Health Care

Yes, yes, race science etc, ghastly stuff. And yet:

Does that mean race is a biologically meaningful definition? It does not. Race as we currently use it is a socially constructed idea, but one with biologically meaningful consequences, such as in healthcare where many disease outcomes are significantly worse for racial minorities. The impact of disease correlates significantly with socioeconomic factors, primarily poverty, and in our society racial minorities are mostly in lower social strata. Black and brown people endure worse medical outcomes not because they are black or brown, but because of this fact. The science very clearly evidences this, and no amount of cosplay race science – or human biodiversity, as they euphemistically brand their propaganda – can debunk it.

No, that’s going too far in the opposite direction. Thalassaemia in Med littoral derived genetics, sickle cell in West African (both, likely, deirved from beneficial malaria resistance), Tay Sachs in Ashkenazi, booze and lactose intolerance in East Asians, propensity to diabetes in Pacific Islanders and on and on. It is not – simply not – true that health differences are reliant solely upon socioeconomic status. But that’s what he’s trying to say here. A more equal society isn’t going to do away with any oof those things I’ve mentioned there now, is it?

Canadians with nonterminal conditions sought assisted dying for social reasons
Some people have asked to be killed due to non-medical reasons – including isolation and homelessness

Under the plans, submitted by private hospitals, the independent sector could treat up to 2.5 million more patients, with some treatment starting in weeks.

The private sector investment would be used to build a string of diagnostic centres for NHS patients across the country, tackling delays in cancer diagnosis, and to develop new surgery units and intensive care facilities.

That it’s clearly and obviously sensible won’t stop the shrieks now, will it. Be like introducing chasubles and thuribles into a Methodist church – it is indeed a religion, Our NHS.

When that assisted dying becomes possible:

Police say sorry after putting down family’s dog by mistake

Soon enough it’ll be:

Police say sorry after putting down family’s Granny by mistake

After all, that is what happened at Gosport Memorial Hospital, isn’t it? 456 times?

Four key factors have been identified that together account for more than one-third of the inequalities in infant deaths between the most and least deprived areas of England.

Researchers say targeted interventions to address these factors – teenage pregnancy, maternal depression, preterm birth and smoking during pregnancy – could go a significant way to reduce inequalities, although higher-level structural changes to address socioeconomic inequality will also be necessary.

If rich and poor people all stop doing the bad things – the smoking etc – then why would reducing inequality make any difference?

Deprivation could have an effect, sure. So could absolute poverty. But relative poverty – inequality? How?

Which of course might suffer from that problem of being simple and wrong:

One possible explanation is the rise of the “western” diet, which is high in ultra-processed foods. A 2022 study of nearly 3,000 children and 4,256 adults in the US suggested that consuming ultra-processed foods was associated with allergy symptoms in children and adolescents. Perhaps the full detrimental impacts of ultra-processed foods are only now being recognised, as data is collected and analysed. There are close links between the gut microbiome and the immune system; similar concerns have been raised about their possible link to digestive-tract cancers in young people.

Another theory is that those who develop allergies are deficient in vitamin D, the vitamin our body produces when exposed to sunlight. Surveys have shown that children are spending an increasing amount of time indoors on screens instead of outdoors playing. This isn’t just a post-pandemic trend: it has been happening for more than a decade, alongside the growing use of tablets, games consoles and phones.

Other explanations have included the widespread use of antibiotics in young children (for ear infections or other ailments), which affect the digestive tract, rising air pollution and early exposure to skin infections. The health community will continue to look to scientists such as Turner, who is also a paediatric allergy consultant, to test the various hypotheses on why these allergies are developing and what can be done to prevent them in children.

The previous 50% death rate in children cdovered up a number of allergy deaths. Add in a bit of genetics – those who would have died did not and so the genes pass on down the generations – and here we are, two to three generations after the collapse of the child death rate with allergy problems.

It explains the available information but whether it’s correct or not is another thing.

Another pandemic as big as the Covid crisis that killed 7 million people worldwide is “a certainty”, Prof Sir Chris Whitty has warned, as he said that the UK’s lack of intensive care capacity for the sickest patients was a “political choice”.

Nature wants to kill us. Another pandemic is a certainty.

But let’s not do the idiot response next time, eh?

A woman has described feeling “suicidal” and “the most unwell I’d ever been” after undergoing plastic surgery in Turkey without mental health checks.

Nina — not her real name — has body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a condition that causes sufferers to become fixated on perceived flaws in their physical appearance.

In the UK, most surgeons will put patients through rigorous screening to assess mental health as well as physical health before taking deposits.

More mental health checks on getting your tits lifted than in having them sliced off. It’s possible that this is not the right way around.

GPs are increasingly spending their time on a small proportion of patients with multiple illnesses, research has found.

Family doctors spend more than a third of their time on patients with three or more serious chronic conditions despite the group accounting for 16 per cent of the population.

The proportion of people with multiple illnesses has been climbing since the turn of the century and one in three have at least two serious chronic illnesses.

What used to be near immediate death sentences are now chronic illnesses to be managed. Therefore some have that several rather than being dead.

This is also what leads to that long running observation that smoking, fatties and booze save the NHS money. Because those do, still, cause the deaded in our beds. And thus save the NHS those years of care of multiple chronic illnesses. One of the oddities of health care economics is that a cheap and reliable cure for lung cancer would actually raise NHS costs over time…..

a plurality fear that it might incentivise doctors to encourage patients to take their lives to ease pressures on the NHS.

How could anyone think that? After all, we’ve only had a few cases of people doing it without even asking…..

Public fears GPs would encourage assisted dying to ease NHS pressures, poll finds

Somewhere between rational fear and a statement of the bleedon’ obvious, innit?

The NHS is to launch its first ever service for transgender patients wanting to return to the gender they were born as.

The move comes in the wake of the Cass Review, an independent report into transgender services, which found that children were being hurried down “affirmative” pathways involving powerful drugs and medical interventions.

The review made a series of recommendations to the NHS, including to provide care for people who had changed their minds after transitioning, and warned health leaders not to use the same medics previously involved in their care.

NHS England published its plans to “transform” care for gender-questioning children on Wednesday, and accepted the recommendations of Dr Hilary Cass’s report in full.

They include developing the first NHS service to treat transgender patients who want to return to their gender at birth.

A service for something that never happens? For as we keep being told no one does regret……

Europe’s far-right surge has a lesson for Labour: fix the NHS to see off Farage

Europe has healthcare systems that work better than the NHS. Europe has more far right. So, err…..

Surrogates have double the chance of dangerous pregnancy complications such as high blood pressure and heavy bleeding compared to natural mothers, a study suggests.

Canadian researchers looked at the records of nearly one million births and found that although babies born through surrogacy are no worse off, their birth mothers were at risk of health problems.

Around seven per cent of surrogates suffered severe complications, compared with just 2.4 per cent of women with natural conceptions and 4.6 per cent of people undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Researchers are unsure what is causing the effect, but say that carrying someone else’s child may bring “physical and psychological impacts”.

Marina Ivanova, study author from Queen’s University, in Kingston, Canada, said: “There are several potential mechanisms that might explain the increased risk of severe maternal morbidity among gestational carriers (surrogates).

“These include differences in baseline health or socio-demographic characteristics of those who choose to become gestational carriers,

It’s not going to be the already rich who are the surrogate mothers now, is it?

The GP system stands “on the brink of collapse” and would go the way of dentistry under another term of the Tories, Wes Streeting has said.

The shadow health secretary said a Labour government would divert billions of pounds from hospitals in an attempt to save “the front door” of the NHS and ensure patients could get help sooner.

You can just see them deciding to nationalise it all. Turn GPs into salaried employees.

After giving birth to her son, novelist Lara Williams feared she might never sleep again. So she turned to CBT-i, a radical and gruelling new therapy that rewired her relationship to sleep

Apparently you stay up until you’re tired enough to go to sleep.

Amazin’ what doctors will think of.

Sir Keir Starmer has said that he would not use private healthcare even if his children were ill.

The Labour Party leader said he would not go private even in a case of chronic illness because the NHS is “absolutely the best” at treating acute health problems.

Of course, you knowe know whether it’s the journo or the politician getting these things wrong but chronic and acute are different things. Almost the opposite in fact.

But lucky he never sends the kids to a GP then – they are private businesses after all.

Iagree with Will Hutton that the essence of socialism is fellowship, and it’s easy to show what that can mean in practice (“Socialism isn’t a dirty word. It’s simply about wanting to make a fairer society”). The NHS is essentially a system of mutual medical aid with state funding, paid for by income tax – the more you earn, the more you contribute – which means it is firmly rooted in the socialist principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. It has been the most popular institution in the country for almost 80 years. People may complain about its performance (largely caused by Tory attempts to dismantle it), but how many of them criticise it for being socialist?

I’d like Labour politicians to pledge to apply the principles of the NHS to other state bodies. And if the Tories and the rightwing press scream that this is socialism, Labour should ask people how bad the socialism of the NHS has been for them.
Charles Osborne
Prague, Czech Republic

Prague, eh?

The Czech Republic has a universal health care system, based on a compulsory insurance model, with fee-for-service care funded by mandatory employment-related insurance plans since 1992.[1] According to the 2018 Euro health consumer index, a comparison of healthcare in Europe, the Czech healthcare is ranked 14th, just behind Portugal and two positions ahead of the United Kingdom.

Ah.

Actually, I ask so as to be corrected:

The world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning, according to trial results that doctors described as “extremely impressive”.

Melanoma affects more than 150,000 people a year globally, according to 2020 figures from World Cancer Research Fund International.

Patients who received the vaccine after having a stage 3 or 4 melanoma removed had a 49% lower risk of dying or the disease recurring after three years, data presented at the world’s largest cancer conference showed. The NHS in the UK is among the organisations testing the jab.

I’ve a very vague idea running around my head. Rough mind – a rough idea not a rough mind, we all already know that.

So, it’s long been an idea that it would be really great if we could “vaccinate” the immune system to go eat cancers. This would require a cheap – in fact by the standards of the industry, very, very, cheap – method of producing vaccines. There are so many cancers, the “vaccine” would need to be personalised for each patient. We’d like to get that “vaccine” production price – not per shot, but per personalisation – down into the $100s or perhaps $1,000s per treatment.

Hmm, OK. Now, I’ve got this vaguery that that’s what mRNA was all about. Covid was a sidestep, it just happened to arrive as the tech was maturing. But the aim was always cancers.

So, am I right on this? Or is this something I’ve made up after the fact?

BlokeinGermanywhoisnowinmycountry?

The official inquiry by Sir Brian Langstaff concluded the pharmaceutical industry’s contaminated product manufactured by subsidiaries of Bayer, Baxter and other drug groups to treat haemophilia did not contain adequate warnings and should never have been licensed.

Diana Johnson, the Labour MP and the chair of all-party parliamentary group on haemophilia and contaminated blood, said: “The pharmaceutical companies need to apologise and there needs to be a claim against them for some of this money.”

If it was the licence that was the problem then it should be those who granted the licence, no?

It’s also worth making another point or two. Hep C, for example, we didn’t even know it existed in the 70s, didn’t have a test until into the 80s. At some point of ignorance the outcome, however appalling and shitty, becomes just one of those things. It’s also true that even if we accept that then there’s still that further point. The scandal here isn’t that shit happens, it’s that shit having happened the establishment blew smoke and backfilled for decades.

Finally, there are those who insist that it was all about neoliberalism and capitalism and using paid donors in the US and all that. And here’s the problem. There’s not one place, not a single country nor health system, that collects enough plasma or blood products without the use of paid donors. Whole blood, yes, but not blood products. Again, jus’ one of those things. Factor VIII means paid donors. As the UK – or the NHS – goes into complete conniption fits whenever money is mentioned this does mean buying from the US. Sorry, but it does.