?

When in the press someone criticises the medical profession, another person is certain to write in to protest that they themselves received wonderful treatment. e.g. the dreadful way that Sue Arnold was treated at the Moorfields Eye Clinic in London, reported a few months ago in her column in the Observer magazine. The following week someone wrote about their wonderful treatment there. If you publicised finding a dead mouse in a loaf, no-one would dream of writing to say that they had had a loaf from the same shop and it hadn't had a dead mouse in it! Officials aver that the public makes few complaints about the Health Service. Like saying that most of our loaves don't contain dead mice.

The official claim disregards the justifiable fears many people have about making a complaint. You risk being struck of a doctor's list (and often the family of the complainant is also struck off) and may find it difficult to get a doctor at all.

The main reason for outraged complaint is being treated as sub-human. As I was. Callously left in agony which could easily have been treated and which I clearly could not treat myself. Agony for which it was impossible to get relief without the treatment that was being denied me. Abscesses and caries cannot 'get better'. There has to be professional intervention.

By allowing medics to insult people under the guise of diagnosing them, by allowing honourable people to be treated in this appalling way, humanity is defiled. By categorising the person who then complains as a nuisance who must be pacified if possible and quelled if not, no-one is safe from such defilement.

There are moves to tinker with the Complaints Procedure. The Primary Health Care leaflet, with the Government's proposals for discussion on health services outside hospital, suggests that there should be informal conciliation procedures to settle less serious complaints quickly and effectively. Again the ruffled feathers syndrome. Complainants do not want conciliation, they want remedial action taken about the complaint. Officially, negligence does not occur. So nothing is done about it.

It would be salutary to cause to be published a sample of the complaints of the last year and what the Complaints Procedure did about them. This would show it up for the charade it is. One only hears of anything being done if the matter is given publicity, which seldom helps.

That suffering, ill, exhausted people damaged by the medical profession have the right to redress in the civil courts is no right at all. Only 3% or 4% of cases get to court and they take a minimum of 4 years to get there. Everything is weighted against the victim, especially the hostile attitude of the Health Authorities. In any case, action in the civil courts has only individual relevance. General reform cannot result.

What victims most need is remedial treatment. There is no provision for this. What can be more important than the right to urgent remedial treatment when you have been harmed by hospital personnel? Gross medical negligence is compounded by the implacable unhelpfulness of the Health Authorities.

The NHS should be accountable to the consumer - i.e. the patient. Medical and dental staff have absolute power to give or to withhold necessary investigation and treatment to patients, to treat them with insolence, to defame their characters in privileged communications, etc. provided only that they call this the exercise of 'clinical judgment'. (Compare this with, in recent times in Parliament, the ritual incantation that a matter is one of 'national security' and as such no-one has the right to question it.) Such power is clearly dangerous, is open to abuse and is clearly being abused. Terrible suffering like mine would be totally prevented if medical and dental staff were accountable.

Negligence

There can be nothing in this country more heinously unjust than the lack of help for the suffering victims of medical negligence. Patients have no protection whatsoever from the ignorance, incompetence, negligence and sometimes sheer malice of doctors and dentists. People who are not victims of the system are unaware of the situation. That negligent doctors and dentists incur neither censure nor sanction from the system ensures that negligence flourishes.

It is a moral imperative for caring people to do what they can to bring a speedy end to this cruelty.

The Complaints Procedure needs to be scrapped and replaced by a system providing immediate help for the victim of negligence (I don't mean money; I mean remedial treatment and support) and an independent inquiry into the negligence with the purpose of apportioning responsibility and instituting reform to protect potential future victims. I stress that I am not interested in legal redress. I am asking for legislative action to remedy a national scandal.

The Health Ombudsman defines instances of medical negligence as matters of clinical judgment, and matters of clinical judgment, conveniently for negligent doctors and dentists, are outside his terms of reference. So he does not help. His reply to my letter made clear that he had given scant attention to my arduously compiled material. My evidence was ignored.

This state of affairs is independent of who the individuals are who become victims, being only dependent on the deficiencies of a system which allows the magic phrase 'clinical judgment' to override reason, humanity and justice. Clinical judgment cannot, by definition, obtain, where clinical diagnostic procedures have been waived. To pretend otherwise is an abuse of language, an abuse of trust, effectively an abuse of power and in practice a physical and psychological abuse of individual victims.

These abuses are systemic and must be rooted out. The powerless and suffering need protection from such cruelty.

There was a public inquiry about Wendy Savage, a doctor neither negligent nor incompetent, and about whom no patients had lodged complaints. There are no inquiries into real cases of negligence, initiated by the victims. Health professionals would be much more careful if their actions were to be subjected to public scrutiny.

A young mother had to have her right leg amputated after doctors failed to spot she was suffering from a rare type of cancer for seven month

Mother loses leg after doctors 'miss cancer'
Article in the Telegraph

Extracts:

"Sally Hurst, 29, a radio producer, repeatedly complained of pains in her knee before it was discovered she had potentially fatal and aggressive tumour.

She had been planning to marry her fiance Peter on an Italian cliff top when her physiotherapist referred her to a specialist. Subsequent tests revealed she the bone cancer Osteosarcoma in her right tibia and had to have her leg amputated from her mid-thigh.

Mrs Hurst had to postpone the wedding, and the couple all but gave up hope of having children.

She said: "For months I was made to feel like a hypochondriac and felt as though I was just being neurotic but ultimately, if I had been referred to a specialist earlier, I might not have lost my leg."

Three months after first visiting her doctor, she was sent for physiotherapy for "ligament damage".

But the pain became so bad that she was walking with a crutch and was given a disabled parking space by her employers.

Mrs Hurst said: "I was ringing my physio constantly complaining of the pain and alarm bells started ringing with him that it wasn't quite right.""

"She and Mr Hurst married the following year at a small ceremony in Rochdale Town Hall, and eight months ago Mrs Hurst gave birth to their daughter Holly.

Mrs Hurst added: "I was told I was going through the menopause in October 2006 as a result of the intense chemotherapy.

"So we couldn't believe it when we found out I was expecting. I felt my body was giving something back to me.""

"Mrs Hurst is now taking legal action against her local West Lodge Surgery, in Pudsey, West Yorks, alleging clinical negligence resulting in the loss of a limb.

Rachelle Mahapatra, of law firm Irwin Mitchell, who is representing her, said: "Despite her continued pleas for help from her GP her symptoms were dismissed as a sprain.

"Time is of the essence when you have an aggressive tumour and the delay meant she could not be considered for limb-sparing surgery.""

The incompetence/negligence/ignorance of doctors is so frequently, as in this case, compounded by their insulting sexist attitudes and demoralising remarks about hypochondria and neuroticism.

A man goes to the doctor and the doctor says, "What's the problem then?"

A man goes to the doctor and the doctor says, "What's the problem then?"

A woman goes to the doctor and the doctor says, "And what seems to be the problem then?"


Yes, it's a joke about doctors and their stereotyping of their patients - but it's not far from the truth, is it?

Women 'get worse heart treatment than men': medical sexism. - Women reporting the same symptoms as men are taken less seriously by doctors.

Extract from a Telegraph health article which appeared on 14th November 2007 but for which I can no longer find a link:

"Women with heart problems are less likely to receive as good treatment and examinations as men, a study has found.

Fewer female heart patients receive effective medication to improve their health and reduce their chances of dying from their condition, an analysis of data collected by the Healthcare Commission shows.

Women admitted to hospital with heart failure were also significantly less likely to have received the most effective tests to diagnose their condition."

This has long been known... - In 1973 researchers, Lennane and Lennane, wrote a seminal paper on medical sexism - about how when women reported physical symptoms of potentially serious health conditions they were less likely to be physically examined, tested and treated, than men reporting the same symptoms, because doctors had a stereotypical negative view of women patients and tended to regard women's symptoms as psychogenic, rather than physical. There have been many similar research research findings since then, and some medical schools have special elements - lectures from psychologists - in their courses to try to eliminate this sexism, which is so damaging to women patients. - Unfortunately the sexism continues...)o: - It is even present in this Healthcare Commission report itself! since they seem to want to lay the responsibility on the women patients, rather than on the doctors who are actually responsible: "Researchers, whose study is published in the journal Heart, are not sure why women with heart problems appear to be having a raw deal, but said part of the reason might be differences in the way they describe their symptoms to GPs."

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!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection
See Sodium in foods andhttp://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.

Examples of Steroid Victims in the UK - Example Number 2.

Examples of Steroid Victims in the UK - Example Number 2.

A young woman, 'Dee', was brought to see me in 2000 by Marion, a friend of mine, who recognised Dee’s weight gain as similar to what mine had been.

'Dee' is less than 5 feet tall and she had always weighed 7 and a half stone (105 pounds). She told me that on Feb 1st 1999 a professor in the eye dept at one of our local teaching hospitals had put her on to 22x5mg prednisolone tablets a day for an eye problem. (Prednisolone is one of the steroids that cause sodium and water retention and it should not be prescribed without a warning about this, and the advice to minimise sodium intake while taking the medication. 'Dee' had not been given this information ot advice.) Such a high initial dose beggars belief! After 3 months on this daily dose her weight had increased by 3 stone – 40% of her body weight!!! – and like me she had stretch marks because of so rapid an increase in weight. She had been reduced to eating only one meal a day in an effort - unsuccessful - to lose weight.

When she told the professor of the weight gain and of the pain she was experiencing, his response was to look away and say something like, ‘It’s funny how women are always complaining of pain.’ - It’s not funny, actually...)o: - It’s disgraceful that women patients are treated in this way... - It is a typical example of medical sexism, to which I have referred in a previous entry in this blog. - Medical sexism is extremely damaging to women patients and it is extremely common in Britain...

After that first 3 months the tablets she had been prescribed were gradually reduced in number to one a day, which she was taking when I met her. But the reduction had not brought about any loss of weight. - The damage had been done. Fortunately Marion and I were able to tell her about salt sensitivity. - We spent 2 hours telling her. We had also to overcome the idea that fat/calories have to be reduced in order to lose weight.

Some months later 'Dee' rang me to tell me delightedly that she had lost a lot of weight by following my advice about reducing salt/sodium intake. In clothes, at any rate, she looked normal again. But of course the terrible stretch marks remain, and so does the pain, though it is less.

If you too are a steroid victim, have a look at my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ and then look at some of the other pages, especially the steroids page.

You will find that the best, the safest, the fastest, the most reliable way to lose weight is to eat less salt and forget about reducing calories or struggling to do exercise when you are too fat to be comfortable doing it. - You will feel SO MUCH BETTER! - Overeating and lack of exercise are NOT what caused your obesity.

Good luck!