Category Archives: Health Care

*Oi! Fattie! Yer pills are ready!”

“Whatchu need dem for? Can’t get preggers as no one’s going t’shag a whale like you.”

“Rennies sir? If you ate less you grossly obese pig then you’d not need antacids.”

Chemists should tell shoppers to lose weight, cut their alcohol intake and quit other unhealthy habits, new NHS guidance says.

The guidance from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence says pharmacists should have a much stronger role in getting the nation in shape.

Pharmacists are being told to start conversations with shoppers about topics like weight loss when they pick up their prescriptions, or buy over the counter products.

“Johnnies? You’ll need a mirror to put those on matey, no way can you see over that gut.”

My miscarriage was the worst thing to happen to me – how could my doctor treat it like an everyday event?

It’s a rare event for you – not for him. Just as with death of an adult. Hmm, did I get that diagnosis wrong maybe? But the Doc ain’t gonna be wailing like the family now, is he?

A 4-year-old has gone blind from the flu: How often does this happen?

No one has been reporting on this little girl regaining her sight on and off, have they?

The Tories must learn from the Orkambi victory and keep drug-pricing off the table

OK:

The NHS has significant buying power, and regularly negotiates discounts,

Thought we just said that the NHS shouldn’t deal in drug pricing?

But the true stupidity is here:

Under pressure, the government admitted it had a “moral obligation” to explore providing access to cheaper versions of the drug, and Labour committed to doing so if it won power. Confronted with the real possibility that the government might break its monopoly, the public relations disaster of desperate families flying to Argentina to keep their children alive, and with an election looming, Vertex gave in and struck a deal.

The battle for Orkambi was won, but the problem is not going away. Whether it’s Trikafta, the successor drug to Orkambi, or any of the new wave of extremely expensive immunotherapy treatments for cancer, many more crucial yet overpriced drugs are coming on to the market. The country cannot be held to ransom every time the NHS needs to buy another medicine from another monopolist.

The monopoly is granted to get the spending on the development of the drug in the first place. If we don;t grant the monopolies then the development ain’t gonna take place…..

Lord knows how true it is, or useful, but:

Chicken soup really could boost the health, according to a new study showing traditional broths may combat malaria.

The humble fare has long been offered to those battling flu and fevers, thanks to a belief in its powers of restoration.

More than 60 homemade broths brought in by an ethnically diverse group of children from a London primary school were found to interrupt the life cycle of the most deadly of the malarial parasites.

A range of soups, ranging from vegetable to beef and chicken, were found to have the power to interrupt the life cycle of Plasmodium falciparum, which causes 99 per cent of deaths from malaria and is transmitted through infected mosquitos.

Chicken soup is, of course, Jewish penicillin. But the usual thought is that it’s the care with which Granny makes it which leads to the cure – care and attention from loved ones does boost the immune system.

But to find that soup actually works – against malaria – is lovely.

An elderly bank manager died after he was left a paraplegic with a broken neck following a “rushed” session with a chiropractor, an inquest heard.

John Lawler, 80, had visited a private clinic in York for the third time in a week to seek treatment for a leg injury he sustained by falling through a garden chair when he received traumatic injuries.

The former Barclays Bank manager was chatting to his wife Joan about where to have lunch when he screamed out in pain minutes into his appointment after his treatment table was dropped and raised “without warning”, his widow said.

An inquest in York heard Mr Lawler yelled at Dr Arleen Scholten, “you are hurting me, you are hurting me” before later adding, “I can’t feel my arms”, during what was supposed to be part of a procedure to manipulate his spine in August 2017.

Mrs Lawler, 83 , told the inquest that despite her husband’s distress, Dr Scholten started to apply an activator, a small handheld clicking device that stimulates the spine, to his neck.

Spine manipulation is not always a good thing…..

The theory is most fun:

Deadly conditions like leukaemia, sepsis and malaria could be drawn from the body using magnets, after a British engineer designed a blood filtering system which sieves away disease.

Dr George Frodsham, came up with the idea while studying how magnetic nanoparticles can be made to bind to cells in the body, to allow, for example those cells to show up on scanners.

But he realised that if it was possible to magnetise cells for imaging, it should also be possible to then suck them out of the blood.

In theory, any bacterial infection, blood cancer, or virus that could be grabbed by a tiny magnetic particle could be removed from the body without the need for lengthy treatments with harsh drugs.

If you can preferentially mark or magnetise the bad stuff then yes, you’ve just created a method of being able to filter by magnetism.

Now, whether it actually works usefully is another matter and it’s going to be fun to find out.

Obviously, they already know about the levitating frog and are aware that the red blood cells contain that iron which is affected by magnets….

When Saracens rugby player Jade Knight ran her first 5km after the birth of her son, she was plagued by urinary incontinence. Pregnancy and birth had caused a weak pelvic floor – the group of muscles that span the bottom of the pelvis – leading to stress incontinence, a condition affecting around a third of mothers.

Embarrassed, Knight religiously wore black leggings when she returned to training out of fear she would leak in front of her team-mates. “Unless I speak about it I don’t think anyone else is going to,” she says. Even as a qualified midwife, she was astounded at the toll pregnancy had taken on her body.

With a severe lack of evidence and information on how exercise impacts post-partum sportswomen,

How old are Kegel weights now?

That is, this is hardly an unknown, is it?

Many liberals and a growing number of Democratic presidential candidates have embraced a bold idea for reforming America’s broken healthcare system. The idea most in vogue—and the most debated—throughout the 2020 election has been to abolish private insurance in favor of a government-run national system, otherwise known as “Medicare for All.” Advocates of “single-payer” generally blame rapacious insurers as the principal villains of the current system, responsible for sky-high premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. Replacing for-profit insurance companies with a government program, the logic goes, would bring lower costs and coverage to everyone

But this singular focus on insurers means that the presidential hopefuls are neglecting an even bigger problem with far-reaching consequences for millions of Americans: the dominance of hospital monopolies in a growing number of health care markets nationwide.

Monopolies, in general, mean bad news for consumers. Health care is no exception.

That’s why there should be a single, monopoly, health care system like Medicare for all, right?

Competition, not consolidation, is better for patients.

Err, yes?

“Little progress” has been made improving patient safety in the NHS over the past 20 years, the top health service watchdog has said.

Serious accidents such as surgery on the wrong part of the body remain commonplace due to an “insidious” culture of defensiveness and blame, the Chief Inspector of Hospitals at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said.

Professor Ted Baker yesterday revealed he receives between 500 and 600 reports of “never events” a year, incidents that are wholly preventable whatever the circumstances.

This includes an occasion where surgeons operated on the wrong eye of a patient.

He told a safety conference at The King’s Fund that hospital managers routinely hide evidence from the CQC, because they regard the organisation as out to blame them.

Midwives failing to check babies’ heart rates during labour is the biggest cause of birth blunders in NHS, an investigation has found.

An analysis of “devastating” cases which ended in brain injury found that seven in ten involved a failure to properly monitor the foetus.

And in almost two thirds of such births, at least two errors were made, with repeated missed chances to prevent death and avoidable injuries.

The research, which examined 96 births, follows official figures which show that almost £5bn of negligence claims were lodged against the NHS in 2018/19.

Half of this – almost £2.5bn – involved claims relating to alleged blunders in maternity.

The investigation also calls for urgent changes to ensure babies were properly monitored during labour.

Incompetence in a state organisation though…..

A landmark trial over one of France’s biggest healthcare scandals will begin on Monday after a weight-loss pill was believed to have killed up to 2,000 people and left many more injured for life.

The trial for manslaughter and deceit will attempt to lift the lid on France’s massive pharmaceuticals industry.

Servier, one of France’s biggest and most powerful privately-owned laboratories, is accused of covering up the killer side-effects of a widely prescribed drug called Mediator. The French state drug regulator is accused of lenience and not acting to prevent patient deaths and injuries.

There’s certainly some commonality. Weight loss drug that causes cardiovascular problems. Would be interesting to know whether it’s actually the same drug, or a slight derivative?

Hundreds of children with cancer being denied potentially lifesaving drugs

Where the Hell’s Mengele when you need him? For we’ve got to start doing medical experiments on sick kids.

That being what the actual problem is. We don’t test drugs on kids. Therefore they either not approved or we’re not sure they will work on kids. Thus they don’t get them.

The solution is to test drugs on kids.

Screening men for breast cancer may be even more effective than for women

No:

Screening men for breast cancer may be even more effective than for women after testing picked up nearly four times the rate of tumours.

Not what’s being said:

Breast cancer in men is rare, with around 1.5 cases for every 100,000 men in Britain, equating to 390 men diagnosed each year compared to 54,800 cases in women.

But around one in 1000 men carry gene mutations that put them at greater risk.

Now a study has shown that when 1,869 high risk men were screened over 12 years, cancer was detected in 18 of every 1,000 exams, compared to five in 1,000 for women of both high and average risk.

Selective screening of men appears more effective than unselective screening of women.

Something that seems fair and reasonable when we think about it.

Scientists can predict risk of heart attack with 90 per cent accuracy

“You have a 50% chance of a heart attack and I am 90% accurate in that prediction”.

The new technology can detect dangerous build-up of fat and scarring around the organ.

It allows medics to predict the likelihood of a heart attack over the next nine years with up to 90 per cent accuracy.

That’s more interesting than the piffle the Telegraph’s writers manage.

Record demand for help from NHS gender identity clinics has seen waiting times reach more than two years , an investigation has found.

Don’t we make them wait three years before reaching for the scalpel anyway? So, they’re getting 2/3 of the work done in advance!

A casting call seeking a thin young girl with “very good teeth” to star in a Milka chocolate Christmas TV advert has been criticised by health campaigners.

The request for child actors to play the role of “Mia” asked for “no red hair” and for the girl to be no older than 12 so she is “childlike”.

It insisted “no overweight children as this is advertising chocolate”.

The advert was published on Spotlight, a talent agency which helps performers find employment, and later on Twitter.

A spokesman for Action on Sugar, a health campaign group, said it was “sure the Advertising Standards Authority would not stand for this”.

Why will the ASA not stand for this?

They’re casting for an actress, the looks of the actress are relevant. And?

Measles vaccines alone have prevented around 21m deaths worldwide since the turn of the millennium

Presumably that’s calculated by using the historic incidence times child population. But it’s still one hell of a number in only 19 years.

Brings home how common those little white coffins were in times past.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, who led the study: “We are interested in understanding autism, not preventing it.

“This new finding supports the idea that increased prenatal sex steroid hormones are one of the potential causes for the condition.

“Genetics is well established as another, and these hormones likely interact with genetic factors to affect the developing foetal brain.”

Surge of hormones in the womb he’s been musing on this as the (or a, perhaps the trigger) cause for at last a decade and a half now.

People with the worst genetic risk of dementia can reduce their chances of developing the disease by a third through exercise and healthy eating, new research finds.

The first study to analyse the combined effect of genetic and lifestyle factors established that the impact of living healthily was enough to substantially lessen the danger from bad genes.

Regular moderate exercise, quitting smoking, drinking sensibly, plus eating lots of fish and vegetables, was linked to roughly the same reduction in the chance of dementia, regardless of genetic risk, the research found.

OK, so there’s dementia caused by bad diet, that caused by genes. That caused by bad diet has risk of reduced by not having a bad diet.

Fair enough.

This means the benefit of adopting a healthy lifestyle is likely to be highest for those with the worst genes.

Eh?