On Wednesday, the body published a long-awaited review of Cass’s findings, conducted by 12 union members.
Prof David Strain, the chair of the BMA’s board of science, who led the review, said the Cass report’s methodology was robust and the BMA was no longer opposed to any of its 32 recommendations.
Presumably they found some union members with actual subject expertise rather than political insistences and so the verdict changed.
The analysis also found that during this period where stroke incidents were on the rise, people from black African and Caribbean backgrounds were more than twice as likely to experience a stroke compared with their white counterparts.
More specifically, stroke incidence was 131% higher in black African and 100% higher in black Caribbean populations in comparison with their white counterparts.
People from black backgrounds are up to 47% more likely to have high blood pressure, and are also up to twice as likely to have diabetes than their white counterparts, even after adjusting for other risk factors including socioeconomic background.
Onviously, we could just cheiek “Waaacism”. And no doubt some will be doing so. It’s even possible that the lesser treatment mentionde could be due to that. But actual incidence of these diseases could also be read as something genetic. You know, that terrible, evil, idea that different groups of humans could, in fact, be different and therefore have different outcomes.
Which opens a whole can of worms, doesn’t it?
Disabled people who use blue badges to go about their daily lives have said they are being harassed, questioned and even assaulted, as anti-benefits rhetoric becomes more mainstream in the UK.
About 3 million people in the UK now have a blue badge, including 1 in 15 adults in England. The number of people who qualify for the scheme – which allows drivers to park in more accessible spaces – has caused some to warn of misuse and fraud.
The AA has called for a crackdown on people using fake or stolen blue badges as the number on the scheme grows, while the Daily Mail “names and shames” drivers taken to court for fraudulently using a badges.
But the culture of suspicion has, according to the dozens of users who contacted the Guardian, given rise to a tide of abuse from members of the public towards badge holders, including accusations that they are faking their disability.
You know, given the way humans work at least some of those 3 million are going to be taking the piss.
Stress from racism and deprivation could explain why black women are more likely to die during childbirth, a study has found.
Researchers reviewed 44 existing studies that examined three physiological pathways associated with worse pregnancy outcomes: oxidative stress, inflammation, and uteroplacental vascular resistance, and found black women had higher levels of the three metrics.
Such physiological differences are not the result of genetic differences, according to the researchers, but rather suggest that socioenvironmental stressors such as systemic racism and deprivation, which are known to have a measurable biological effect, may influence the body’s ability to function healthily during pregnancy.
Sure, this could be true.
On the other hand the outcome for black mothers is worse everywhere. Even in black majority countries it is. Which means that the racism must be so prevasive as to be everywhere, including in black majority countries.
Which could be true too, obviously.
But Occam’s Shaving Kit would suggest that, well, there’s a genetic difference here. Well, over and above the obvious one about melanin. Which, as far as I’m aware, is also true.
All of which should be measured after the known effects of poverty, of course.
It’s even possible to test this. “Black” is not a single and all encompassing diagnosis. So, are there variations within that population by other genetic markers? Are Bantu derived groups affected differently than Nilotic – say and just as an example?
Hmm? No, racism is the conclusion we want so that’s the one we’re sticking with?
“It’s important that we don’t stop trying to tackle the root causes that lead to worse pregnancy outcomes in black women, which are the socioeconomic disparities and the systemic racism they can experience throughout their lives.”
That’s what we’re supposed to be testing, not asserting, Love.
Dozens of MPs are opposing Wes Streeting’s decision to award himself power to dictate what the NHS pays for drugs amid growing concern the move may be illegal.
Thirty-one MPs have signed a House of Commons motion voicing their disapproval of the health secretary being handed the power to override the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (Nice) judgment on how much the NHS should spend on individual medicines.
They fear that the change is a “power grab” that undermines the role Nice has played since its creation in 1999 as the arbiter of which medicines constitute value for money for the NHS to buy – and thus which patients can receive – in England and Wales. Nice is widely viewed internationally as a model of how to protect against drug companies charging excessive prices.
Nice is regarded internationally as a method to ration health care treatments. Some think it a good one, many a bad but there we are. It’s a method of rationing, not a method of protecting against high prices.
With no options left, the doctors offered a treatment known as CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy, which has proved gamechanging for certain cancers. The team extracted the woman’s white blood cells and isolated her T-cells, which patrol the body and kill infected or abnormal cells. The doctors engineered the T-cells to recognise a protein called CD19 found on B-cells and re-infused them into the patient.
I’m always amazed by people who say that there’s no innovation, no technological advance these days. Even if we take out the AI, phones and internet, there’s still this sort of stuff. 30 years ago no one would even have known whih three diseases the poor woman had let alone how to treat them….
They are now available because the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) from this week has increased the amount of money the NHS can spend on a treatment in the hope of giving patients a longer and higher quality of life from £30,000 to £35,000 a year.
That’s per Qualy, per decent life year gained by the treatment. We are saved etc:
While NICE was established in 1999, the explicit range of £20,000–£30,000 became commonly recognized as the guiding threshold in the early 2000s.
£30k then is worth about £15k now. So, the amount the NHS is willing to pay to save us hsa halved in only a couple of decades. Isn’t a nationally planned – for our benefit of course – health service such a lovely thing?
It’s also a lovely retort to that argument that the reason the NHS becomes more expensive is because all these new expensive treatments keep arriving. But as the NHS doesn’t spend on all these lovely new and expensive treatments that cannot be the reason for the rising NHS bill, can it?
I blew the whistle on Covid jabs five years ago. Now, I’m fighting for my medical licence
When my father died suddenly in 2021, I raised legitimate safety concerns about mRNA vaccines. The establishment backlash was immediate
Aseem Malhotra
Presumably the against sugar folk, the against salt folk, the against obesity folk, the against UPF folk, have all thrown him out so he’s this gig instead.
The Nottingham killer was not sectioned after a previous violent attack because he was black, an inquiry has heard.
Valdo Calocane attempted to break into a neighbour’s flat during a psychotic episode in May 2020 but was not committed to a psychiatric hospital after professionals considered an “over-representation of young black males in detention”.
Calocane, who was subsequently sectioned multiple times because of his violent behaviour, went on to kill students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both aged 19, and caretaker Ian Coates, 65, and attempted to kill three other people during an attack in June 2023.
There’s a bit of a gap between “because blacks in chokey” and “considered blacks in chokey” but it’s still viciously racist, isn’t it.
Whether or not someone needs to be sectioned based upon their skin colour rather than whether or not they need to be sectioned? Racism, obvs.
If you were stuck in the waiting room at the fictional Pittsburgh trauma medical center (PTMC) – and, as is the case with most real emergency rooms, to be at “the Pitt” almost certainly means waiting for hours (unless you’re imminently dying, but even then …) – you would at least have a lot to read. Paperwork and entry forms, for one. Signs warning that “aggressive behavior will not be tolerated”, a response to the real uptick in violence against healthcare workers.
Except no US medical drama would have real NHS waiting times as a plot point. No American would possibly believe such a stretching of what could possibly be true.
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 measuresGPs 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.