NHS - UTI = Euthanasia?

[WhiskeyGirl]

I wonder if this will be a feature of Obamacare?

"Son calls for police probe into 'attempted murder' of his elderly mother who he claims had her food and fluids withdrawn by doctors"

About 29 per cent of NHS deaths – some 130,000 a year – are via the LCP, prompting Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist of East Kent Hospitals, to claim in June that patients were being placed on a ‘euthanasia pathway’ because of ‘pressure on beds’.

Doctors had placed Mrs Tulloch on the Liverpool Care Pathway, a controversial NHS process used across the country to help the dying in their final hours.

Upon learning of this by chance, her son immediately complained that Mrs Tulloch, who had been admitted for treatment to a urinary tract infection, was not imminently dying.

He also claims he saw that his mother was not sedated, meaning she was suffering from extreme thirst.
THE LIVERPOOL CARE PATHWAY

The Liverpool Care Pathway was devised in the late 1990s to ease the distress of the last hours of dying patients and is now used across the NHS.

Under the pathway, pioneered in Liverpool, patients judged to be days or hours from death can be denied water or nutrition through a tube, heavily sedated, and denied treatment that could prolong life. They can also be refused unnecessary tests or treatment.

At the moment, only one duty doctor is needed to approve its use but experts last week said that two doctors should be involved in the decision-making process.

Experts said the most senior staff available must be involved because ‘it is not always easy to tell whether someone is very close to death’.

The demand for better supervision of those on the LCP follows claims that 130,000 patients a year are being killed off prematurely.

‘To deprive my mother, conscious and aware of my presence, of all means of sustenance appeared to me to be extremely cruel,’ he said.

read more here - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2215395/Peter-Tulloch-calls-probe-attempted-murder-elderly-mother.html

I wonder if the number of people on LCP has increased these past 10 years?  How much is saved in pension and other welfare costs?

[WhiskeyGirl]

"Ruth Davidson: Free prescription policy is depriving other areas of NHS of crucial funding "

Answering questions at the conference in Birmingham, she also said thousands of nursing and midwifery posts have been cut in Scotland.

"It's well known across the UK there are free prescriptions in Scotland. What it doesn't tell you is what that costs us," Ms Davidson said.

"In the last few years we have seen the number of nurses and midwives reduced by thousands.

"The people in Scotland are actively paying with their lives for this policy because in England and Wales they have access to the cancer drugs fund, so people with rarer cancers can be treated for that, they can have lives extended.

To bad so sad...no midwife for you, here is a free blue pill.

She accused the SNP and Labour of offering "electoral bribes" to voters and added: "Right-thinking people have long argued that they were quite happy to pay for their aspirin if it meant vital cancer drugs could be made available for the chronically ill."

In widely-trailed remarks she revealed just 12% of Scottish households contributed to the nation's wealth.

She said: "The rotten system of patronage which denies so many people real choices in their lives has created a corrosive sense of entitlement which suits its political gang-masters.

"It is staggering that public sector expenditure makes up a full 50% of Scotland's GDP and only 12 per cent of households are net contributors, where the taxes they pay outweigh the benefits they receive through public spending.

I like this article.  In the US the number of people not paying taxes is just 47%.  Imagine a day when 'free' stuff like aspirin is more important than access to hiring midwives and nurses.

Stressing the need for a strong centre-right voice to oppose Labour and the SNP, she said: "It's not just about the votes, it's about making sure that the left-wing consensus is subjected to forensic scrutiny.

"Otherwise Scotland could end up making North Korea look like a beacon of free enterprise ... before any of you think this is some form of exaggeration, only today the SNP have asked me to apologise for the crime of using facts to support arguments.

"Facts, I may say, which are supplied by the Scottish Parliament's information service and based on the Scottish Government's own figures. So welcome to Pyongyang everybody."

read more here - http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/ruth-davidson-free-prescription-policy-1367662

There is also mention of a prescription fund in other parts of the UK (apparently there is some difference between the various parts) to help folks pay for rare cancer treatments and such.

[WhiskeyGirl]

"The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal"

The drug example used in the article is "reboxetine".  Why does cancer treatment for children cost millions?  Does the insurer get a refund if the treatment/therapy doesn't work?  Why do they cost so much?  Why did Obama negotiate with drug companies behind closed doors?

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.

Is this even possible?  How do they find and unrepresentative sample of patients?  Offshore drug trials?

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug – antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on – then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin. These cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce your risk of having a heart attack and are prescribed in very large quantities. This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.

When you compare one kind of drug against the same kind of another manufacturer, are the results saying something like "drug A is 100% more effective than drug B" and the real effectiveness rate is like .02% and .01% of say 1,000 people in the study?  In other words, the drug only worked for 2 people out of 1,000?

"lies, damn lies, and statistics"?

read more here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre?newsfeed=true

[WhiskeyGirl]

Half of drugs prescribed in France useless or dangerous, say two specialists

The doctors claim that the state wastes money on unnecessary medicine that they blame for up to 20,000 deaths annually

..."They haven't discovered very much new for the last 30 years, but have multiplied production, using tricks and lies.

"Sadly, none of them is interested in making drugs for rare conditions or, say, for an infectious disease in countries with no money, because it's not a big market. Nor are they interested in developing drugs for conditions like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease because it too difficult and there's not money to be made quickly.

"It has become interested only in the immediate, in short term gains. On Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry is third after petrol and banking, and each year it increases by 20%. It's more profitable than mining for diamonds."

read more here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/14/french-doctors-drugs-useless-dangerous?newsfeed=true

[WhiskeyGirl]

"National Health Shortage"

Shadow health secretary, Labour’s Andy Burnham, said: “When the Government chose to reorganise the NHS at a time of financial stress we warned that it would lead to a postcode lottery running riot. That is exactly what is now ­happening, with increasingly crude cost-cutting across the system. The Tories are ­removing the N from NHS – treatments allowed in some areas now shamelessly denied in others.”

Post code lottery - sounds like 'red lining'...

Meanwhile bosses at the Royal Free Hospital in North London have introduced a weekly “golden hour” when private patients are given priority for appointment, ­potentially forcing cancer patients to wait longer to be seen.

Apparently, the UK has private health insurance for those that have money and want better service/opt out of the NHS sytem.

from the comments -

As much as I agree with austerity, this is one step too far. Denying the population of their basic rights, most have paid for this with their national insurance. Now the Tory-Liberal pact is creating the biggest class divide since the first world war, those who can afford medical treatment and those who can't, it is funny how nearly all the cabinet are multi-millionaires.

I can understand cutting back on unnecessary treatments on thing like IVF and sex change ops.

I came to the conclusion that the government is trying to kill those who are a drain on the system by attrition about a year ago, now they are succeeding.
The only way to stop this government, short of assassination, is to cut the city down to size, cut the purse strings, and get some reality to life.

read more here - http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/the-nhs-rationed-cancer-patients-oaps-1325925

Why should healthcare decisions and access be political?

[WhiskeyGirl]

"Half of medicines sold in France are ‘useless’ "

France is the world’s fifth-largest consumer of medicines, behind the US, China, Germany and Ireland.

The average French citizen will get through 47 medicine packs, prescription or otherwise, every year – at a cost of 532 euros per person, which equates to 12% of GDP. The state shoulders 77% of the cost.

In the UK, by comparison, spending on medicines is 9.6% of GDP.

read more here - http://www.france24.com/en/20120913-france-medicine-drugs-pharmaceutical-mediator-philippe-even-bernard-debre-pharmacy

I wonder what percentage of GDP the US spends on medicines.

[Slogger]

Why should healthcare decisions and access be political?

Healthcare becomes political the moment the government camel gets its nose under the tent.  Now, the whole camel is in our tent.  Beat the camel out of the tent and we (the patients) may have a chance.

[Sister]

Why should healthcare decisions and access be political?

Healthcare becomes political the moment the government camel gets its nose under the tent.  Now, the whole camel is in our tent.  Beat the camel out of the tent and we (the patients) may have a chance.

exactly!