Search This Blog

Wednesday 8 May 2019

THE NHS. Increasing demand for health services, and its ongoing inability to cope with the pressures

The problems of the NHS, indeed the problems of national health services throughout the world, are thought to concern rising health demands of patients, limited resources, and the failure of the system to cope with the pressures.

The solution to the problem is always that the NHS needs more resources; or it needs to use its resources more efficiently.

So year by year the health service is faced with a dilemma. How can it cope? It constructs an argument for more resources, and usually gets them. Then more problems come to the surface requiring even more resources. It has become a perpetual circle which the NHS has never been able to break.

Why is this? I have written an E-Book entitled "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" which seeks to explain this ongoing medical problem, and to suggest a different strategy to resolve it. I am reproducing here the introduction to this E-Book.

Introduction
Conventional Medical Failure

"If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take,
their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny"
                                                                              Thomas Jefferson


What would we normally do if we got into the habit of buying something and then discovered it did not work? What if we used a product, time and time again, for many decades, only to find out that it did not do what what it was supposed to do? 

           * Would we continue to buy the product and use it? 
           * Or would we begin to question its value? 

We would certainly not continue spending our money on any product that was useless. Then, what would we do if we found that this same product actually exacerbated the situation we were trying to resolve by our purchase? 

           * What if it was discovered that the product was causing serious harm to many people using it?
           * What would we do if it was found that the product was actually dangerous, and sometimes fatal?
          
Would we take a chance in the hope that it would not harm us? Or would we begin to question its safety and value, and think twice before spending money on it again? Would we not instead look for an alternative, something more effective, something that did not harm us, and actually did what it said it would do?

The answer is clear. We do not normally buy ineffective and dangerous products. We would demand an alternative. We would ask important questions about why the product had been sold to us in the first place, and why it had continued to be sold for so long when it was known to be ineffective and unsafe.

Yet this is what we have NOT been doing about the medical treatment millions of people receive,
and have regularly used for their health, over the last century and more.

Conventional Medicine is failing
Conventional medicine was not working. It was not producing a healthier population. We have been consuming ever-increasing amounts of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for the last 100 years and more. There have been generations of 'virus hunters' and 'germ killers' who have waged war on disease, and quite regardless of the vast amounts of money that have been spent pursuing their view of health and sickness, people were not living healthier or happier lives.

Chronic Disease at Epidemic Levels
After decades of spending on conventional medicine, chronic diseases have risen to epidemic levels. As will be outlined in Chapter 9, there has never been a time when there has been so much disease, chronic disease such as Arthritis, Asthma, Allergy, ADHD, Cancer, Diabetes, and so many others. 
We are not getting better, we are getting sicker.

The Return of Old 'Conquered' Diseases
The success of conventional medicine was built on the eradication of  'old' acute diseases that once killed thousands of people. Conventional medicine claimed once to have 'conquered' them - but they are returning, diseases like TB, Malaria, et al. They are returning with even greater vigour and seriousness, the pharmaceutical drugs that were once through to control them no longer work, and there are no new drugs to replace them. 
The claimed success of conventional medicine is proving to be ephemeral.

New and Rare Diseases
And then there are the new diseases - the rapid rise diseases like Autism, Alzheimers disease, and many others, most of them unheard of prior to the prodigious rise of conventional medicine during the 20th century. 
Where are these new diseases coming from?

The Toxicity of Pharmaceutical Drugs
Many explanations are put forward to explain the reasons for the epidemic levels of disease we are now experiencing. Yet one explanation is regularly ignored - the toxicity of pharmaceutical drugs. Over the years many drugs and vaccines have been banned or withdrawn because it became clear they were causing death and disease. It is also clear that the drugs and vaccines still being used today also cause death and disease. Both will be detailed in the linked chapters. Pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are not benign. 
They are actually creating disease!

National Health Services
Most modern societies have a method of delivering health services to its population, The underlying principles of the British NHS has always been to provide a health service for everyone, free at the point of need, and regardless of status, income or wealth of the individual. These are principles about which British people feel justly proud, and not unreasonably want to defend and protect. 
Other countries provide health services based on these fundamental principles, and they are certainly worth defending.

Spending on National Health Services
The expenditure on national health services has increased enormously during the last 70-100 years. This spending began when it was thought that science would develop medicines that would eradicate serious illness and disease, and maintain and regain our health. The argument was that better health care would produce a more productive workforce, and strong military of healthier, fitter young people. In time, within democratic countries, this idea became a popular vote-winning strategy for politicians, encouraging them to spend more money on the health of their electorates. 
Health spending became a vote winner, the basis for an extraordinary rise in government funding of national health services.

The Domination of Conventional Medicine
Most health services around the world are now dominated by conventional medicine, itself dominated by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. In many counties conventional medicine has become a virtual monopoly supplier of health care, with other alternative or natural medical therapies being sidelined or excluded. 
Certainly, most people who go to see their doctor, or goes into hospital, will be treated with with conventional medicine.

Constant and Continual Crises with National Health Services
If conventional medical treatments were genuinely curative, if they were free of side effects, and did not create illness, there would surely now be signs of a healthier population, less susceptible to sickness and disease. Yet this is not the case. Mirroring increased expenditure has been an epidemic rise in is serious sickness and disease, and demand for health services is leading to ever-increasing levels.
This increased demand is threatening to bankrupt national health care services.

Excuses for increased levels of sickness
So what are the reasons for this unlikely combination of factors - increased levels of sickness and disease, and ever increasing expenditure on health services. Year by year, decade by decade, we have been told that the reasons for rising costs, and rising levels of sickness, are twofold.

1.  The NHS has been inadequately resourced, that it needs more money to cope with the demand for health services.
2.  The NHS is badly managed, and needs to be re-organised so that money is spent more efficiently. 

Yet around the world it can be seen that successive governments have thrown enormous resources into healthcare, and there have been regular attempts to re-organise and to spend use resources more efficiently. This will be discussed in chapter 10 of this e-book. Certainly it can be argued that the British NHS has suffered neither underfunding or poor organisation. There has been regular increases in spending, and successive 'restructuries' in desperate attempts to 'make it work' for patients, to no avail. 
So why are national health services struggling?

The Failure is Medical!
The real explanation for the failure of national health services throughout the world is simpler, more fundamental. It is not based on political, financial or organisational failures.
The failure is medical!

It is the failure to invest in medicine that is effective and safe. It is the decision to invest in one kind of medicine that is expensive, ineffective, harmful to patients, whilst at the same time ignoring other forms of natural medical therapy.

               * If a patient is treated with a drug that does not work that patient will return to see the doctor again - and again. Demand for health care services will increase because when people get ill they do not get better. 
               * If a patient is treated with a drug or vaccine that has serious side effects that patient will return to the doctor sicker than (s)he was before, levels of sickness and disease will increase, the demand for, and the cost of medical treatment will grow, year by year. 

The problems faced by national health services around the world correlates more closely with this explanation than under-resourcing, or bad organisation. The problems arise from the failure of conventional medicine, and more specifically, the failure of the pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that have been prescribed and taken in ever increasing quantities.

Yet this was not what we are being told about conventional medicine, For decades conventional medicine has told us that it is ‘beating disease’, that we are all getting healthier, and living longer than ever before. We have been led to believe that conventional medicine is 'scientific', and that as a result it has been a positive benefit to humankind. So it's not surprising the this is what most people believe. We are never told about the evidence that conventional medicine is ineffective, harmful or failing even though the evidence supporting this position is available but hidden behind a barrage of hype, spin and propaganda that the powerful conventional medical establishment has projected over the years.

The purpose of this e-book
The massive investments that have been made into conventional medicine have never seriously been questioned in terms of the health benefits and outcomes that have arisen from it. This e-book seeks to look beyond the common assumption that conventional medicine has been a ‘positive benefit’ to health. It questiona whether there has ever been any pharmaceutical 'wonder' drug, or 'miracle' cure. It ask the question whether conventional medicine is safe enough for us to take. And whether conventional medicine is just too expensive. 

It is time to embark upon a serious, cost-benefit analysis of a system of medicine that is not only failing to make us better but is harming us, and at the same time costing more than even the wealthiest nations can afford.

This e-book seeks to bring together the many strands of the case against the conventional medical establishment. It will note that our consumption of conventional drugs are vaccines have risen prodigiously during the last 100 years, whilst at the same time the incidence of serious illness and chronic disease has spiralled out of control. It will examine not only the successive and ongoing failures of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, but how they have contributed, decade by decade, to increasing levels of sickness, ill-health and disease.