I have been writing about the ongoing crisis in the NHS since 2011, and it has been difficult to find a new angle on it. Each winter, for decades now, the NHS has faced the same crisis: too many sick patients, needing too much expensive medical treatment, with insufficient resources to cope with them. More money is demanded, and the NHS budget has been increased accordingly. Yet however much the NHS budget in increased the crisis returns again.
- Insufficient funding, we are told, year by year; we need yet more money.
- Nonsense, I have said; this is not a funding failure, it is a medical failure. The NHS is a prisoner of conventional or pharmaceutical medicine; this is the reason for failure; and no amount of additional money is going to change that.
- (To see all my previous blogs go to "search" at the top of this page and type "NHS crisis").
Spending more and more money on a failing medical system is non-sense; it is a failure to understand, and to properly analyse, what is happening to the NHS.
However, finding a new angle on the NHS crisis this year is much easier. COVID-19 has highlighted the growing failure of pharmaceutical medicine, which means that the NHS crisis cannot be resolved with more money if it is spend on the same thing. Moreover, money is no longer the problem. Since February 2020 the government has effectively given the NHS access to an 'open wallet' from which it has been told to take "whatever is needed" to deal with the pandemic.
So now, it is us, the patients, who have to "save the NHS"!
The conventional medical establishment, including the mainstream media, is telling us that the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the situation; it is the new virus that is causing the problem; it is a completely new situation. Yet this new virus has not really transformed anything. It is the same problem, presented in a slightly different guise. The pandemic is not the problem; it is not even a particularly notable or unusual event.
We are constantly told the this coronavirus is more infectious, more deadly than the normal flu. If it is it is only marginally so. The overall death rate this year, we are told, is higher than the average death rate. If it is the difference is marginal.
COVID-10 is more of the same old excuse for the annual NHS crisis. This crisis remains what it has always been - a medical failure. The underlying problem has not changed. The NHS has no effective medical treatment to offer. This means that if the symptoms are severe patients are hospitalised; they receive all the NHS's (normally excellent) nursing care. If necessary they can access all the medical facilities intensive care units can offer. But there is no effective treatment through all this, the NHS has admitted this. This means that each patient outcome depends on whether the patient dies (usually of 'underlying health problems'), or is strong enough to survive. All the NHS can do is to take care of the patients, and wait to see which it is to be.
- Conventional medicine has not focus on the immune system, the importance of supporting and strengthening natural immunity through diet, nutrition, vitamin supplementation, and the like. We had to wait for the vaccine, we are told.
- There is no recourse to natural medical therapies, no request for assistance, no interest in what homeopathy, naturopathy Ayurveda, et al, could offer. Natural medicine has proven to be effective in countries like India, Cuba, and with patients everywhere who use their local natural therapists. But these therapists are excluded from the NHS, they have had to operate under the constraints of lockdown.
The NHS lacks imagination. It relies entirely on pharmaceutical medicine. It has no 'plan B'. It has become of creature of a system of medicine that has always demonstrated three main characteristics:
- it is not effective medicine; it is not capable of making sick people better,
- it is not safe medicine; drug and vaccine side effects, adverse reactions and DIE's, have been making sick people sicker now for decades,
- it has always been the most expensive medical system available, largely because it is an inherently dangerous system of medicine.
So the NHS has now become
>>> a bottomless pit, with a seemingly endless amount of money now being poured into it,
>>> an organisation with an ongoing inability to meet the demands of sick patients,
>>> and which is now asking US - taxpayers and patients- to save IT from total collapse.
So COVID-19 has done nothing other than to push the NHS further towards a terminal state. Neither government nor the mainstream media (MSM) seem willing or even capable of coming to this analysis. The have become part of the conventional medical establishment. As far as they are concerned the NHS remains a national treasure, based on the solid principle of providing people with the best medicine, freely available, at the point of need.
- So we are still being asked to praise and support the NHS, without any attempt to differentiate between supporting good nursing care and ineffective medical treatment. Both are lumped together. The former is praiseworthy and supportable; the latter is not.
- There is still no debate, in government, in the MSM, or the NHS, about whether patients are actually being offered the 'best' medicine', or if the monopoly the NHS has given to pharmaceutical medicine constitutes good value for money, or whether it is in the best interests of patients,
- And, perhaps most crucially of all, no-one seems to understand that the NHS has now reached the point when it can no longer make treatment available to everyone, even those patients with the most serious illnesses.
This time-honoured principle of the NHS is now being seriously undermined. The NHS crisis is no longer solely about funding. The seriousness of COVID-19 has been grossly exaggerated, but even so the NHS has clearly demonstrated it is incapable of coping with it. In the oft-repeated words of the Government and the MSM, we have to 'save our NHS'. And who is saving it? Who is paying the price? Patients who are seriously ill, and those who are likely to become serious sick, are saving it, often at the cost of their lives.
- The destruction of the national economy, our livelihoods and jobs, the scale of which mirrors only the calamity previously caused by the two world wars, is causing unprecedented levels of harm to mental health, with markedly increased levels of anxiety, depression and suicide,
- Enforced isolation and loneliness has led to rising levels of social distress,
- There have been rising levels of family breakdown and domestic violence, and apparently, even a significant increase in child sexual abuse,
- Increased levels of alcohol and substance abuse will inevitably lead to more sickness, and increased need for medical treatment,
- An estimated 27 million doctor appointments have been 'lost', and it is estimated that over 350,000 urgent cancer referrals may have been missed because patients believed (with good reason) that the hospitals could not cope with additional demands,
- About 50,000 "non-urgent" operations have been 'delayed'; many of these will no longer be required when patients die; and when the back-log is tackled, many patients will be considerably sicker.
So the workload of the NHS will not reduce; it will increase as a direct result of its failure to cope with the COVID-19 influenza outbreak.
