Health Care

From herbalists in Africa gathering plants to use as poultices to acupuncturists in China using needles to cure migraines, or Indian yogis practising meditation, traditional remedies have increasingly being shown to work, and deserve more attention and research, according to a World Health Organization official.

A historical lack of evidence, which has seen traditional practices dismissed by many, could change with more investment and the use of modern technology, according to Dr Shyama Kuruvilla, who leads the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre.

It just becomes medicine – like quinine did. As soon as we get someone warbling on about different methods of knowing, different methods of proof, then we’re in Woo! territory.

Sure, sure, test it by our standard scientific methods. If it works by those then Woot!

But which of these – despite protestations – do you think it will end up as?

After all, we’ve already seen the madwives kill thousands with their traditional approaches…..

India’s leading doctors have warned of the dangers of an unregulated boom in weight loss injections, and emphasised they are not a magic pill to solve the country’s growing epidemic of diabetes and obesity.

Demand for appetite-suppressing drugs such as Mounjaro, Wegovy and Ozempic has surged since they were introduced into the Indian market this year.

In the eight months since it was approved for sale, Mounjaro – a jab that regulates blood sugar and suppresses appetite to help with diabetes and obesity – is now India’s highest-selling drug, overtaking antibiotics.

How much of this opposition is to the word “unregulated”?

Mohit Bhandari, one of India’s leading bariatric surgeons, said he believed that the official numbers of people with diabetes and obesity in India were a “significant undercount due to poor data collection” and estimated they were more than 10% higher than government records.

However, Bhandari is among those urging caution at the widespread and unregulated use of weight loss drugs, which he said were already being abused and mis-prescribed with possible long-term consequences.

“The GLP-1 drugs already very important for India, they’re more than welcome,” he said. “However, there are very significant problems and caveats to this. These jabs should be properly controlled by the government.”

Bloke who makes his living from an alternative treatment demands government control of the alternative treatment to how he makes his living.

Hmm….

New rules on access to single-sex spaces could pose a significant risk to the mental health of trans and non-binary people, according to 15 of the UK’s most respected mental charities.

Organisations including Samaritans, Mind, Centre for Mental Health and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have written to the equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, to express their “deep concern” about guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that is awaiting approval from the government.
….
The organisations, which also include the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, Beat, the Mental Health Foundation and the Association of Mental Health First Aiders, are concerned about the impact on access to inpatient wards as well as community-based and crisis services.

They write: “Living in fear of abuse, discrimination or humiliation is a major risk factor for poor mental health, and trans and non-binary people already experience some of the highest rates of mental ill health in the UK, driven by stigma, exclusion and barriers to affirming care.”

A list of those who are, shall we say, unbalanced on the issue?

A United Nations committee has warned New Zealand is at serious risk of weakening Māori rights and entrenching disparities for the Indigenous population, in its most critical review of the country’s record on racial discrimination.

Last month, the UN’s committee for the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (CERD) examined New Zealand’s record as part of its eight year review cycle for signatories to the convention.

Its 14-page report, released on 5 December, expressed concerns over multiple government policies affecting Māori, including the disestablishment of the Māori Health Authority, cuts to public funding for Māori services and minimising the role of the Treaty of Waitangi – the country’s founding document that is instrumental in upholding Māori rights – in schools and governance arrangements.

So the peeps claiming to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination are against the abolition of racist discriminations? That the Maori do not have a separate but equal health care thing is racist discrimination rather than the removal of it?

And there is why we should pay the UN no mind….

Natural birth ideology — belief in a vaginal birth that avoids the use of instruments, drugs and caesarean sections — has been blamed for encouraging midwives to delay taking action when things are going wrong.

Well:

Student midwives are being stopped from graduating because universities are failing to train them adequately, the nursing regulator has warned.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has intervened after concerns were raised over the standard of training in the UK. In some cases, students have been compelled to study for longer, or even to switch universities.

Last week The Sunday Times revealed that dozens of universities across England were still promoting the controversial “normal birth” ideology in undergraduate courses. Many experts, including Donna Ockenden, chair the Nottingham maternity inquiry, said students were not being trained with the skills needed to care for women giving birth today.

There is, sorta, the question of why are they being trained in universities? Not on maternity wards?

Oh, yes, that’s right, so as to be professional, right? So, to be professional they have to go to uni to be inculcated with leftie nonsense rather than learn how to do the actual job.

The effect “was palpable” she said as women’s complexity had increased over the past two decades, but university training had not kept pace. “The majority of women who are cared for on consultant-led units need more than the basic standards that midwives are educated to at the point of graduation,” she added. “We now start with a workforce that is not trained in basic nursing skills.”

Uni’s such a good idea.

Stop promoting natural birth ideology, midwife courses told
Despite a litany of scandals, universities are still pushing ‘normal birth’ over medical interventions. Now our investigation has prompted the regulator to act

Entrenched bureaucracies – or if you prefer, that long march through the insitutions – can be terribly difficult to dislodge. Even when it’s moron trying to return childbirth – that most dangerous thing a woman ever does – to it’s natural rate of being the biggest cause of adult mortality other than the diseases of old age.

Why anyone let the cretins do this is one thing, stop[ping them is another. And we really must stop them.

Why family bullying over inheritance has become rife
Older people are being manipulated to hand over cash to family members struggling with the cost of living, finds Mary Downer

Under the Ayushman Bharat medical insurance scheme, launched in 2018, poor patients are entitled to cover worth 500,000 rupees a year for each family. Most importantly, the treatment is available not only at the crowded and frenetic government facilities but also at private hospitals across India that offer a better standard of care. So far, 822m Ayushman Bharat health account (ABHA) numbers have been issued.

OK.

But this is where the scheme is foundering. Nationwide, the unpaid claims for medical care stand at more than 1tn rupees (£8.5bn). In the state of Kerala alone, there are 4bn rupees in pending claims.

Government doesn’t like paying up, eh?

And more!

Often the delays are down to complicated paperwork. Claims can be rejected or delayed over trivial issues such as misprints or minor discrepancies.

And the babus inist upon a pile of paperwork and bureaucracy, do they?

Who could have predicted this, in India of all places?

GPs in England threaten action over online appointment booking plan
Doctors’ union says GPs will be overwhelmed by ‘triage tsunami’ and gives ministers 48 hours to take measures

GPs in England are threatening to take action over government plans to increase patients’ online access to appointments which they say will lead to a “tsunami” of extra demand.

GP is a majority female occupation these days. We have more of them too. We also have a large portion of those female GPs working part time. The supply of GP’ing has fallen even as we spend more on that £250k cost of training a GP.

Which does lead to an interesting question. If the birds now worked full time would we have enough GP’ing going on?

We could even take a leaf from Spud’s work. He once said – in a TUC budget submission no less – that high paid birds are uniquely subject to hte income effect. Raise their tax rate an they’ll work more hours in order to continue to enjoy that life of loooxury.

So, increase the tax rate on GPs – or, in fact the same effect, lower their pay – and watch as GP’ing labour hours increase.

Solved, eh?

Of course, that does rather depend upon Spud having got his economics right….

The NHS must change how black men are treated for prostate cancer to prevent “an epidemic of unnecessary deaths” in which twice as many die as white men, campaigners have warned.

Academics are seeking to raise awareness that one in four black men are getting this cancer, twice the rate of white men, which is one in eight, according to Prostate Cancer UK’s analysis of patient datasets for England. One in 12 black men are at risk of dying of this condition compared with one in 24 white men.

If the same number – or portion – get the disease but more die of it then it’s differential treatment. If the same portion of those who get it die then it’s not differential treatment and if more people get it but the same portion who do die then again, it’ not treatment that’s different. It’s something before treatment.

But then this is being driven by the ususal type of race grifter (an expert in forensic archaeology apparently) so there we are.

Donald Trump’s administration is on Monday expected to tie pregnant women’s use of the popular medicine Tylenol – known as paracetamol elsewhere in the world – to a risk of autism, contrary to medical guidelines, the Washington Post has reported.

Trump officials are also expected to announce an effort to explore how the drug leucovorin could purportedly and potentially treat autism, according to the Post report published Sunday, which cited four sources with knowledge of the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made.

Not sure which of those two I disbelieve the more.

Either are possible, obviously, at the paracetemol and autism one I’ve never evern heard of. But RFK and vaccines has me suspicious of both…

Black women in England are still facing poorer outcomes in their maternity care due to systemic racism, alongside failures in leadership and data collection, according to a group of MPs.

Across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts, while babies born to black mothers are at an increased risk of stillbirth.

Is there any society in which these aren’t both true? Where maternal mortality and stillbirth rates are not higher for blacks than whites?

If there isn’t then two explanations present themselves. One that the whole world’s racist – which might even be true but would be a surprise as an outcome in ocuntries where blacks have the political power these days. Or, there is something genetic going one. Which, obviously there is – black skin for example – but is there something more. Say, propensity to gestational diabetes? And those with actual medical knowledge could no doubt expand that list.

It seems like one of those things that it would be worth finding out about, no?

One of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health advisers will tell Reform members that Covid vaccines cause cancer at the party’s conference on Saturday.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, a British doctor who works on the US health secretary’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, is a prominent sceptic of mRNA vaccines and has been invited to the conference by Nigel Farage.

He believes that Mr Farage supports his plan to pause the rollout of all vaccines until they have been independently reviewed for side-effects, including cancer and heart problems.

Malhotra (see C Snowden, passim) climbs aboard every passing health care fad. And always on the wrong side of it. Salt, sugar, now vaccines – presumably because van Tulleken has taken the ultraprocessed foods gig.

Reform should really drop this one.

Diagnostic software triples rate of full recovery in stroke patients
Specialised AI-assisted tool used on 60,000 people works up to an hour faster than traditional scans, allowing almost half to make total return

We can cut the number of trainee doctors and pay them less then.

Excellent.

However, new modelling by Stanford University and Italian researchers suggests that while the vaccines did save lives, the true figure was “substantially more conservative” and closer to 2.5 million people worldwide over the course of the pandemic.

The team estimated that nine of 10 prevented deaths were in the over-60s, with jabs saving just 299 people aged under 20, and 1,808 people aged between 20 and 30 globally.

Overall 5,400 people needed to be vaccinated to save one life, but in the under-30s this figure rose to 100,000 jabs, the paper suggests.

Given that, with rare exceptions, covid itself was only dangerous to the over 60s.

The lower these numbers get the worse lockdown looks as well, eh?

Exposure to certain forms of air pollution is linked to an increased risk of developing dementia, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind.

Air pollution is the result of doing something. If we do something then we live longer. Long enough to get dementia rather than starving to death in our 30s.

QED.

NHS will use AI to prevent next Letby scandal
Pioneering tech to scan data in real time to detect serious failings in care

AI is pattern recognition. As is the way Letby was caught. But pattern recognition works on something that has happened – it’s not a preventative, it’s a detection.

People dying early from cancer costs the UK economy £10.3 billion a year, according to the most comprehensive analysis of its kind.

Researchers from Cancer Research UK calculated the number working years lost to the disease, alongside people’s expected economic output in that time.

They found that cancer deaths among young adults aged 25 to 49 were having a significant effect on overall economic output, costing £3.2 billion every year.

0.1%. I’d hesitate to call that significant but very well.

As part of its plan, the charity wants the Government to take further action on smoking, obesity and alcohol, all of which contribute to cancer.

Ah, but if we’re doing such reductios then we do have to include the savings to the NHS of a shorter lifetime of health care provision. And the lack of a pension to pay and so on.

If you’re going to do a cost benefit analysis then you’ve got to do a cost benefit analysis.

Taxing sugar and fat would be one way of altering the nation’s diet, and we should also look at the quality of school meals. Beyond food regulation, we need to buy back school playing fields, offer opportunities to exercise for free, and encourage active transport by making pavements pleasant and cycle routes safe. The current obesity crisis arises from a complex mix of social and commercial determinants of health and these are not problems that can be fixed with a simple injection.

Well, yes. We can just stop having rabies injections too. What do you mean you want to go abroad where rabies exists?

Lifestyle changes cure everything, d’ye see?

Experts said the rising cases were a “terrible indictment” of the state of the NHS, with Poland, Germany, Italy and Belgium among the main beneficiaries.

It’s the state healthcare systems treating UK patients. That’s a benefit to hte patients, to the NHS, not to the foreign places and systems.