The government’s reduction of funds and extra stress on junior doctors is just the tip of the iceberg. Looking at the bigger picture, doctors’ surgeries have been overly swamped with patients for many years, so much so that doctors are unable to allot more than 10 minutes of their time to each ailing customer. Hospitals are overwhelmed with casualties, plus are unique conduits for MRSA, SARS, and breeding grounds for a whole host of other HAI’s, and these diseases cause death to thousands of people every year. Not only that, but any visitor to an NHS hospital can see for themselves the terrible waste of resources that goes on. The NHS is ailing and the problem is out of hand. No wonder the government want to sell it off to private investors, but more of that later on.
The question I ask myself, is why? What could have possibly caused this terrible sickness in such a wonderful institution? Some say the stress on our free-at-the-point-of-delivery medical welfare system has something to do with the population explosion, but if every British tax payer contributes towards the NHS as they have always done, then why should a larger population make any difference?
I remember as a child, growing up in the 60’s, with the ethos that all you have to do if you have a health problem is visit the doctor and he or she (usually a 'he' in those days) will give you something to make it better. In hindsight, this belief is a complete delusion and one that is still inherent in society today. The real truth of the matter is that a visit to the doctor and coming away with a pharmaceutical prescription, or having had a vaccination, is much more likely to compromise your health even further and therefore make you even more reliant on the already oversubscribed National Health System. The statistics for autism
which the CDC have admitted can be caused by vaccines are staggering, according to WebMD 1:2000 children in the 70's and 80's and in 2009, 1:100, according to the British Journal of Psychiatry. The increase in Cancer, in part due to the polio vaccine, is even worse.
That’s because pharmaceutical preparations are not medicines. They’re drugs. They are not formulated in order to help the body heal itself, but are poisonous substances given on an on-going basis with the intention of suppressing symptoms, and causing side-effects for which the patient will require more drugs, and so on.
It is also no big secret that the pharmaceutical industry is hugely corrupt and over the years has had to pay billions of dollars in fraudulent claims against them. It is unfortunate, for patients, that the medical establishment is so on board with the drug companies and that together they campaign so ardently and consistently against any alternative to big-pharma treatments, despite efficacy-at-the-point-of-delivery. And because the pharmaceutical industry is motivated by money not people, once healthcare becomes privatised the situation can only get worse, in terms of the end result, for patients.
Projects like the Leading Together Programme AHSM are working to promote greater responsibility for health away from doctors’ surgeries and hospitals. But, however commendable this effort is I can’t help feeling that it is also, much too little, too late.