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?"

Antiemetic Drugs. Another Pharmaceutical Drug found to cause Strokes

A study published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) on 23 March 2022 has made link between Antiemetic drugs (used for sickness, nausea and vomiting) and strokes.

The study is discussed here in MIMS, specifically mentioning two of these antiemetic drugs, domperidone and metoclopamide.

Fairly routine stuff perhaps - unless you think more deeply about what we are being told, and the unfortunate 'belatedness' of the timing of this information. 

Antiemetic drugs have been with us for a long time, and many millions of people have been prescribed them with no knowledge of their potential danger. Metoclopamide was 'discovered' in the early 1960's, and widely prescribed since the late 1970's. Domperidone has been marketed since 1979. 

And herein lays the problem with conventional medicine, and whether anyone can, or should, place their trust in any of their pharmaceutical drugs.

Why has it taken medical science so long to ascertain that antiemetic drugs can cause strokes? We are told that pharmaceutical drugs are all scientifically tested, and only approved once they are proven to be both safe and effective. And an drug that can cause strokes is, by any definition, not safe! 

Yet these two drugs have been given to many millions of patients, for many decades. The question arises - how many of these unfortunate patients have suffered a stroke as a direct result of taking antiemetic drugs. I have checked; stroke is not mentioned as a 'side effect' of these drugs

Yet this is not a new phenomina. It is a matter of public record that hundreds, even thousands of approved pharmaceutical drugs have been banned or withdrawn in the last 70 years because ultimately they were 'scientifically proven' to be too dangerous to prescribe to patients.

Most patients take pharmaceutical drugs because doctors have assured them they are 'safe'. However, the UK's NHS website informs us that strokes are caused by many factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, high cholesterol levels, diabetes, and excessive alcohol intake. But nowhere does the NHS mention that strokes can be caused by pharmaceutical drugs.As I have written elsewhere, many pharmaceutical drugs, PPI drugs, contraceptive pills, beta blockers, common painkillers, steroid drugs, anti-coagulant drugs, and many others are known to do so - to which, it appears, we can now add antiemetic drugs.

It would seem that conventional medicine would prefer we did not know that the drugs they prescribe to patients have become one of the major reasons for strokes. So it seems unlikely that the general public will ever be told about the link between strokes and antiemetic drug link. They know now - but we won't be told!

This tells us a lot about the pharmaceutical drugs that are still being prescribed and routinely described by doctors as being 'safe'? How many of these drugs will prove to be harmful to our health, either because the adverse drug reactions remain unknown to medical science, or conventional medicine prefers to keep its patients uninformed? Just how dangerous are the drugs we are taking today?

Domperidone and metoclopamide are not safe drugs. Moreover, they were not safe even before the link with strokes was discovered. They are known to cause many other serious adverse reactions, most of them listed on the Drugs.com website. 

 

Metoclopamide 

 

The first information given by the Drugs.com webpage gives use about Metoclopamide is a black box warning!

 

    "Metoclopramide can cause tardive dyskinesia, increaseda serious movement disorder that is often irreversible..."

 

But it goes on to list a whole host of other adverse drug reactions    , including:

•  difficulty breathing, speaking and swallowing,
  
• fast/irregulat heartbeat,
  
• severe continuing headache,
  
• increased blood pressure,
• inability to move eyes,
• loss of balance,
• loss of bladder control,
• seizures,
• neusea and vomiting (the symptoms they are supposed to treat),
• and much more.

All to prevent sickness and vomiting!

Domperidone

Domperidone does no less harm to the patient. The Patient Information Leaflet gives a long list of people who should not take the drug, and an array of warnings and precautions. It says that the drug can cause the following adverse reactions:

• allergies, such as breathing difficulties, itching, wheezing, loss of consciousness, etc.,
• heart disorders, such as heart rhythm disorders, palpitations, heart attacks, 
• Intestinal cramps and diarrhoea,
• recuced sex drive,
• sore breast of menstrual problems,
• and much more.
  

And it is to be guessed how many patients taking these antiemetic drugs were told about any of this prior to taking them. And now, strokes will have to be added to the list of adverse reactions doctors will need to keep from their patients. Describing them as "safe" is so much simpler, and quicker!

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.   

*************************************************************************************

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.

"Another Life-Saving Covid-19 Drug Identified"

This was the headline of a BBC article, dated 4th March 2022. And this is how they justified this 'good news' story from the pharmaceutical industry.

            "UK experts say they have found another life-saving drug that can help people ill with Covid. The anti-inflammatory baricitinib is normally used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Trials suggest it can cut death risk by about a fifth in patients needing hospital care for severe Covid. It could be used with other Covid-19 treatments, such as the cheap steroid dexamethasone, to save even more lives, researchers say. That might halve deaths."

 

The drug is described as relatively cheap, too - note least when compared to the cost of the Covid-19 vaccines.

            "The NHS may soon recommend baricitinib based on these new results. A 10-day course of the pills costs around £250, although the NHS may be able to negotiate a discount."

 

So baricitinib is both effective and inexpensive - so what could possibly be wrong? Alongside Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin conventional medicine is now coming up with yet more 'old' drugs that can treat the Covid-19 pandemic. 

 

So what about safety? Safety, after all, is usually the single most important factor that is left out of any discussion in the mainstream media about pharmaceutical treatment. And the safety of baricitinib was not mentioned at all in the BBC article referred too (nor in any other mainstream media outlet who covered the story).

So go to the Drugs.com website and search for baricitinib; then the 'safety' of this new "life-saving" treatment will quickly be revealed. Indeed, the first thing you will see is a 'black box' warning.

            "Patients treated with baricitinib are at risk for developing serious infections that may lead to hospitalization or death. (My emphasis). Most patients who developed these infections were taking concomitant immunosuppressants such as methotrexate or corticosteroids". 

 

The infections mentioned in the black box included tuberculosis, invasive fungal infections like candidiasis, and "other infections due to opportunistic pathogens", malignancies, sudden cardiovascular death, thrombosis,pulmonary embolism, and much much more. Yet this was not all. After the black box, a very extensive list of all the known, and very nasty adverse reaction, this drug can cause are outlined.

Dexamethasone is not much safer, according to Drugs.com. It outlines a long list of known side effects including aggression, anxiety, irregular heartbeat, depression, troubled breathing, stomach cramping, decreased vision, indigestion, loss of libido, menstrual irregularities, muscle wasting, and more.

 

THESE KNOWN ADVERSE DRUG REACTIONS WERE ALL STUDIOUSLY IGNORED BY THE BBC - WHILST FEELING ABLE TO DESCRIBE THE DRUG AS "LIFE SAVING" - quite incredible!

Yet there is another issue arising from this story, on top of this media censorship of known medical harm. What this BBC, and other parts of corporate media who covered this 'good news' story are actually reporting is that the Conventional Medical Establishment (CME) is beginning to tear itself apart!

 

One part of the CME which has until very recently dominated the Covid-19 narrative had a very clear message - only the new vaccines would save us from the virus; the vaccines were amazingly effective, and extremely safe. This dominant CME group had controlled not only the Official Narrative, but the governments and mainstream media who relayed it. But now, with the very obvious failure of the vaccines (not to mention mask mandates, social distancing and lockdown, they are very much on the back foot.

So a smaller part of the CME is now not only finding its voice, but the corporate media is now giving them some publicity - after two years of censorship. Their message is clear. These pharmaceutical drugs were available to us, all along. They could have been used more widely, cheap drugs that could have been more effective, and saved more lives than the Covid-19 vaccines.

This is the position taken by Robert F Kennedy, Jnr, in his new bestselling book, "The Real Anthony Fauchi: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health". He (alongside many others) are championing pharmaceutical drugs such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectic - both drugs that have long been put forward by this small CME group.

 

I wrote about Hydroxychloroquine in this blog in April 2020, at the very early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this I outlined the long and serious list of known adverse drug reactions that Hydroxychloroquine was known to cause, also a list taken from the Drugs.com website.

 

Ivermectin? It would seem that this drug will not kill you! But it can make your life tiresome, with known side effects including fever, itching, skin rash, joint and muscle pain, painful and tended glands in neck, armpits and groin, rapid heartbeat, headache, swelling of face, hands, arms, feet and legs, diarrhoea, dizziness, light-headedness, loss of appetite, shaking or trembling, and sleepiness. All of them never mentioned - of course.

It would appear that pharmaceutical medicine is now regularly dredging up old drugs, describing their wondrous qualities, calling them "life savers", but always failing to tell us that they are known to cause serious patient harm, and death.

But do not allow this censorship to detract from the internecine battle in which conventional medicine is now engaged. Such infighting is typical of any institution that is in the process of decline and failure. Both groups are aware that conventional medical drugs and vaccines are not offering us protection from illness, leave alone good health. So each blames the other other. They disagree about the best course of action, and they embark in recrimination.

 

I have described this decline and fall in more detail in my E-Book, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine", first written some 15 years ago. What we are witnessing is two competing sides of the powerful pharmaceutical medical establishment squabbling with each other.

 

YET IT IS CLEAR THAT NEITHER SIDE HAS THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEMS OF SICKNESS AND DISEASE, AND OUR DECLINING HEALTH.

• The dominant side has determined for two years the treatment that we have been offered for Covid-19, and that treatment has totally failed.
• The other side suggests that we should have been offered different treatment - pharmaceutical drugs that are already known to be seriously harmful to patient health.
  

Who Protects Patients from Pharmaceutical Drugs and Vaccines?

We have a fairly uniform system of pharmaceutical drug regulation, in force in most countries of the world. The current system was brought in after the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1970’s. Its primary purpose, really its sole purpose, was to protect patients from being harmed by dangerous pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. It has two main components.

• First, new drugs are tested by medical science.
• Then, national drug regulators examines the scientific evidence that has been found for the efficacy, and the safety, of the new drug. It is the drug regulator that determines whether the new drug should be approved for public use.

Unfortunately the system does not work (A List of Banned and Withdrawn Drugs).

This is evidenced by the large, and ever growing number of new drugs, brought to the market over the years, having been tested by medical science, and approved as ‘safe’ by the drug regulators, then sold to patients for many years, often decades, only to be withdrawn and banned - because ultimately they have proven to be dangerous, and to have caused serious patient harm.

The main problem with the drug regulation is that during the last 50 years the pharmaceutical industry has taken over control of the entire regulatory process.

• Medical science makes its living testing drugs. The pharmaceutical industry pays them to do so. Yet if any scientist, or any science company, puts up too many obstacles to new drugs entering the market, they know that they will not used any more. So they go either go out of business; or they comply with the interests of the drug companies. So most ‘medical science’ has been bought and paid for - it is controlled by the drug industry.
  

• The Drug Regulatory Process is also largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry; but the pharmaceutical industry has another weapon to ensure that it controls the process. It has created a 'revolving door' which ensures that drug industry personnel move into the regulatory agencies, and that agency personnel in the other direction to lucrative posts in the industry. Drug regulation has one of the most effective ‘revolving door’ policies in operation anywhere.
  

• The government is largely complicit with the process. This has been demonstrated most recently by allowing the approval of the Covid-19 vaccines in double-quick time, and promoting the vaccines for the drug companies. Why? Politicians, and political campaigns, are funded by Big Pharma; and governments want to attract pharmaceutical investments in their country. Most governments now award drug companies with indemnity against any harm pharmaceutical drugs cause - including the harm caused by Covid-19 vaccines. Certainly, governments around the world have shown little interest in making sure that drug regulation protects patients.

• The mainstream media is now also largely funded by large corporate industries, through advertising and mutual directorships of companies - not least the pharmaceutical industry. The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated how the mainstream media sings along with the drug companies, and is prepared to censor and exclude any, and all opposition to the pharmaceutical narrative. The mainstream media has still failed to tell the public about the harm that is being caused by the Covid-19 vaccines.
  

This leaves the patient entirely unprotected.

Patients are now at the mercy of pharmaceutical profiteering, supported by governments and the mainstream media who tell us that the pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are we are being given are entirely safe, and amazingly effective. 

It is usually only when the levels of patient harm being caused by drugs and vaccines become undeniable that any action is taken.

So what we have now is an industry, a powerful industry, whose products are (i) not properly tested or (ii) regulated, with drugs and vaccines regularly entering the market, causing serious patient harm, without the public being told.

The entire pharmaceutical industry is dishonest, corrupt and fraudulent; and it is supported in this by medical science, national governments, and the mainstream media. The court cases listed here demonstrate that the primary purpose of the drug companies is to make profits. Public safety has never been a major concern for them.

Postscript. What happens when a drug company is faced with an independent safety study?

• Pfizer applied for an Emergency Use Application for its Covid-19 vaccine in India. 
• The regulator asked the company to undertake an independent safety study, to determine if the vaccine was safe, and generated an adequate immune response.
• Pfizer refused to conduct a local safety trial, and instead withdrew its application!

This is how drug regulation should work. India is prepared to protect its citizens, at least in this instance. Why are our governments failing to do so?

 

Social Prescribing. Is Conventional Medicine Losing Confidence in Pharmaceutical Medicine?

I have always equated 'Conventional Medicine' with 'Pharmaceutical Medicine' - for good reason. There has never been any good reason to do otherwise. The two are indistinguishable, certainly within most national health services around the world, and certainly within the British NHS. Go to see your doctor, or go to hospital, and the chances are you will be treated with a pharmaceutical drug, or vaccine. 

Yet are they now diverging? Just ever so slightly?

The reason for asking this question is an article published in the GP magazine, "Pulse" on 7th February 2022, "Will Covid signal the end of the road for over-medicalisation".

            "Social prescribing, also sometimes known as community referral, is a means of enabling health professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services. The referrals generally, but not exclusively, come from professionals working in primary care settings, for example, GPs or practice nurses."

Over medicalising? Does this mean that too many pharmaceutical drugs are being prescribed?

Social prescribing? Is the suggestion that doctors will actually prescribe "a range of local, non-clinical services" rather than the wonder pharmaceutical drugs they have been prescribing for decades?

The Pulse article continues....

        "Recognising that people’s health and wellbeing are determined mostly by a range of social, economic and environmental factors, social prescribing seeks to address people’s needs in a holistic way. It also aims to support individuals to take greater control of their own health."

No suggestion here that health can be found in a bottle of pharmaceutical pills! I wrote about social prescribing two years ago, in February 2020, when the UK's NHS were suggesting a greater use of "Talking Therapies" for depression and other mental health issues. More talking therapies, and less use of drugs? Was this, I asked, a tacit admission that pharmaceutical drugs were not the 'wonder drugs' we have been promised by conventional medicine for the last 100 years? Was this actually an admission that pharmaceutical drugs just do not work, that they caused more harm than good?

After all, if the drugs were really so wonderful, so effective, so safe, why would conventional medicine want to recommend using anything else?

The Pulse article recommended "a range of activities that are typically provided by voluntary and community sector organisations". Several examples were given, including volunteering, arts activities, group learning, gardening, befriending, cookery, healthy eating advice and a range of sports. 

Not a pharmaceutical drug anywhere to be seen!

Yet, social prescribing was described as capable of supporting many people "with a wide range of social, emotional or practical needs, and many schemes are focused on improving mental health and physical wellbeing". 

Support, without pharmaceutical drugs! An admission that would surely never have been made a few years ago - when the drug companies were busy telling us that medical science would in some future utopia be capable of transforming our lives, and our experience of illness!

        "Those who could benefit from social prescribing schemes include people with mild or long-term mental health problems, people with complex needs, people who are socially isolated and those with multiple long-term conditions who frequently attend either primary or secondary health care."

This is a large group of people. If they can be helped by social prescribing rather than taking prescription drugs it would mean much less use of pharmaceuticals. Do the drug companies approve of such a suggestion?

Social prescribing is certainly a less harmful, more positive alternative to pharmaceutical drugs, not least in that it recognises the importance to health of social and emotional interaction with other people. But coming from a journal, one of the pillars of conventional medicine, it is not a great endorsement of the treatment it has been handing out to us, in ever-increasing quantities, for the last 100 years.

It is very clearly an admission that the drug treatments conventional medicine has been using have not been successful, that the drugs have not delivered health in the way we have all been promised for so long.

So perhaps I am going to have to be more careful in future about the distinction between conventional and pharmaceutical medicine!

Postscript 29 April 2022

Conventional medicine continues to have a crisis of confidence is pharmaceutical drugs. This time it concerns painkilling drugs.

"GP's should prescribed tailored exercise and weight loss to relieve osteoarthritis" is an article in today's 'Pulse' magazine. It announcers new NICE guidelines for the treatment of osteoarthritis, thereby continuing the trend of conventional medicine moving away (slightly) from pharmaceutical medicine.

            "Updated NICE draft guidance has placed a greater emphasis on exercise and weight loss in patients with osteoarthritis, with use of strong painkillers not advised. GPs should offer tailored therapeutic exercise, such as aerobic activity or muscle strengthening, to all people with the condition as well as consider offering education or behaviour change programmes, NICE said."

It is more specific about the non-use of painkilling drugs.

            "Pharmacological treatments should be used at the lowest effective dose for the shortest possible time and topical NSAIDs should be the first choice for joint pain due to the condition. Paracetamol and glucosamine should not be routinely offered, strong opioids should not be used and weak opioids only used for short-term pain relief and when all other drug treatments are contraindicated, not tolerated or not effective."

Whether this will make any difference of how doctors treat osteoarthritis may be doubtful, but this constitutes yet another admission - that pharmaceutical drugs are not effective in the treatment of osteoarthritis.