Sickle Cell Disease. A new treatment costing £1.65 million being offered by the NHS

Sickle Cell Disease is rightly considered to be a horrible condition. It is thought that about 15,000 people have the condition, in England alone, affecting people mainly of Black African and Caribbean heritage. It can cause intense, recurring pain, and it can be life-changing, and even life-threatening.

The NHS has announced that a new, "groundbreaking", individualised 'gene editing' therapy will be offered to patients in England on the National Health Service (NHS). Good news, then? 

The main problem is that the treatment is going to cost the already over-stretched, almost bankrupted NHS £1.65 million per patient. It is expected that 50 people per year will be offered the treatment - total expenditure of an astonishing £82.5 million per annum.

If the treatment works, this may represent excellent value - at least for 50 people every year. But the NHS spending this amount of money represents what is known, in economic jargon, as "an opportunity cost", that is, the opportunity to spend this money on other things.

Other things, for example, like spending money on the treatment of the remaining 14,950 people who currently suffer with sickle cell disease!

Conventional medicine always does this. It comes up with new, 'groundbreaking' treatments that are so expensive they are either not used, or used only by people wealthy enough to pay for their own treatment, or used with a tiny number of people at public expense.

So I have an alternative suggestion!

Earmark this £82.5 million for sickle cell disease. Divide the money between the 15,000 patients who suffer from the disease, and allow each patient to spend their £5,500 on homeopathic treatment!

Homeopathy has been treating Sickle Cell Disease for many, many years; often with complete success. Do a web search - "homeopathy, sickle cell", and see for yourself. Even if each consultation with a homeopath costs £100 per month (with remedies), not one of these 15,000 patients will have to spend more that £1,200 on their treatment. 

The remaining £4,300 could then be spent by the 15,000 sickle cell patients on celebrating their freedom from the disease.

It is time for some new, "groundbreaking" thinking about how the NHS spends public money - on treatment that actually works

Loosening the Grip of Pharmaceutical Medicine on our Health Services

When we seek out health services, in most countries of the world, we will almost inevitably get some form of pharmaceutical, drug-based medicine, delivered by medical staff who are totally committed to the idea that drugs and vaccines will (i) maintain our health, and (ii) return us to health when sick. This is certainly so in Britain, where the NHS now provides pharmaceutical medicine with a complete monopoly.

For a growing number of people this is unsatisfactory. It is not conducive to health freedom and patient choice where each individual ican choose the medical treatment we wish to have. Even if the NHS was dominated by Homeopathy, or Ayuveda, or any other natural therapy, it would be the same - not everyone wants to use the same medical treatment - and most people would like to know about the options available to them, their safety, and their effectiveness.

The basis on which a medical monopoly that has been awarded to pharmaceutical medicine is the subject of an article by the Alliance for Natural Health, which is a supporter of informed choice in the provision of health services. The article, Loosening Big Pharma's Grip on our Health, asked whether there needed to be more or less regulation of health services in response to this market dominance of a single medical system. It discussed the 'rigged' market in health, it made a distinction between Government and Market regulation, and looked at the costs of Big Pharmas current monopoly. It is a thoughtful article that ANH asks to be widely circulated - so I have reproduced the article in full here.

    "Drugs made by one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world - with 80 years of experience behind it - appear to have had little impact on curbing spiraling rates of chronic disease. Healthcare systems are at breaking point and most governments and politicians seem to studiously avoid pointing out what seems so obvious to so many of us.

Mainstream medical systems rely heavily on expensive, often dangerous, drugs to treat symptoms rather than targeting the underlying causes of disease. This pill-for-an ill, drug dominated model that’s driven by crony capitalism comes at a massive cost to both individuals and society.

At the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), we’re dedicated to challenging this broken system and advocating for a healthcare approach based on sound principles and ethics, rooted in prevention, natural health options, and the freedom to make informed choices. It is our hope that a new political landscape that is supportive of natural health will unfold, at least in the US, when the Trump-Vance Administration takes the reins in 2025, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an influential role.

Pharmaceuticals are tightly regulated. But for whose benefit?

A rigged market in healthcare

While markets are often criticised for being profit-driven, they also provide a powerful regulatory mechanism. When markets are free, competition ensures that businesses, regardless of their motivations, must consider the needs of their customers and employees. Selfish business owners can’t thrive unless they deliver real value. In a truly free market, a company that ignores its customers’ needs or disregards safety concerns will ultimately fail. But for this self-regulating system to work, it must operate independently—without interference that protects bad actors.

The healthcare industry does not operate in a free market, but rather in one that is highly regulated, the regulations having been carefully tailored to Big Pharma’s interests, not those of citizens. The result is that Big Pharma enjoys a protected monopoly that it has built over decades through its revolving doors with government agencies, notably the FDA. In a system where the rules of the game are rigged in favor of FDA-approved drugs, it’s no wonder that natural health options—like dietary supplements, lifestyle changes, and preventive care—are marginalised. Instead of being held accountable by market forces, Big Pharma thrives on government interventions that limit competition and create massive profit margins.

Government Regulation vs. Market Regulation

Many assume that government regulation is necessary to protect public health and safety, but regulations often fall short. Ponder this: If drugs require regulation to ensure their safety, effectiveness and quality—these being the three pillars of drug regulation—how come properly prescribed drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, and that most drugs don’t work in most people? With Big Pharma’s tentacles so deep into regulatory agencies, transparency so compromised that crucial data are routinely hidden from public view, and conflicts of interest rampant in ways that sway judgment, objectivity and the opportunity to work in patients’ best interests, should we really expect Big Pharma to be the trusted custodian of our health?  

Consider that nearly half of the FDA’s budget comes from the drug industry in the form of user fees—the money Big Pharma pays the FDA for drug approval. Then there’s the revolving door between Big Pharma and the FDA, where many FDA officials use their time at the agency as a stepping stone to more lucrative employment in the sector they are meant to oversee. Is it any wonder that the FDA has repeatedly attacked and undermined the natural health sector?

Clearly, Big Pharma’s monopoly power comes not from free-market success but from political protectionism. Without government intervention propping up its control, Big Pharma wouldn’t stand a chance against natural health alternatives. These alternatives include inexpensive nutrients and herbs delivered as supplements that build resilience and prevent disease, and changes to conventional dietary and lifestyle norms that are plunging huge numbers ever deeper into metabolic disease. A sick child is the most precious asset to Big Pharma which can then hope for a lifetime’s worth of income from that individual.

The industry profits when people are chronically ill, relying on drugs to manage conditions rather than resolving them. Statins and the latest skinny jab, semaglutide (trade names Ozempic and Wegovy), are examples of long burn wins for Big Pharma.

In a true free market, these pharmaceutical monopolies would be exposed to competition from safer, preventive options, ultimately benefiting public health.

Big Pharma’s Monopoly and Its Costs

The cash flow made possible by monopolies allows pharmaceutical companies to influence politicians and medical societies, as well as steer the direction of medical research. The end result is a healthcare system where patients and practitioners alike are funneled into a drug-dependent approach, ignoring or actively discouraging preventive solutions that could improve quality of life and reduce healthcare costs.

Imagine a world where governments stopped propping up these monopolies. A natural health solution like diet, exercise, or a range of dietary supplements that could become the preferred choice over expensive, side-effect-laden drugs. Consumers could choose health solutions that are more in line with their personal values, budgets, and well-being goals. Commercial speech wouldn’t be constrained in ways that prevent companies from providing truthful information to the public. Big Pharma’s reliance on government regulation and monopoly pricing would collapse, and the market would then do what it does best: encourage quality and innovation by responding directly to consumers’ needs. Like nature, the fittest or best products would flourish in the marketplace, the ineffective ones would fail, and companies that sold products that were dangerous, if the risks were not adequately communicated, could be sued—rather than being protected by government or law (in the case of vaccines) as they are today.

Backroom deals are rarely for the benefit of patients and the public.

A New Approach for True Health Freedom

ANH believes that natural health freedom is only possible in a system where government power doesn’t create or sustain monopolies. People deserve access to preventive healthcare options that aren’t crowded out by a system that prioritises profit over wellness. A free market in healthcare would pave the way for greater transparency, accountability, and choice, empowering individuals to take charge of their health with natural and preventive options.

Ending Big Pharma’s monopoly on our health isn’t a matter of simply “deregulating”; it’s about ending the crony capitalism that keeps monopolies alive. Removing these artificial supports would allow for real competition in healthcare, enabling natural health options to thrive, lowering healthcare costs, and improving outcomes.

The healthcare revolution we need isn’t a top-down, regulatory-heavy approach. It’s a move toward real freedom, with health freedom being central. That’s because our health—for most people anyway (even if it isn’t always recognised until it’s lost)—is our most important asset. With a free market, individuals and patients have access to the health solutions of their choice, free from interference by captured government agencies and the media.

At ANH, we’re fighting to protect this freedom and support for health systems where disease prevention, natural health choices and unalienable rights are not only respected, but facilitated and encouraged. The endgame? Human vitality and flourishing."

 

Perhaps more than any other organisation of which I am aware, the ANH adopts the most intelligent and considered approach to the important concepts of health freedom and patient choice. I recommend that everyone supports them in their work.

 

Economic Inactivity. 2.8 Million People Unemployed

It's not just the NHS that is "broken", as I have discussed here recently. Regrettably there is a corresponding lack of ANY understanding about WHY the NHS is broken, and WHAT has led to the abject failure of the NHS over the decades. The reason I put forward to answer these vital questions has been discussed regularly on this forum during the last 15 years; but (it would appear) no-where else.

Whilst most people may know that the NHS has a problem, few people seem to know, or ask about the underlying cause of that problem. Certainly no politician appears to know, not least Britain's new Labour government. And they are not alone. Every British political party is committed to "saving the NHS", and they are all are willing to throw any amount of money into propping it up. This approach is based on the assumption that there is nothing wrong with the NHS - other than underfunding. It just needs more money, more resources. This is not so.

Britain spends over £180 billion on the NHS (2022-3)! In comparison we spend only £81 billion on Education; and £52 billion of defence.

So why don't we throw another £22 billion at the NHS, just as the government did this week - in the forlorn hope that this will be sufficient to "save" it. If, as I suspect, it proves not to be enough than more money will have to be found. This assessment of the travails of the NHS, and our knee-jerk response to them, has not changed in over 70 years!

The problem with the NHS is not resources, it is about how, and on what, they spend these resources. The NHS has long sold its soul to pharmaceutical or drug-based medicine and I have long argued this case, here on this blog and elsewhere. The drug-led approach of the NHS employs treatments that have limited, marginal effectiveness. And these limited benefits are gained only at the expense of causing serious iatrogenic harm - euphemistically called "side effects" or "adverse drug reactions" - which are really serious illnesses and diseases. The argument is not based on my personal opinion, but on the available medical literature. We only have to look at the package inserts (Patient Information Leaflets, PILs) which come with each and every pharmaceutical drug and vaccines. These drugs have been used liberally by the NHS since 1948 to treat patients. They cause disease, not least the kinds of chronic disease, leading to long-term sickness, that is making it increasingly difficult for so many people to work, and support themselves and their family.

In order to see how serious the problem of pharmaceutical drug-taking is, take a look at my "Iatrogenic Disease" e-book, in which I list nearly 100 serious medical conditions, and the specific drugs and vaccines that are known to cause them.

Economic Inactivity

One problem the new Labour government wants to address to get Britain working again, and to deal with the problem of long-term ill-health. The Labour party manifesto stated that after 14 years of Tory government (2010 to 2024) large numbers of people have become economically inactive, effectively excluded from the labour market, and that nearly one million young people were not in work, or learning, and that the economic cost of worklessness is becoming a major issue. The problem of long-term sickness is discussed in more detail here in an article published by the Alliance for Natural Health.

Indeed, the problem is well recognised. Back in November 2023 the (then) Tory government stated there were over 1,100,000 people with long-term health problems, disabilities, or long-term unemployment. They had a plan to get them back to work, a plan focusing mainly on providing support and sanctions for anyone who were not actively looking for employment.

Now the Labour government's “Back to Work Plan” states that tackling economic inactivity is central to their number one mission: to "grow the economy". The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has stated that "rising levels of economic inactivity are unacceptable and that immediate action must be taken. 9.4 million people are now economically inactive, a record 2.8 million people are out of work due to long-term sickness, and 900,000 young people (1 in 8) are not in education, employment, and training". She continued:

    “Earlier this week the Health Secretary set out how cutting NHS waiting lists will get Britain back to health and back to work, and how by taking bold action on public health we can build the healthy society needed for a healthy economy."

So the new government believes that the problem of economic inactivity is a health issue, and to deal with it they have to address the ongoing failure of the 'broken' NHS to cope with the ever-growing levels of sickness and chronic disease that are clogging up waiting lists, access to treatment, etc.

The assessment that the problem of economic inactivity is about health is undoubtedly correct; but it is the right conclusion for the wrong reason! The problem for most people who are too sick to work is not that they have been waiting too long for medical treatment. It is because the medical treatment they have received hitherto via the NHS has (i) not made them better, and (ii) caused them to be ill and/or incapacitated.

So government policy is to give the NHS more money to the NHS, so that 'economically inactive' people can be given more pharmaceutical drug treatment - in other words, more of the same. The NHS has been doing this for over 75 years, and during all this time, chronic disease, in all its many guises, have reached epidemic levels - and they continue to rise inexorably. And as our NHS has generated increasing levels of chronic disease, as its medicines have made people sicker, it is almost inevitable that more people are becoming 'economically inactive'. 

Epidemic levels of chronic disease, and economic inactivity, is a secondary cost of a failed medical system. These secondary costs are not the direct cost incurred by the NHS, staff costs, premises, testing, vaccines, drug treatments, operations,and other treatments, but the unintended consequences that have arisen directly from the mal-functioning of the NHS. A few examples outlined in the above link include...

• The Arthritis epidemic that stunts people's life, makes people increasingly immobile, and prevents sufferers from working, and earning their own living.
• The Asthma epidemic that now curtails the ability of so many people to lead a full, active and independent lives.
• The Cancer epidemic that incapacitates, and cuts short the working lives of so many people, who are left requiring both increasing medical, social, and end-of-life care.
• The Diabetes explosion, alongside its many related conditions, that now incapacitates so many more people than ever before, increases their need for life-long medical and social care, and reduces their capacity for work.

The new Labour government does not understand this. Its plans for reorganising the NHS do not focus on failed medical treatment. On receiving the highly critical Darzi Report it has committed itself to three 'missions' on health:

• Moving the focus of health care from Hospital to Home: a good idea for a variety of reasons, but it does nothing to move NHS treatment away from its total commitment to pharmaceutical (drug-based) medicine.
• Moving from Analogue to a Digital record system: no doubt a positive move to ensure better communication within the NHS, but a 'mission' that has little/nothing to do with the treatment that will be offered to patients.
  
• Moving from a Sickness service to a Prevention service, certainly a necessary and sensible change, but not if (as I suspect) 'prevention' involves an increasing number of vaccinations, and the 'preventative' use of well-known and over-used pharmaceutical drugs like aspirin, Beta Blockers, and Statins, and many others.
  

So none of these three missions are designed to alter the medical treatment that is offered by the NHS. Our government will now be spending in excess of £200 billion on the NHS. And because it does not recognise the underlying problem, it will continue to be in crisis. Soon doctors will tell us yet again that they require another major increase in an "under-resourced" health care system.

It is impossible to fix anything that is "broken" unless we know how it is broken, and what has broken it. And to continue throwing resources at a "broken" system, with money being spent on the same solutions, is not just misguided it is foolish. It is the triumph of hope over experience, an abject failure to assess accurately and correctly the roots of the NHS problem.

We need an NHS that is capable of standing up to the drug companies, questioning and researching the efficacy of pharmaceutical, drug-based medicine. We need an NHS that begins to recognise (again), and focus its work on the importance of the immune system, and begins to stress (again) the importance of life-style decisions, diet and nutrition, exercise, stress management, and similar, in supporting our natural immunity. Above all, we need an NHS that is prepared to look at and compare the relative effectiveness (patient outcomes) of pharmaceutical medicine when compared to other natural medical therapies such as homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, herbalism, and the like.

In fact, this has already been recognised, and recommended by a group of MP's in December 2018 when the All-Party Parliamentary group for integrated healthcare released a report which stated that changing health needs required a different approach, and recommended the greater use of complementary, traditional, and natural medical therapies "to rescue the NHS from financial crisis". Their report stated that in 70 years of the NHS there were a growing number of people suffering from long-term illnesses, and that this posed a significant threat to the future sustainability of the NHS.

The lobbying of this group was clearly, and sadly, not as powerful or effective as the Pharmaceutical lobby. Its recommendations were, however, exactly what is required to respond to the 'broken' NHS, and to address the needs of the increasing number of people who are 'economically inactive'.

Is anyone prepared to listen yet?

NHS Crisis (Autumn 2024). Another Installment of Medical Failure?

I have written a series of blogs on "the NHS Crisis", the first one in May 2011, some 13 years ago, and here is yet another update. However, this time it has been written for me - courtesy of an official Government Report, "Independent Investigation of the NHS in England, which does not write off the problem as a little local difficulty that will be solved by pouring more money into a failed institution!

The report was published after a 9-week review of the NHS by Lord Darzi, an independent peer, and former cancer surgeon, initiated by the election of a new Labour government in July 2024. It has been widely reported in the mainstream media, and paints a stark picture, far beyond the usual problems with long and growing waiting lists and delays in response, diagnosis and treatment throughout the entire NHS organisation. The report states that:

• Accident and Emergency services are in "an awful state":, with long waits estimated to be causing an additional 14,000 extra deaths (annually).
•  The health of the nation has deteriorated, and has brought in "a surge in long-term mental health conditions".
• Rising levels of illness risk economic prosperity, with 2.8 million people now unable to work because of poor health.
• Britain has higher cancer mortality rates than other countries.
• Although hospital staff have increased since the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of appointments and procedures have not risen because "patients no longer flow through hospitals as the should".
• The NHS has been starved of capital investment, leading to "crumbling buildings", mental health patients in "Victoria-era cells infested with vermin" and "parts of the NHS operating in decrepit portacabins".
  

My series of blogs (use this link to see my last one, in March 2024, which gives links to all of them) have charted the rise and rise of the NHS Crisis as it has developed through the last 13 years, highlighting (i) the nature of the crisis at the time of writing, (ii) predicting that the crisis would get progressively worse, and would NOT be resolved by pouring more money into it, and (iii) that no-one has yet had the wit to work out the underlying reason for this ongoing NHS Crisis! 

Does the Darzi report, and the new government's initial response, address the issues I have raised? That's look at each one.

(i) Hitherto, the serious nature of the NHS Crisis has always been heavily discounted. It could be resolved by another management re-organisation, or (more usually) by putting in additional resources, by bringing in private investment: the problem was primarily one of under-investment. Now, we are told, the crisis will take 10 years to resolve, and no further money will be spent "without reform".

(ii) So the Darzi report has (at last) overturned the idea that the interminable saga of NHS Crises can be resolved by pouring more money into it. And for the first time in the 76 year history of the NHS, a British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, have openly admitted this. So my prediction has come true.

• Keir Starmer has said that although the NHS is in a critical condition, there will be no additional money "without reform". It must, he says, "reform or die". But what reform? Another structural management reform? There have been plenty of these, and none of them have prevented the NHS crisis spiralling, year by year.
  
• Wes Streeting has spoken about the three 'big shifts' that were needed. (a) a move from hospital to community care. (b) a move from analogue to digital technology "to empower patients and give them control over their healthcare". (c) moving from a treatment model to a preventative model. These are 'shifts' that have little or nothing to do with what I argue, that it is the treatment that the NHS offers its patients that is at the root of the problem.
  

 (iii) So the fundamental reason for the ongoing NHS Crisis has still not been identified! Why, for instance, are "patients no longer flowing through hospitals as the should"? Is the medical treatment they receive not working? The question is not even asked. And why is there "a surge in long-term mental health conditions". What is causing this surge? Again, the question is not asked, leave alone given a response. So how will these proposals get 2.8 million patients back to work - if there is to be no change to the medical treatment they receive? The misguided and thoughtless assumption that pharmaceutical medicine is treating illness and disease successfully remains firmly in place!

So what, indeed, is causing the unprecedented/epidemic levels of chronic diseases, like ADHD, Allergy, Arthritis, Autism, Dementia, Diabetes, Epilepsy, Heart/Lung/Kidney/Liver disease, Mental Health, and so many more? It has little to do with hospital care or community care, with digital technology, and moving to a 'preventative' model. In pharmaceutical medicine, prevention seems to mean giving drugs like Statins, and vaccines, earlier - whilst people are still well!

If the NHS continues to provide patients with a diet o pharmaceutical drugs, which have limited and marginal effectiveness as treatment, there is little hope that it will ever be able to reduce the number of sick patients, and the amount of sickness they present.

If the NHS continues to provide patients with pharmaceutical drugs which cause serious adverse reactions, and disease in patients, there is every possibility that the number of sick people, and the seriousness of their health deficits, will continue to increase - as they have done for the last 76 years.

So the Darzi report, and the government response to it, is positive in the limited sense that the seriousness of the problem has at last been recognised, and the futility of throwing more money in the bottomless pit of the NHS acknowledged. 

But without identifying the fundamental problem, the control that the NHS has gratuitously given to pharmaceutical medicine, and its almost total reliance on pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, the solution has again been missed again.

When the NHS was established it was based on two important principles. First, that treatment should be free at the point of use. And second, that the best medical treatment should be offered to patients. I agree with both these principles, but the second has been badly neglected. 

What was not envisaged in 1948 was that the pharmaceutical industry would achieve a virtual monopoly in the treatment options offered to patients by the NHS. The only change that has taken place regarding patient treatment has been the removal of Natural Medical Therapies, including homeopathy.

Pharmaceutical drugs are not making us better. Indeed they are making us sicker. But they now have a monopoly within the NHS. Visit a doctor, go to a hospital, and you will almost inevitably receive pharmaceutical medicine. 

That is the fundamental basis of the NHS crisis.

The Contaminated Blood Inquiry. Is the focus of the media response misplaced!

We do not learn from our mistakes. History should teach us that scandals, disasters and fiascos are never recognised at the time, or even soon afterwards, but usually take 30-40, or even 50 years after they happen before they are accepted. We don't seem to understand this, even today, following the publication of the Infected Blood inquiry's final report. This is how the Guardian described the contaminated blood scandal.

            "The scandal has been described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS. People treated by the NHS in the UK between the 1970s and 1990s were exposed to tainted blood through transfusions, including during complications in childbirth, or, in the case of haemophiliacs, given contaminated “factor VIII” blood products imported from the US".

I wrote about this scandal here in 2017, in "The Contaminated Blood Scandal. The worst cover-up in NHS history". It certainly has been a cover-up of massive proportions, one that has lasted for over 50 years after the issues were first known.

And now, hiding (as yet unannounced and unrecognised) in the background, is yet another scandal in the making - the Covid-19 vaccine scandal. This has concerned a mass vaccination campaign using a largely untested, and therefore experimental vaccines). And I predict that this scandal might also take another 30, 40 or 50 years before it is fully recognised by the UK's health and political establishments.

This 30+ year gap from 'event' to 'recognition/apology' is not restricted to conventional medicine. The Hillsborough tragedy, the Bloody Sunday massacre, and the Post Office scandal, are all demonstration of this laggardly timescale; and but there are many others. Nor will these scandals be the last; there will no doubt be many others to come!

Yet it is within the confines of the conventional medical establishment that most of these scandals happen. I wrote about several of these medical scandals in Chapter 9, "Medical Errors" in my "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" e-book. And if we are ever going to learn, it is important to understand what is going on, and why these decades-long time-delays are allowed to happen - time and time again.

There are influential people and powerful organisations implicated in each and every one of these scandals. They invariably, inevitably hold control the information about the situation within their sphere; within industry, within the conventional medical establishment, within government, and/or within the mainstream media. They are people with reputations to defend, and personal wealth to protect. And corporations or institutions with profitability at stake. When it is realised that there is a problem, they defend themselves, vigorously, through many tried and tested strategies:

• initially they ignore the situation (on the basis that it is best not to discuss the situation in case it attracts unnecessary or unwanted publicity),
• then they obfuscate (it is best that people are confused, or over-whelmed, rather than certain that something 'bad' has happened),
  
• they go into denial, they cover-up (they play for time, defending themselves with arguments like "there is no evidence", or the "correlation is not causality", et al,
  
• they discount the importance of the situation (there may be a slight problem, but only a few people people were 'involved; it's not a serious issue), and they excuse themselves by saying that the benefits of what happened far outweighed the risks.
  

These factors were all in evidence in previous scandals; Thalidomide, Vioxx, Opioid, Primodos, Sodium Valproate, were all defended using these strategies. The infected blood scandal was no different, just the latest example of a medical scandal that took decades before the truth was recognised, and the cover-up revealed.

I suggest that the Covid-19 vaccine scandal is at the very earliest stage of this process. Literally millions of people, around the world, have reported serious adverse vaccine reactions to national drug regulators, and they have not been recognised, investigated or acted upon. There is growing realisation by doctors and others within the Conventional Medical Establishment that there is a serious problem (stemming from the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration), and when the patient harm issues have been raised in Parliament, by a handful of MP's, they have spoken to an almost empty chamber, and received only an obfuscatory response from a government minister. The voluminous reports of serious patient harm from the Covid-19 vaccines are said to be greater than any other vaccine for the last 70 years. There have been 'excess deaths' each and every month for the last 3 years (since the vaccine roll-out), and questions about  links with the Covid-19 vaccines have usually been ignored, or denied. All these suggestions and allegations meet with institutional ridicule and denial, a refusal to investigate further, and the determination to continue with the Covid vaccination campaign.

Any similarities here with the contaminated blood scandal in the 1970's and 1980's? An industry not prepared to abandon a profitable vaccine? A health system unwilling to admit that it has caused serious patient harm? A government that does not want to compensate and pay damages to damaged patients?

The problem is that we might have to wait 30 years to find out! We are in the early stages during which the victims do not receive recognition, sympathy, support or compensation. They are the 'ordinary' people, with limited resources; they are not 'experts', and they find it difficult to penetrate 'the system' which insists there is no problem; and they certainly don't have the funds to take the issue to a court of law. 

On the other side of the fence they face people in positions of great power and influence, backed by powerful institutions. These are rich and powerful people, in extremis, who stick together. They present as a united front to protect themselves, to sing from the same song sheet. Corporate directors, senior government officials, and the mainstream media control the agenda, the information is (and is not) made available to the public.

Indeed, with health scandals in particular, one notable feature of these scandals is that no action is taken to correct the fault. The infected blood products continue to be sold; the opioid drugs are still marketed; Sodium Valproate continues to be prescribed; and even the infamous Thalidomide drug is still being used, today! These sales continue until such time that the scandal becomes bigger, when sales begin to fall, or the hitherto toothless, incompetent drug regulator bans it; or the drug company 'withdraws' it because it has become "uncommercial". One of the Covid-19 vaccines, the AstraZeneca vaccine, has suffered this fate - withdrawn for 'commercial reason' even though  it was never approved in some countries (the USA), was banned in about 12 European countries, and 'withdrawn' from the UK. The 'commercial' reason was that no-one wanted the vaccine because of 'suspicions' that they caused serious patient harm!

Another common thread that runs through most, if not all, these medical scandals is that drug/vaccine/treatment involved usually started life as a "wonder drug", a "game changer" that would transform the treatment of one disease or another. However, each one has moved from being loudly heralded "a miracle cure" to be quietly being dropped as a killer drug.

And then we are led to believe that such a thing has never happened before! 

Even at the very end of medical scandals, as with the 'contaminated blood scandal', the issue is usually discounted as being a 'one-off' issue, a single, isolated and terrible medical 'mistake' that must not be allowed to happen again. Also, they are presented as situations that would not be allowed to happen, not now, because things have changed, medicine has moved on. So, the defective, disease-inducing blood scandal product becomes "the worse disaster in the history of the NHS" - the implication being that something as bad as this has never happened before. And of course the Inquiry will insure that no such thing will never happen again in future!

So usually no-one is ever held to account for the scandal. This is the main purpose of the long drawn out history of obstruction and delay. If resolution can be delayed for 30, 40, or 50 years on, the people involved will either be dead, or too old; their scandal-driven profits already spent, or no longer available. The pharmaceutical industry will have re-organised, the old, often defunct drug companies will no longer be around to question, or prosecute. The politicians and civil servants involved with the scandal will have moved on, or died. Even some of the documentation might have been 'lost'. 

So it is the current government (that is, tax payers) who foots the compensation/damages bill, especially when drug companies have been given immunity from prosecution.

Conventional medicine is inherently secretive. This is because it relies heavily on pharmaceutical drug treatments, all of which are known to have serious side effects that can cause serious patient harm. This is at the heart of what makes the NHS defensive in all its dealing with the public. This is why conventional medicine does not, perhaps cannot, function openly, transparently, or honestly.

So there will be more health scandals, and with all the evidence available at this point it seems safe to predict that the Covid-19 vaccines, which are already suspected to have caused so much serious patient harm (heart conditions, cancer, damage to the immune system, to mental health, et al), will eventually grab our attention. But not, perhaps, for another 30 or 40 years!

So how can we identify a scandal 30 to 40 years earlier? I have a couple of tips.

• Watch for a new 'medical breakthrough', the promotion of a new 'ground beating' medical treatment by both government, and the mainstream media,
  
• Listen to who is speaking, and what they are saying. (i) the voice of the 'common' people who claim they have been harmed, but who remain largely unheard, or beaten back, and (ii) the denials and obfuscations of the medical and political establishments.

If these conditions apply then we just might have another medical scandal to witness - if we live long enough to see it unravel!

 

Note: When it was first published, Blogger removed this post. It was part of the Media's censorship campaign again the idea that pharmaceutical medicine was anything but "safe and effective". It has since been republished!

The NHS Crisis (Spring 2024): now there is no more money!

The NHS Crisis is developing fast, getting worse by the day, and has become a year-long event. I have been writing about this crisis for over 11 years now. The underlying pattern of the crisis has never changed:

 >>> increased sickness >>> followed by increased spending on pharmaceutical treatment >>> followed by even more sickness >>> and then even more demands for even more money. 

During this time the NHS has never changed its explanation for the crisis. They don't have enough money, they need more, lots more, for more pharmaceutical drug treatment, for more adverse drug reactions, for more sickness - for which the NHS will want more money for treatment. It is a merri-go-round!

It has always been thus. It is contained within the 14+ blogs written over the last 13 years on the NHS Crisis, all listed and linked at the foot of the page.

And no one (outside this blog) has EVER questioned whether it is wise to spend more and more money on a medical system that is so demonstrably failing to provide an effective response to the constantly expanding levels of sickness. Yet the right questions are beginning to be asked. The NHS has routinely told us that it does not have enough doctors and nurses. Yet doctor numbers have risen by 37%, and other staff by 45%, in the last 10 years. This Expose article asks "How does the the NHS do so little with so much". It fails to come to the inevitable conclusion, but it does provide some useful statistics from the Office for National Statistics.

• The number of doctors increased by 37,467 (up 37%) from 101,137 in 2013 to 138,604 by 2023.
• The number of nurses and midwives increased by 68,063 (up 23%) from 295,163 in 2013 to 363,226 in 2023.
• The number of scientific staff increased by 42,938 (up 13%) from 123,912 in 2013 to 166,850 in 2023.
• The number of support staff increased by 125,510 (up 45%) from 279,579 in 2013 to 405,089 in 2023.
• The number of infrastructure staff increased by 62,758 (up 41%) from 152,437 in 2013 to 215,195 in 2023.
• The number of ambulance staff increased by just 1,721 (up 10%) from 17,537 in 2013 to 19,258 in 2023.

Even the BBC is beginning to ask questions about the viability of the NHS. In July 2023 it wished the NHS a happy 75th birthday - but asked whether it could survive to 100 years old. They are right to ask the question, but as usual, wrong in their assessment of what the problem is. They mentioned the "dire warnings" that it could not do so "without drastic change". A change in the medical system, dominated by pharmaceutical drugs, that dominates NHS treatment? No, let's blame the patient instead!

            "When the NHS was created the main focus was on short bouts of treatment for injury and infection, but now the challenge is completely different.The ageing population means huge numbers of people are living with chronic health problems, such as heart disease, dementia and diabetes that require long-term care and for which there is no cure. It is already estimated about £7 out of every £10 spent in the NHS goes on people with these conditions. On average, those over 65 have at least two. And the situation is only going to worsen. "The numbers are going to grow," Health Foundation director of research and economics Anita Charlesworth says. "The baby boomer generation is reaching old age."

Predictably the BBC fails to spot that heart disease, dementia and diabetes have grown to epidemic proportions during the 75 years of NHS treatment, but fails to take the comment "... for which there is no cure" any further!

It does, however, provide graphs about health spending as a percentage of day-to-day public service spending, indicating that this rose from 27% in 1999-2000, to 32% in 2009-2020, to 42% in 2019-2020, and to 44% in 2024 to 2025. More and more money for health clearly indicates that there is less and less money for any other public service - education, police, local government, defence. We are gradually, progressively, robbing Peter to pay Big Pharma!

This Medscape article outlines just how bad the situation has become, focusing on the situation in Northern Ireland.

            "Record-breaking waiting lists and emergency department times – the worst across the UK, healthcare staff at breaking point and leaving the region, GP practices closing due to financial issues, and a scheduled junior doctors' strike this week have seen the situation hit crisis point. The health service in Northern Ireland is now in “absolute meltdown” say clinicians working in the region, with even the Minister for Health acknowledging that the situation is “deplorable” and “unprecedented”."

            "Northern Ireland's Minister of Health, Robin Swann issued a stark warning of an "extremely difficult and worsening" financial position for health and social care ... (as usual) ... calling for increased resources and multi-annual budgeting".             "We have a system that is in very real trouble. Every part of it is in profound distress.... The risks of service breakdown are real and growing in a range of areas. I do not say this to frighten people but to help build a shared understanding. We continue to have expectations and demands of health and social care that we cannot currently meet, and on the current trajectory the situation is getting worse rather than better".

In other words, there is no more money, no more handouts for a failing medical system can be expected. The Westminster Government continues to trickle money into the NHS; but it recognises that taxes are too high, that more borrowing is untenable, and in a recent budget, has said that they are expecting more productivity from medical staff (blame the staff?). The Opposition Labour party, which might find itself in government by the end of this year, tells a similar story; they will not break their fiscal rules, which effectively means - no more taxes, no more borrowing, no additional money for the NHS.

This is what has changed since I last wrote about the NHS Crisis. Both government and opposition has now accepted that there is no more money. The NHS is not going to be bailed out, again, as has happened routinely during the last 75 years. The magic "NHS money tree" is dead!

Another new factor is that key NHS staff have gone on strike; senior doctors, junior doctors, nurses, ambulance staff - people who have never been on strike before. Why? Despite the money thrown at the NHS little of it has apparently gone to staff. So not even those who deliver pharmaceutical medical treatment are content. A newly qualified doctor, after 5-6 years of training, has a starting salary is about £33,000. And it has been estimated that junior doctor's salaries have fallen by about 30% in the last 15 years.

So the NHS has not only devoted itself, entirely, to a system of medical treatment that does not work, which is actually making us sicker, it cannot even treat its clinicians, the people who operate the NHS, properly. Staff morale within the NHS is not only poor, it is getting worse.

In a health service that cannot cope with the pressures it faces, recent news from the GP Magazine, Pulse, on 12th March 2024, reported alarmingly that "swathes of GP's were at risk of redundancy". Watch this space! Is the NHS facing self-destruction? A BMA spokesperson has recently warned general practice that it has suddenly gone from a recruitment crisis to an employment crisis. 

Surely the NHS crisis cannot get any worse! But I haven't mentioned NHS dental services, which in many parts of the country are now virtually non-existent. The Guardian reported, in October 2023, that there were a record numbers of patients complaining to the NHS Ombudsman about poor care, exorbitant fees and gaining accept to NHS dental services in England. The Ombudsman said that poor dental care leaves patients frustrated, in pain and out of pocket. The number of complaints received every year has risen by 66%, and the proportion of complaints being upheld has increased from 42% to 78% over the same period. The ombudsman is currently receiving about 100 calls a week from people worried about poor treatment, an inability to access NHS dental care, and being removed from a dentist's practice list.

So the NHS crisis continues and deepens, as it is likely to do so long as we fail to recognise the main reason for the crisis. No problem is ever resolved unless and until the cause of the problem is accurately identified. The NHS, and the Government, have been singularly unable, or unwilling to do so to recognise that it has invested in pharmaceutical medicine, a medical system that just does not work. So, bad as the current crisis is, it will only get worse.

According to the USA Department of Health and Human Services, as many as 1 in 3 hospital admission each year are linked to adverse drug reactions, and inter-reactions. The situation in the UK is similar, as it is in other countries with a so-called 'advanced' or 'modern' medical system. So we have the evidence that prescription drugs, legitimately prescribed, cause patient harm, and make them sick, can even lead to death. 

In fact, many do lead to death. This is from a paper published by Imperial College London, "National State of Patient Safety, 2022. What we know about avoidable harm".

            "In 2019 there were more than 130,000 avoidable deaths in Great Britain - more than 22% of all deaths. Of these, 64% were classed as preventable and 36% were classed as treatable"

The problem is that the conventional medical establishment is skilled at discounting any such evidence. They are the result of under-performance, mistakes, errors, accidents, all of which can be avoided by improved management practices. The motto of the NHS seems to be "carry on, regardless".

 

NHS Crisis: links to previous blogs

• The NHS Debate (NHS in Crisis 2011)
• Our doctors in Crisis (NHS in Crisis 2015)
• Britain's NHS in Crisis (2016)
• NHS in Crisis (2016)
• NHS in Crisis (2017)
• NHS Crisis (Winter 2017)
  
• The NHS Crisis (2017-2018)
• NHS in Crisis (Summer 2018)
• NHS in Crisis (2018-2019)
• NHS Crisis (2019-2020). It gets worse each winter. But the real cause is never identified
• NHS in Crisis 2020. Another routine annual winter crisis notwithstanding Coronavirus Covid-19
• NHS in Crisis (Autumn 2020). Covud-19 is confirmation that conventional medicine is failing us
• The NHS Crisis (January 2021). The Covid-19 Pandemic, and an organisation heading for new levels of serious medical failure.
• The NHS in Crisis (March 2022)

 

 

Conventional Medical Treatment. Why is there growing dissatisfaction amongst patients?

People have had a love affair with pharmaceutical medicine for many years. We have been led to believe it is the route to good health. The UK's NHS has been a much loved institution since it was first established in 1948, and conventional medicine continues to dominate health provision in health provision all over the world, with constant demands for more funding. 

Yet is public approval now beginning to falter?

The approval of conventional, or pharmaceutical medicine has survived despite escalating levels of chronic disease over the years, and now running at epidemic levels. It has survived despite thousands of pharmaceutical drugs/vaccines, presented initially as 'entirely safe', and 'game changers' in the treatment of this, or that illness, being 'banned' or 'withdrawn' when they were found to cause patient harm. When the drug did not make patients better, regardless of being put on these unsafe drugs for their entire lifetime, pharmaceutical medicine has continued to remain popular.

Yet will conventional medicine survive after its abject failure to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic? Will more people start to realise that our love of affair with conventional medicine has been misplaced, that pharmaceutical medicine is of limited value, and a demonstrable record of failure? 

We have been told since 2020 that government policies on Covid-19 (in most countries of the world) have been based the best 'medical science' available. Yet an increasing number of people can now see that these policies, the policies advocated by conventional medicine, have been a disaster.

• The Virus: the Covid-19 virus was probably engineered in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, and although this was initially denied, the suggestion is now more widely accepted, and evidence is accumulating.
• Masks: there has never been any science to support the wearing of masks as a protection against Covid-19; yet despite actually being told this in the early days of the pandemic, they were subsequently made compulsory.
• Lockdown: the failure of lockdown policies is demonstrable, as are its negative outcomes - on mental health, on child development and education, on jobs and livelihoods, on the economy, on personal liberty, and much else. Now (after more than two years) these failures are now being discussed.
• The Vaccines: the vaccines have clearly not worked, in the way we were told they would work. They have neither stopped the vaccinated contracting the virus, nor prevented the transmission of the virus. Moreover, the Covid-19 vaccines have caused more serious harm, and death to patients, than any other vaccine in the history of vaccinations.
  

Throughout the Covid-19 saga we have been urged to "save the NHS", as if the pandemic was a greater threat to the institution, and to the pharmaceutical drugs to which it is committed, than to patients! Actually, it probably was! In Britain we were urged to stand on the street, night after night, to applaud NHS staff, alongside rainbow and 'thank-you' signs to illustrate the reason for the applause. 

Now, there is a growing understanding that the fear and panic over the virus was largely induced by conventional medicine (with the unstinting support of government and the mainstream media), that the harm caused by the virus was grossly exaggerated, and that the Covid-19 virus has proven to be no more of a threat to us than any other seasonal influenza outbreak.

The applause often reminded me of the Soviet-styled clapping of political leaders, the engineered worship of a powerful (but a failing and increasingly absurd) political elite.

To an extent the applause was understandable. My issue is not with NHS staff, it is with the medicine to which the NHS is now totally committed. The staff were on the front life, they were responsible for for looking after very sick and dying patients, and the manufactured panic did seem genuine enough to most people at the time.

Yet there are now signs that confidence in conventional medicine is might now be changing. Public satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to the lowest levels for over 25 years. So what has caused the change?

The King's Fund has recently published "Public satisfaction with the NHS and social care in 2021: results from the British Social Attitudes survey". This has shown that overall satisfaction with the NHS fell to 36%, which they described as "an unprecedented 17 percentage point decrease on 2020". This was the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since 1997, when satisfaction was just 34%. More people (41%) were dissatisfied with the NHS than satisfied, and this dissatisfaction was spanned all ages, income groups, sexes and supporters of different political parties.

The reason for dissatisfaction with the NHS did not identify the failure of the medical system.The main reason people gave for being dissatisfied were waiting times for seeing a doctor, and for hospital appointments (65%), staff shortages (46%) and the long-held view that government did not spend enough on the NHS (40%). I suspect that more fundamental but unvoiced concerns have emerged over recent years.

I have heard much cynicism from erstwhile supporters of the NHS about the way Covid-19 was dealt with. There has certainly been a gap between (i) what we were told and (ii) what actually happened. For instance, when the vaccines were about to be introduced, in December 2020, we were told that they would save us, and return us back to normal life by February. Remember? The first single injection would improve the situation. Then we were asked to have a second dose. Then a booster. Then a second booster. And now we are being told that we will need to have boosters every 6 months for the foreseeable future, according to one UK government health agency.

With each injection, take up rates reduced. Fewer people were prepared to take more. This was probably because people realised the the Covid-19 vaccines were causing serious harm to patients. What other reason could there be? Even one manufacturer, Pfizer, knew about the harm their vaccine might cause. The public have not been told about this, by government, by doctors, or by the mainstream media. But when someone is damaged they think twice before getting a second, a third, and a fourth vaccine.

So there is little wonder that people are having increasing doubts about how 'scientific' conventional medicine is, and whether doctors and the NHS can be trusted. A rash of recent articles has outlined the new scepticism. The BMJ recently published an article entitled "The illusion of evidence-based medicine". The Daily Expose published an article entitled "Modern Medicine - a castle built on sand". CHD has published at article entitled "How politics corruption evidence-based medicine". And the Vaccine Reaction has published an article entitled "Trust in CDC waning".

Even the Spectator is moving into these more critical areas. The 'inescapable' conclusion of their article "The NHS is failing" is that when you compare the NHS to other similar health services in similar countries around the world the it does not merit our devotion.

            "While MPs compete to shout the loudest in their support of the UK’s health services (‘save our NHS!’), the British public has fallen out of love with it. More people are now dissatisfied with the NHS than are happy with it. This is true across all ages, income groups, sexes and voters of different political parties. Support for the NHS is now at the lowest level for a quarter of a century."

The Spectator article is written by Tim Knox, former director of the Centre for Policy Studies. He compared the NHS with the health provision in 19 other countries so it is basically a comparison of health service outcomes in other wealthy countries, all of which have a health service which is dominated by conventional/pharmaceutical medicine. It indicates that the NHS compares badly. So, for example, life expectancy in the UK is 17th out of these 19 comparable nations. 

            "Our cancer survival rates are shockingly low. We are the worst for strokes and heart attacks. We are one from bottom for preventing treatable diseases. We are third from bottom for infant mortality."

The article concludes that our health system is less successful than that of other nations, that in all comparisons used, the UK comes bottom of the league tables four times (more than any other country) and is in the bottom 3 nations for 8 out of the 16 measures.

Knox's article also makes the another important point, that the amount of money spent on conventional medicine makes little difference to patient outcomes. He looked at the American insurance based model as a possible alternative for the NHS, but found that although the USA spends considerably more money on conventional medicine than any other nation, patient outcomes were even worse.

            "If there is one country that clearly has a worse system than the UK, it is America. Extraordinarily low life expectancy, vast costs and often poor treatment means that it would be a crazy model to imitate. But that doesn’t mean we should discount an insurance model altogether. Plenty of European and western countries are able to effectively use such a model without the massive health failures we see in the US."

So criticism and dissatisfaction of conventional medical provision may be growing, but not to the point that the underlying cause of the failure of NHS medicine has been identified. 

The NHS is NOT failing because it is failing to use its resources as well as other comparable countries. Or because the insurance system, or some other type of organisational structure might be better that a tax-payer funded NHS service. There is a continued reluctance to identify what really underlies patient dissatisfaction - that the failure is the result of the pharmaceutical medical system that dominates the health service provided by the NHS, and health provision in most other countries.

Yet if patient dissatisfaction is increasing so rapidly it is difficult to see how the NHS can recover from a growing cynicism. Chronic disease, of all types, is on a steep rising trajectory. We are getting sicker, and conventional medicine is not making us better. Indeed, adverse drug reactions are making us more sick year by year. And for several decades now conventional medicine has failed to come up with any new treatments that are likely to overcome the ever-increasing levels of sickness and disease.

With waiting lists now at their highest ever levels, over 6 million people; and with projections that this could get far worse (as many as 14 million people suggested here) the cynicism is unlikely to improve.

Even the mainstream media is feeling obliged to publish details of this growing dissatisfaction with the NHS. What this means is that it will not be long before more and more people realise that it is conventional or pharmaceutical medicine that is failing. It is not funding, or the organisational structure, or the efficient use of resources. Then the rising dissatisfaction will be redirected, and is likely to increase even more. 

In the next few years we are heading rapidly towards medical chaos and breakdown.

 

Postscript May 2022. 

Patient satisfactions with doctors hits record low as face-to-face consultations become the exception.

The Scandal of NHS Maternity Care

When I talk about "The Failure of Conventional Medicine", as I often do, it is not an academic event, that has no impact on our lives; it is demonstrated by what has happened to our health during the last 70 years, and more. It is about the epidemic levels of chronic disease from which we are now suffering. It is about the spectacular lack of success in how we treat infections. It is about the creation of illness caused by conventional medical treatment, and particularly through adverse drug and vaccine effects.

It is also about a medical system that has failed to keep patients safe from serious harm, and has actually caused direct harm and death on patients.

This harm has been amply demonstrated today, when the Ockenden Report on the maternity practices at the Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust over the last 20 years was published. The commercial media has been obliged to report on this awful catalogue of failure. But it has sought to describe this saga of failure as a 'one-off', a situation caused by 'bad practice', the result of professional 'errors' and 'mistakes'.

The Ockenden Report describes the catastrophic failure at an NHS Trust that led to the unnecessary deaths of 200 babies, 9 mothers, and other children who were left with permanent, life-changing injuries.

The situation at Shrewsbury and Telford is certainly not a one-off. It follows the Morecambe Bay Investigation in September 2013 into serious incidents in the maternity department at the Furness General Hospital (FGH) between 2004 and 2013. The report concluded that the maternity unit was 'dysfunctional', that there were "serious failures of clinical care" that "led to unnecessary deaths of mothers and babies". It made 44 recommendations, both for the Trust and the wider NHS, "aimed at ensuring the failings are properly recognised and acted upon". Presumably these recommendations had little impact on Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust.

There have been other smaller, but similar investigations. For instance, Basildon University Hospital, part of the Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, is currently under investigation when a third woman died during childbirth at a hospital's maternity unit in just three years. A BBC article outlines the scale of the problem. In the last 10 years the Trust has paid out over £103m in compensation over 'failings' in its maternity department. It states that this Trust has the highest number of successful clinical negligence claims of any NHS provider, and that "a Trust spokesman said the maternity payments related to cases which could have happened over a 20-year period". The clinical negligence claims related to 36 mother and baby deaths, 31 babies with brain damage, 24 with cerebral palsy and 27 stillbirths.

Predictably, the mainstream media has presented each case in isolation; but they are clearly not 'isolated' cases. So rather than look at the real reasons for these successive failures, they have had to find other 'scapegoats'. It is the shortage of midwives. It involves 'poor staff cultures' at specific maternity units. 

And, of course, this is about the 'errors' or 'mistakes' of members of the staff; or poor management. Each of these cases will lead, and already have led to the expenditure of yet more resources being poured into the same old medicine.

Never is it asked - is the system of medicine that completely dominates NHS maternity care, at fault?

Are these situations arising because conventional medicine is inherently dangerous? But assumed to be entirely safe?

Maternity care has been increasingly medicalised, from the 1960's onwards, since the days that have been dramatised in the BBC's "Call the Midwife" series. No longer is delivering babies in the NHS the realm of midwives. 

AIMS, the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services, founded in 1960, "have campaigned tirelessly for improvements to the UK's maternity services, as well as supporting women and families directly through our helpline, and sharing information to pregnant people and health carers ....." This is what AIMS says about 'The Medicalisation of Birth'.

            "Maternity care in the UK, as in much of the Western Hemisphere, is dominated by obstetricians, who have moved from a position where they were called in to assist with a problem labour to the current situation where they control the majority of pregnancies and births. They have done so by persuading the population that childbirth is inherently dangerous, that women's bodies do not function well, by undermining their confidence, by claiming that only obstetric care will guarantee a healthy baby and, worst of all, by carrying out what is now an international witch hunt to remove those midwives who practise real midwifery. As a result of this control, women's voices are often ignored."

Childbirth was not a medical issue before the 1960's. Every pregnant woman was designated a midwife, who befriended, got to know her, and together they worked to deliver the child. This was the norm. It ensured that the mother had someone to speak to, someone who listened to her, someone who knew when to call for medical assistance, if required.

The NHS has, to a significant degree, abandoned this one-to-one relationship between mother and midwife. Is this at the root of the problem? A shortage of midwives? Could this be something to do with the undermining and abandonment of their former role and function?

Now, pregnant women almost exclusively give birth in hospital. AIMS believes that every woman should be able to choose to give birth at home. Even as recently as 2007 the Department of Health said (in Maternity Matters) that "the choice of home birth should be offered to all women". This is not what happens now. The NHS believes that all women need to have access to the latest medical technology, at all times; that unless the natural process of giving birth is supported by doctors, it is dangerous. AIMS has described the process.

        "It was not until the 1970s that (AIMS) realised that, rather than providing quality care for truly high-risk women, the obstetricians had seized the opportunity to gain control of all births. Instead of women being cared for in the community by a skilled midwife, and referred to an obstetrician when the midwife detected a problem, all women were now required to book with a GP who invariably simply referred her to an obstetrician. The community midwives were brought into a centralised hospital service and converted into obstetric nurses. Unfortunately, in the UK the system does not differentiate between an obstetric nurse and a midwife; they are all called midwives."

For instance, ultrasound has to be available, despite evidence that it could be harmful - evidence that has never been properly research, or even acknowledged. And the option of Caesarian birth has to be available, even with concerns that far too many births are using this surgical procedure when it is entirely unnecessary.

I will not even bother to mention he role of pharmaceutical drugs in pregnancy, and their impact on both the mother and the baby. It is a subject in itself, but they are a a known cause of birth defects.

So women no longer had a midwife to take her through the final weeks of pregnancy, someone to talk to, to seek reassurance from, to discuss any social, emotional or medical issues and problems with their pregnancy. Now, she has a bureaucracy of medical experts, who know so much that they do not need to listen to the mother. They know so much, and are so correct, they feel able to 'bully' women, apparently. Yet this is how conventional medicine works, everywhere, in all spheres of medical practise. It is an arrogant medical system. It knows best. 

This arrogance has deeper roots than maternity services. Conventional medicine is in a constant state of denial. The pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines they use cause serious adverse reactions - which are never admitted, until such time they can no longer be denied. To admit the failure , and the inherent dangers of these 'medicines' would be to invite claims for medical negligence - which is already playing a leading role in bankrupting the NHS.

The assumption within the NHS is that they know best, and the best medicine has to have access to the most up-to-date medical drugs and technology. Pregnancy is not a 'normal' process. Women are in mortal danger unless they conform to a medical process over which obstetricians are in control.

Perhaps we all need to ask serious questions of the NHS. And the right question always includes:

"Is the conventional medicine provided by the NHS safe?"

The NHS in Crisis (March 2022)

The NHS is in deep crisis. Indeed it is a constant crisis that I have been writing about for over 10 years: and year by year the situation gets worse. So this has become a regular blog (links to previous pages are listed at the foot of this blog). So in future the topic will be updated in March every year - even though the subject will inevitably be the same - just worse each time!

The size of the crisis was demonstrated to me over the weekend by a petition sent to me via Change.org from an NHS nurse asking for "an urgent injection of funds" for the NHS, which she described as being "at breaking point". This text supported the petition.

        "As an NHS nurse, I have seen first hand the effect the pandemic has had on our patients, staff, and service. The NHS was already underfunded, but now it is at breaking point. We need an urgent injection of funds to save our health service, and we need it now.

        We really feel the pressure of the 100,000 vacancies in the NHS, which means we are understaffed and often having to do the job of more than one person. The workload is impossible. Staff are leaving because they have had enough and there is little incentive to stay or join the NHS.

        The safety of our patients and conditions for staff have been getting worse even prior to the pandemic - and it has been happening for over 10 years. We’ve seen our pay eroded meanwhile our responsibilities and skills have only increased and lots of staff are struggling to make ends meet.

        We are paying for this crisis with our mental and physical health and in our pay packets and our patients are suffering all the time as a direct consequence.

        But my NHS colleagues and I are determined to save our health service. That’s why we’re joining together with the major health unions and over 40 organisations to call on this government to act, to improve the health service, and to safeguard it for future generations

Our demands are:

1. Approve emergency funding of £20 billion to save lives this winter.

2. Invest in a fully publicly owned NHS and guarantee free healthcare for future generations.

3. Pay staff properly: without fair pay, staffing shortages will cost lives.

Across the NHS we are united in saying ’SOS NHS’, and we need your support too. Will you sign my petition to help save the NHS?"

This succinctly encapsulates the problems faced by the NHS, the crisis in which it finds itself, once more; and the normal response to the crisis? Always another massive injection of resources to "save the NHS".

The fundamental reason for these ongoing, and deepening NHS crises is that conventional (or pharmaceutical) medicine is, as always, ignored. More of the same medicine will not save the NHS.

• The NHS will continue to fail to make us better, to reduce the pressure on NHS services.
• NHS treatment is actually making us sicker, year by year, through adverse drug and vaccine reactions (see my website on Iatrogenic Disease). I have written about conventional medical failure in detail in my E-Book, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine".
•  And any new injection of money into the NHS will be used to pay for yet more of a failed medical system.
  

So what has been happening within the NHS during the last year? Covid-19 has, of course, provided the NHS with a new (?) excuse for its underlying failure. The NHS has effectively become a Covid-19 service - to the detriment of all else! Throughout the two years of the pandemic the NHS has received significant amounts of new additional money (the Chancellor said from the beginning - "all it takes"). And everything the NHS has received has been spent on "chasing" this virus. 

Conventional medicine admitted from the beginning of the pandemic that it had no treatment. And the public health measures that have been imposed on us - social distancing, face masks, test and trace, and lockdown, have all been spectacularly costly failures. Then, the new vaccines that have been rushed into our arms have proven to be both unimaginably unsuccessful (with more 'booster' injections being required on a regular basis), and the cause of significant patient harm. See this summary of UK data, taken from the UK government website.

So, for the past two years normal life has been put on hold, for the sick and vulnerable, and for fit and healthy people, with strong immune systems, alike. And now we are beginning to see how seriously detrimental these policies have been to all aspects of our social life, our mental health, to child development and education, to people's business's and livelihoods, to the national economy, and to lots more.

Yet the NHS obsession with Covid-19, which has not proven to be a significant event in relation to our health, has not altered what is happening within the NHS - it has just further exacerbated its decline into an ever-deepening crisis.

Increasing Levels of Illness and Disease.

For any country that spends ??% of its GDP on health, the bulk of this directly on the NHS, it is surely not too much to expect that it makes a difference to the lives and health of patients, and in particular, that it can be seen to tackle the scourge of illness and disease. The sole purpose of the NHS is to make us healthier. Yet it is very clearly not doing so!

Levels of sickness have been rising, often dramatically, for the past 75 years, for as long as the NHS has been in existence. Most chronic diseases are now running at unprecedented, epidemic levels, and they continue to rise. I have been writing about this for many years - this blog published in 2012. A more recent blog which chronicled the rising incidence, and the associated cost of chronic diseases such as ADHD, Allergy, Alzheimer's / Dementia, Arthritis, Asthma, Autism can be found here - CHRONIC DISEASE. The rise and rise of chronic diseases over the last 100 years; and the introduction of some new ones. There are many more 'out-of-control' chronic diseases detailed here. "Epidemics of Chronic Disease: why we are sicker now than we have ever been". 

The almost total focus of the NHS on the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that many patients have had to forego either early diagnosis, or treatment, or both, for these diseases. The NHS fixation on Covid-19, and the public health strategies used to deal with it, have exacerbated the situation. Perhaps the most serious consequence has been the ongoing rise of mental health. Even the BBC, an inveterate supporter of pharmaceutical medicine, has had to admit that the NHS is "struggling with a 'long tail' of pandemic mental health". 

       "The number of referrals for specialist NHS mental health care reached a record high in England by the end of 2021....

       "The Royal College of Psychiatrists says the pandemic has led to unprecedented demand and backlogs, and services are struggling to keep up.

       "There were 4.3 million referrals, for conditions such as anxiety and depression, in 2021.....

       "Just under a quarter - 1.025 million - were for children or adolescents" where there has been a  "huge rise in severe cases" with the previous two years each seeing about 3.8 million referrals.

       "The College had delivered 1.8 million mental health consultations in December 2021", but now "an estimated 1.4 million people were still waiting for treatment.

So not only is more money required for mental health services, many other similar situations exist throughout each NHS speciality. An ever-increasing amount of treatment is being delivered, but the treatment does not work, so there is never sufficient to cope with ever-increasing levels of patient demand.

And as usual, both the BBC article and the petition sets up the inevitable scapegoat. It's the government! They are not spending enough on health care - the NHS is under-resourced - it needs more (and more - and more) money. The result, if only politicians had to wit to see it, is what we can see happening before us. 

• Record numbers of patients waiting for all kinds of treatment, a demand that the NHS cannot cope with. 
• The waiting period for treatment continually increases, regardless of the condition, and regardless of how much additional spending on the NHS.

The Experience of Patients.

So record number of patients are now waiting for NHS treatment, now calculated to be over 6 million; and the amount of time patients are having to wait is increasing. Medscape has recently described this as a "disastrous NHS performance". The waiting list was 4.59 million in January 2020, so we have witnessed "an increase of just under 1.5 million, or almost a third, in a year". A trip to A&E now means that over 16,500 people (in England alone) have had to wait more than 12 hours for be seen (January 2022). Nearly 1 in 30 emergency admissions were delayed by 12 hours or more, and 60.8% were delayed by 4 hours or more. The article provides many similar figures that Medscape describe as "the worse performance since records began".

Worse is to come, apparently. A National Audit Office report has warned that even if the NHS manages to achieve its planned 30% increase in activity, the waiting list will still grow to over 7 million over the next three years. The Public Accounts Committee’s report described this as a ‘huge risk’ to primary GP care.

Many more patients are now queueing for what are described as 'Routine Operations", such a hip and knee replacement, cataract operations, and similar. The government have promised to eliminate all waits of more than a year by March 2025. The reality is that 24,000 people have been waiting for a least two years, nine time more then were waiting in April 2021.

Many patients, with a host of serious illnesses and diseases, are now waiting for treatment. The mainstream media have focused on cancer patients.

• the current 2-week target for urgent referrals for suspected cancer was already in decline, but is now considerably worse. One estimate shows only 75% of people referred toa specialist got an appointment within that time; the target is 93%. Many similar figures indicate that the NHS is continuing to fail.
  
• some targets are being lengthened to conceal the failure, for example, the 2-week wait for diagnosis is to be extended to 28-days.

Eve Byrne, director of advocacy at Macmillan Cancer Support, has said this about these latest figures. 

        "It is deeply troubling to see these figures now at yet another worst-ever record, as we know that any delay to diagnosis and treatment causes huge amounts of anxiety and distress for people living with cancer." 

It affected the availability of health services too. People were reluctant to go to hospital, or to see their doctor. They were scared by the way the NHS spoke about the pandemic, they were too afraid of living a normal life. Hospitals and doctors were protecting themselves, and did not encourage patients to attend.

So suddenly doctors were not available to those who wanted, or needed NHS treatment. There were problems obtaining a GP appointments. There were no face to face meetings. People who phone d for appointments found themselves stuck in long queues, getting through became a major issue. The cancellation of 'elective' surgery added to the frustration.Although not a new problem, NHS capacity to respond to patient need has been a problem for decades; but now it could all be blamed on Covid-19.

Doctor so doctor abuse became an issue, as patients became increasingly dissatisfied. This further lowered morale.

Distressing indeed. So what is the solution? The Health Secretary, Sajid Javid has announced there are to be more "radical NHS reforms"! For decades now there have always been two solutions to the problems of the NHS - more funding - and organisational reform. Neither ever works!

The Morale of Conventional Medical Staff

All this means that NHS staff are under increasing pressure, and this now seems to be a major cause of concern within the NHS. Read the wording of the petition again. There were 100,000 vacancies in the NHS prior to the pandemic. This situation did not arise because the NHS refused to employ staff; it happened because people with the right qualifications were not available. So it is unlikely that yet more money will be successful in finding more recruits, let alone prevent or replace those who are leaving, or are planning to leave, the NHS because of poor morale and unbearable work pressures.

Meg Hillier, MP, and chair of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, has said recently that she is extremely concerned that the Government has ‘no real plan’ to translate the increased funding of the NHS into improved patient outcomes. She did not add that this has been the case, increasingly, since 1948! She said that the Health Department still did not understand that the only solution to the problems of the NHS was to manage its greatest resource properly - "our heroic NHS staff" whom she describes as 

            "exhausted and demoralised, they’ve emerged from two hellish years only to face longer and longer lists of sicker people. And this is compounded by staffing shortages in a number of professional areas.’

Director of the Royal College of Nursing, Patricia Marquis, said that the Medscape figures "show the scale of the challenge nursing staff are facing in trying to reduce the backlog while all the other pressures they are under remain" adding that "nursing staff are struggling to provide safe and effective care with a severely-depleted workforce."

So the problem now is not just the effectiveness of NHS treatment, and its ability to get patients off the waiting list, it is the safety of patients.

The Kings Fund, an important 'think-tank' specialising in health, agreed, and stressed the seriousness of the sitution throughout the NHS. Commenting on the latest NHS hospital performance statistics for September and October, Deborah Ward, Senior Analyst at The King’s Fund said this: 

            “Today’s stats reveal the worst performance since current records began for ambulance calls, A&Es and waits for planned hospital care. In a normal year any one of these would ring alarm bells; taken together before winter has even begun they suggest a health and care system running hot for such a sustained period whilst still dealing with Covid-19, it is now on its knees"

What this means is that each section of the NHS relies on the performance of other sections. Failure to admit a patient to hospital meant the ambulances had to wait with their patients inside the vehicle. To assist with pressures on hospitals, early discharge was discussed. But this was thought to put too great a strain on primary care, and the GP's. Throughout the last two years the pressures were extreme, there was little slack anywhere in the system. 

We are now moving out of winter and into spring, when in previous years "winter pressures" begin to ease. This is no longer the case. NHS Providers have said that staff absenteeism was increasing (a factor of burn-out), there are now 110,000 staff vacancies within the NHS, and together this meant putting significant pressure of the quality of care, and patient safety.

And like all failing organisations, damaging in-fighting is increasing and making the situation worse. The British Health Alliance has recently reported that many doctors are now resigning from the NHS because the Health Department's insistence that they see more of their patients "face-to-face", rather than by telephone or video. The NHS is becoming an 'own goal' organisation - this following the decision to sack any NHS frontline staff who did not want to take a dangerous Covid-19 vaccine.

Money and Resources

Predictably, Covid-19 has offered the NHS a new excuse for making more financial demands - to turn itself into a Covid-19 only service. As usual, every effort, and every pound of additional money, was put into chasing the virus. Conventional medicine openly admitted it had no treatment, and no vaccine. It led to a panic reaction.The NHS probably felt that it had to be seen doing something, so it led to social distancing, face mask wearing, and lockdown. Normal life was put on hold to protect the sick and the vulnerable, which was sensible enough - but insisted on insisting that healthy should be treated in exactly the same way. This was done to the detriment of all aspects of our social life, our mental health, child development and education, people's business' and livelihoods, the national economy, and much else.

Inevitably, the inability of the NHS to cope with the demands made by the Covid-19 pandemic, leave alone continuing to do their normal work, led to increasing demands for more resources. The government response, from the beginning, was positive -  "anything it took". And it did take a lot! A profoundly unsuccessful 'Test and Trace' scheme was set up - with over £30 billion of taxpayer money - outside the NHS budget. People were not allowed to go to work; so companies had 85% of their employees wages paid by government - costing more £billions - all coming from outside the NHS budget.  

All this expenditure, and more, was made necessary not by the Covid-19 virus, but by the policies pursued by government and the recommendation of 'experts' within conventional medical science.

The budget of October 2021 included a commitment to increase NHS resource budget to over £160 billion by 2024-5, with investment projected to grow by 3.8% annually in real terms. A great deal was made about this money reducing the waiting lists.

At the same time, a new, long-expected policy for social care was announced, with £5.5 million of controversial new taxation announced. However, it was quickly decided that all this money would be given to the NHS - for the next 3 years.

The Guardian outlined the situation.

            "In an effort to get a grip on the crisis, the Chancellor will unveil plans for investment in NHS capital funding this week to help deliver about 30% more elective activity by 2024-25 compared to pre-pandemic levels. This is equivalent to millions more checks, scans and procedures for non-emergency patients."

The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, described the importance of the new investment in no uncertain terms, indicating exactly what he though the money would acheive.

            “We are committed to getting health services back on track and ensuring no one is left waiting for vital tests or treatment. This is a game changing investment in the NHS to make sure we have the right buildings, equipment and systems to get patients the help they need and make sure the NHS is fit for the future.”

Inevitably, and predictably, this was not enough money for the NHS. Dr. Layla McCay, Director of Policy at the NHS Confederation, said health leaders would welcome the funding, but added that it still “falls short” of what is needed “to get services completely back on track”. Medscape outlined the NHS financing debate in more detail at the time. I suspect if Sunak had announced the doubling, or trebling of the NHS budget increase the assessment would have been little different.

In more recent weeks the UK's Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has declared there will be no more new money, that the NHS would have to cope with what it already has. We had to learn to live with Covid-19, an admission that the previous policy, of eliminating the virus could not be met. For the first time, for as long as I can remember, a major UK politician was NOT promising more resources for the NHS. Covid-19 spending, that is, spending on health, had put unprecedented strains of the national budget. And this decision has been taken at a time when the NHS is in dire straights.

This is the inevitable result of the NHS investing its entire budget, exclusively, on pharmaceutical medicine. For the drug companies it has been a bonanza. For the NHS it is bringing forward what has been, for many years, an impossible situation. The NHS will not survive unless, and until, it offers patients medical therapies that work, that make sick patients better, and does not make their illness worse.

I have always supported the principles of the NHS - the provision of medical treatment for all, regardless of income or wealth, at the point of need. But there is one part of this principle that the NHS has failed to provide - the provision of the best treatment. Increasingly it has failed to offer patients anything other than the false promises of pharmaceutical medicine. The NHS is about to learn tht health does not emanate from a bottle of pills, or a jab in the arm. It has become the captive of pharmaceutical medicine, a hostage to the performance of drugs that have done more to damage patient health than improve it. The drugs and vaccine don't cure patients, they harm patients.

And this is why the situation will only get worse; although how much worse it can become without a complete collapse is problematical. But then, the situation can always be blamed on a virus!

I will be back next year at this time with an update.   

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To plot the decline of the NHS over the last decade, this is a list of my previous posts on the un-ending . crisis of the NHS. They describes how the NHS has been brought to its knees.

The NHS Debate (The NHS in Crisis 2011) published in May 2011.

Our doctors in crisis (NHS in Crisis 2015) published in March 2015.

Britain's NHS in crisis (2016) published in February 2016.

NHS in Crisis (2016) published in March 2016.

NHS in Crisis (Winter 2017) published in January 2017.

The NHS Crisis (2017-2018) published in November 2017.

NHS in Crisis (Summer 2018) published in April 2018.

NHS in Crisis (2018-2019) published in October 2018.

NHS Crisis (2019-2020) published in February 2020.

NHS in Crisis (2020) published in June 2020.

NHS in Crisis (Autumn 2020) published in October 2020.

The NHS Crisis (January 2021) published in January 2021.