Physician, heal thyself.

Here we go again;

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is calling for fewer fast food outlets near schools and a complete ban on unhealthy food in hospitals in a report which warns the crisis is at risk of becoming “unresolvable”.

No. No it isn’t, the risk is entirely resolvable. You just don’t eat nothing but takeaways and shitty ready meals. There – risk averted. It comes down to the old adage about ‘public health’; there is my health, there is your health, there is no our health.

By 2050 more than half of adults will be seriously overweight and tough measures are needed to prevent the situation spiralling completely out of control, the UK’s 220,000 doctors warn.

Where do you get this from? I’m not going to say they won’t, but you cannot say with any certainty that they will. Look, the adults of 2050 have not in the main been born yet. How can you possibly say what will happen in forty years? Look at how our habits and attitudes have changed since the 60′s. We have no idea what the future will look like. As an example, since the horsemeat story broke the butcher down the end of my road has been run ragged. He has, and this is no exaggeration, been giving tours of his cold storage room, showing supermarket shoppers who have come to him how the meat on his counter and in his window has been carved off the carcass hanging up in the back. He can tell them what farm the meat came from, what the farmer’s name is. These shoppers have been coming back. He provides better meat, supporting local farmers, in a better atmosphere and a price which is the equal of, or cheaper than, the supermarket.

Things change.

Doctors are united in viewing obesity – the consequences of which include diabetes, heart disease and cancer – as the single greatest public health crisis facing the country, the report says.

Blah blah blah.

The report criticises both current and previous governments for “piecemeal and disappointingly ineffective” attempt to deal with the problem, given that one in four adults in England is obese and these figures are set to climb to 60 per cent of men, 50 per cent of women, and 25 per cent of women over the next 37 years.

Yada yada yada.

Look, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It is your job to fix us when we’re broken. How we got broken is of no concern to you.

More to the point, may I suggest that you deliver on your promises? The actual Snowolf is part of a little pack that meets up every afternoon. One of the pack humans is ill, he’s a man just past his 80th birthday and has a nasty cancer which keeps popping up in his bladder. It now looks like his bladder is going to have be removed. He’s been subjected to  a battery of tests, the last one was a scan, the results of which would be interpreted and revealed three weeks after the scan. Three weeks was up on Thursday. Nothing, not so much as a peep. The Consultant is ‘unavailable’. How about a little less time on the golf course and preaching to everyone and a little more time doing your actual job?

Actually, I have another question. Where in the blue hell were the sainted, hugely important and no doubt vastly knowledgable ‘Academy of Royal Medical Colleges’ when their members were overseeing the needless deaths of over 1,000 people, left sat on the bog, or dying in sheets covered in their own piss and shit, or denied even a drink of water? Hmmm? Where was this august organisation when these people, who had been entrusted to their members to make them better, died of neglect in circumstances that would have embarrassed Haringey Social Services?

Perhaps, when our medical professionals can display a capacity for not neglecting their patients to death in circumstances that would have scandalised a Napoleonic War charnel house, or can take someone into their care without deciding that it would be best for all concerned if they were just left to die, then maybe, possibly, I might just be prepared to give some credence to what their rent seeking, power hungry, arrogant trade bodies have to say.

I am dying.

Just wait a moment before you send the flowers and set up an Arsebook page where you can tell me to RIP in peace, this isn’t on the horizon just yet, but I am dying. You are dying. We’re all dying. Just like the digital display on a James Bond timebomb, from the moment we pop out the countdown to zero starts. There is nothing you, I or anyone else can do about it. The clock will eventually read 00:00, and when it does, that’s your lot.

The whole thing is complicated by the fact that the digital display is hidden, and we don’t all get the same number at the start, nor do our numbers all count down at the same rate, so we don’t know when the countdown hits 00:10. There is no way to defuse this bomb, it will never stop at 00:01 as you, the hero of your own action movie, mop your sweating brow and give a sigh of relief.

However, there is yet another story this morning designed to make you think you can live forever, or at least for a long, long time.

Nearly half of cancers diagnosed in the UK each year – over 130,000 in total – are caused by avoidable life choices including smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things, a review reveals.

Tobacco is the biggest culprit, causing 23% of cases in men and 15.6% in women, says the Cancer Research UK report.

Next comes a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in men’s diets, while for women it is being overweight.

Yes, and?

“Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that around 40% of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change.”

But that’s just it, isn’t it? I have to die of something, it will be cancer, a stroke, a heart attack, renal failure, being squashed by a rhino that leaned too far out of its penthouse flat window trying to glimpse a view of that new Ferrari as it drives down the street (rhinos LOVE Ferraris) or being sat in a chair as my body just wears out.

I’ve said it time and again, there’s nothing offensive about death, it is the natural order of things. If I’m lucky, and very few of us will be, I’ll go to bed one night a reasonably healthy person and will just stop working. More likely I will get one incurable condition or another, and if it isn’t cancer it’ll be something else, and it will hurt. Worse still, I’ll live to be 110 and will spend the last twenty years of my life incapable of doing things for myself, eating bland, liquidised food served to me by some person who looks after me because they are paid to do so, not because they have any emotional connection with me. I will spend the last twenty years sat in a wing back chair, bored to distraction, and being governed by rules dictating when I get up, go to bed, when and what I eat and drink, when I take a shit, literally waiting for the warm embrace of death. That isn’t life, that’s a prison sentence for being old.

Well, fuck that.

If I am going to die, and I am, I will do it on MY terms, having lived MY life to MY satisfaction. I’ve only got the one, and I’m buggered if I’m going to live it in a fashion that doesn’t upset a government stats sheet or some idiot who thinks we should and could all live forever.

Seriously, can you imagine anything worse than eternal life?

No, St. Peter will ask me what I did with my life just after I come to a crashing halt in a burning car, sliding sideways into the Pearly Gates, I’ll be the one climbing out of the wreckage screaming ‘Woooooo! What a ride!’ Better that than arriving dressed in beige acrylic with an anorak and a flat cap, paying the ferryman with a coin from a neat, fussy little shovel purse and answering the question ‘What did you do with your life?’ with ‘Everything they told me to’.

It is my life and my body, not yours. And Doctors; it is neither your job nor your place to presume to tell me what to do with it. You are paid to fix it when it goes wrong, or to tell us when it is beyond repair. Just get on with it, won’t you?

Be afraid, be very afraid. Oh, and give us some money.

This isn’t about last night’s election results (with more to come), I’m not scared about the gains Labour have made, I just think it is funny that people persist in shuffling between Labour and the Conservatives in the hope that just for once, they don’t make an absolute horlicks of it. For the last 90 years they’ve been taking it in turns and every time each turn taker has covered themselves in shite. Quite why anyone expects them to be different now is a mystery to me.

Nor am I scared with the SNP apparently sweeping the board clean in Scotland. That’s a matter for them, the fact that the SNP are madder than Mad Jock McMad, winner of Scotland’s maddest man competition, is of no consequence to me. I don’t understand how you can bang a drum screaming ‘freedom’ like a demented Mel Gibson wannabe, whilst being the most authoritarian party on the block and promoting independence from the horrible, horrible English, only to jump under the direct control of Brussels. That isn’t protecting Scottish culture or national character, it is a wilful attack on the proud history of Scotland. But hey, what do I care? I live in Kent, it’s your country, Jimmy.

No, we need to be scared because. . .

Coffee, sex and blowing your nose could increase the risk of a type of stroke

So any hay-fever sufferer with a new girlfriend and a love of Starbucks has a life expectancy of about 10 minutes I’d say.

They all increase blood pressure which could result in blood vessels bursting, according to research published in the journal Stroke.

Going for a brisk walk increases the blood pressure. Reading about fines for littering payable by people who haven’t actually done the littering raises the blood pressure, reading press releases about shagging being bad for you raises the blood pressure. Should action not be taken against them?

The Stroke Association said more research was needed to see if the triggers caused the rupture.

I’ll translate that for you:

The Stroke Association said more cash was needed to see if they could think anything else up.

Nanny Beeb has helpfully published a list of activities that can lead to burst aneurysms:

  • Coffee 10.6%
  • Vigorous exercise 7.9%
  • Nose blowing 5.4%
  • Sex 4.3%
  • Straining to defecate 3.6%
  • Drinking cola 3.5%
  • Being startled 2.7%
  • Being angry 1.3%

Straining to defecate? That’s one of life great pleasures, I use disabled toilets specially when I want a good strain, it’s nice to have all those handles to grab hold of. I think that’s a coded call to ban Guinness.

We really are through the looking glass here. I think I’m going to start a project to colonise Mars, I can see no future on this planet.

Crisis of confidence.

I think I’m losing it folks. I just don’t know where to start.

Another politician, this time a sitting MP, pleads guilty to pilfering on a pretty grand scale. Of course this story has been running for ages now. But really, an elected representative shamelessly stealing from the public? In 21st Century Europe? Really? I am still shocked by this. How dare they? It is easy to say this and that about our politicians, but the realisation that our political class really are that venal, that arrogant is a betrayal which makes me as sad as it does angry.

Yet, a stupid sixth form student, who has shown genuine remorse for his actions, backed up a mother who must have searched her soul to the very depths before advising him to turn himself in has been sent to prison for two and a half years. He undoubtedly deserves prison time, but does he deserve more than a man who stole with such ruthless, methodical cynicism? I would submit not. And he never tried to argue he was above the law. Yes, he could have killed someone, but he didn’t. Yes, he took the right to peaceful protest and stamped all over it, but pretty much every government has done worse in our name.

Like trying to stop people receiving vaccinations against a disease we’re all told to be very very very scared of. Really? What do you want to do? Hang on to the vaccine so people you don’t like won’t get it?

The BBC, the organisation which perhaps represents best the modern attitude of equality, diversity and a whole host of other left wing policies has been found guilty of age discrimination (and in my opinion, were lucky not to be found guilty of sex discrimination as well) in such a fashion that the Guardianistas would have been screaming for blood had it been any other organisation or business in the country. Really? Really? I mean, how? Or is this another case of rules only applying to the little people?

Then to top it all, some complete arsehole has stolen a meerkat from my local wildlife park, a place I am very fond of, because. . . well, why? Why would you steal a meerkat? Lovely little buggers they are, very endearing, and yes they are high profile because of the advertising campaign, but as a house pet? No. That’s not going to work. They are social animals and I should imagine when in distress will make a real mess of someone’s house. I fear that when this becomes apparent in the next couple of days, the poor little sod will end up dead in a dustbin.

What I want to know is this, has the world really gone totally barking? Am I the only sane one about, or is it me that is the nutter? Because I’m having real trouble squaring this circle.

I don’t even know where to start

With this. . .

Parents who smoke in cars in front of small children are “committing a form of child abuse”, a leading GP has said.

Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, has condemned society’s attitudes to food, alcohol and cigarettes.

Why is it so hard for these arseclowns to understand? Police are there to enforce the laws that exist, not to enforce those they wish to see on the statute. Doctors are there to cure people who are ill, not to ban us from doing anything that carries any risk at all.

If these two ever get together, there will be but two laws, the only thing we’ll be allowed to do is sit quietly at a table, with our hands in full view. The second law will be that we wash those hands once every ten minutes.

Thankfully it’ll never happen, they could never get on, the only thing more arrogant and authoritarian than a Doctor is a senior police officer.

The BBC have plenty of form here as well, the willing playground voice of nanny’s decrees. Look at the photo on the article, the message is clear, smoke and your kids will get fat.

Just do your bloody job won’t you? The one you are paid for, handsomely, where you don’t have to work weekends and evenings, (even the police manage that), from money taken from us on pain of prison. Your job is to make people better. Do it.

Would the mechanic complain if he kept seeing the same person every week because they were habitually smacking the wing of the car against the gatepost? No. He’d be delighted. Because he relies on people coming to him for a living. Doctors get their money regardless. They make no connection between the taxes paid and the service given.

Bastards.

The One That Is Amazed. . .

Occasionally, something happens which gives you a renewed sense of faith in humanity. Sometimes people do things that show you despite all the misery, intolerance and interference that the human race specialise in, there is also evidence that we are the most amazing, determined and quite brilliant animals out there.

What am I blithering on about?

I have a friend, the same age as me, and about three years ago her mother suffered a very serious stroke. Just to show the Righteous how wrong they can be, she was a non-smoking, almost teetotal woman of 51 who cycled 4 miles a day in her journey to and from work. She was the very epitome of the health nazi’s model citizen. Fit as a fiddle. It just goes to show you that when life decides to pitch you a curve ball, there’s bugger all you can do about it.

The result of this stroke was that she was immobile, with significantly reduced vision and looking at spending the rest of her life in a care home. She could still communicate, perfectly capable of speech, but was easily confused, tired and without much hope of having even a fraction of the life she had before the event.

After what can only have been a very hard conversation with her kids, she decided to sign the no resus chit in the event of a repeat performance.

On Wednesday morning I received a phone call from my friend who was beside herself. It transpired that her mother had suffered another stroke. She’d been rushed the short distance from her care home to the hospital but there was nothing that could be done. She was breathing for herself, but that was it. Her kidneys had failed, there was absolutely no response to any stimulii or tests and the opinion of the quacks was that given the gap in time between the stroke occuring and her being discovered that the brain was effectively dead and it was just a matter of hours until the other systems shut down.

Because of the no-resus chit, no mechanical or medical assistance was afforded to my friend’s mother beyond some suction to remove the fluid from her airways (nasal and oral discharge had turned from clear to dark red, a sure sign of the fat lady filling her lungs before bursting into song) so her death wasn’t caused by choking/drowning.

The whole family rushed to the bedside, a good deal from hundreds of miles away, to say their goodbyes, and had returned home on Friday evening, secure in the knowledge that the embrace of death was a formality.

At 3am on Saturday, some three days since the stroke and without even a saline drip, my friend’s mother woke up. Although incapable of speech, she could focus on people in the room, squeeze hands and nod or shake her head in response to questions.

At 5pm on Saturday, with my friend’s uncle in the room (having hot-footed it back from up-country with the rest of the clan), my friend’s mother stared at her brother and proclaimed ‘I’m baaaaack! Now go and get me a pint of bloody Stella.’

This woman was written off, had been left to expire with no assistance, at her own request, in a hospital bed with no fluids for at least three days. The family members had said goodbye, her room at the care home had been surrendered. This was, dear reader, curtains.

What point am I making? Well, none really. Beyond that fact is stranger than fiction, if you were to write it as a novel/stage or screenplay it would be spurned for being too fantastical. One further point, never, ever underestimate the human capacity for survival and to prove people wrong. I am not a religious man, but events like this can only be described in terms of miracle.

She’ll never run the London Marathon, but this determination to live and also not to do as one is told is a lesson for us all. Isn’t it also just like a bloody woman to ask for one thing, and then to go and do the exact bloody opposite?

OK one final point, we pay through the nose for our NHS. The nursing staff at the hospital have been magnificent, but, it was fully eight hours between the woman in question waking up and her seeing a doctor. There were simply none on site, in a large hospital on a Saturday morning.

There is no way she can get an assessment of the damage and a prognosis until Monday, because no-one with more than a nursing qualification seems to work on a Sunday. In a fucking hospital.

Don’t worry though, there was a pencil neck wankstain with a clipboard on duty who came out to berate the greiving relatives (this was before the Lazarusesque awakening) for smoking in the open air, fifteen metres away from the nearest person, who tried to take personal details in preparation for prosecution for an offence which doesn’t exist, (vis. smoking in a hospital grounds, or one suspects, in a position where a hospital can be seen, even if you have to use binoculars) and over which he would have no powers of prosecution. They gave him the option of collecting the details, or leaving with his teeth. He chose the latter.

The One That Is Asking Can You Please Stop It? . . .

I’ve been driving around all over the place for work today. I can’t stand commercial radio as it’s all the same four shite songs interspersed with adverts of toe curlingly bad quality. I can’t stand Radio 1 as it’s like commercial radio but without the adverts, that tool Evans is on Radio 2, Radio 3 is so ridiculously worthy and Radio 4 is as dull as ditchwater. So given I didn’t have the foresight to bring my CD’s with me that leaves Radio 5. And it’s been getting right on my wick today.

Two stories it’s been leading with all day have driven me to the edge.

Firstly, they’ve been reporting this story about a report about the number of children being admitted to hospital with preventable diseases such as tooth decay and obesity. Sigh. Well, you remove any meaningful cooking lessons from school for a generation and what did you think was going to happen? All this citzenship guff started creeping in during my last couple of years at school, and that was under the last Tory administration. Indeed I’m certain I did a project in the 5th year (early 90′s) in these extra-curricular yet timetabled lessons called ‘Challenge’ (God help us) about global warming and how we’d all be bollock deep in glacial melt water by the time 2000 came around. Nothing changes.

Anyhow, I digress. These lessons were at the expense of other lessons about how to cook and child development, and PE and useful stuff. This is what happens when you stop teaching and start indoctrinating. Good isn’t it?

So, when I arrived home this afternoon, I was not in the slightest bit surprised to see what the subject of tonight’s Panorama is.

From obesity to alcohol misuse, from rotting baby teeth to hearing problems caused by passive smoking – Britain’s largest children’s hospital is treating younger and younger children for health problems which are ultimately preventable. Many are the result of kids’ lifestyles and are, according to the experts, causing them unnecessary suffering.

BBC Breakfast News and 5 Live have form in this area. Look, arsewipes, it’s perfectly simple, if you are going to do news and current affairs programming, at the least I would expect the news to be reported. I do not expect you to make a programme and then build your news coverage around it. At best this is ethically questionable. I’d complain to them about it, but it would make no difference. The sooner this bunch of leeches lose their public funding the better. Let’s see how much takeup you get on subscription for pretend news, Eastenders, the promotion of Lloyd-Webber’s latest show and celebrities clearing out their lofts and heading off to the bootfairs.

The second story that has annoyed me is this constant whining from CEOP about Facebook not having a panic button. CEOP, which is like an elephant’s graveyard for retired senior coppers even went over to DC to demand, Demand, a panic button on Facebook.

You can already log complaints of inappropriate conduct and content with Facebook, but it doesn’t go to CEOP. You see, an American corporation who generate a huge amount of revenue off the back of advertising on their site have no vested interest in making sure that their users are safe, that their users’ parents are satisfied it is safe, and in making sure that their sponsors are happy to be associated with a safe product.

Any parent who allows their kids uninhibited access to the ‘net is just plain lazy and naive or neglectful, and it is not the place of a corporation to take over parenting duties for them.

Who the hell do CEOP think they are? How would we react if an American ‘law enforcement’ agency came over to London and started brow beating our corporations over how they do business?

Oh. . .

One final point in this ridiculous story. Isn’t it strange how CEOP start stamping their feet and shreiking about how awful this is, and how they are absolutely the only people who can sort this out just as it seems likely that a Labour government is going lose office and herald a round of significant cuts in the public sector?

It would be cynical of me to draw any connection and to point out that CEOP’s record thus far is not entirely glorious.

The One That Knows What’s Next. . .

I forget who it was that said Puritanism was the feeling that someone, somewhere might be having fun.

Fun is bad for our health. That is why smoking has been all but banned everywhere. That is why, with the job pretty much done, that focus has now been shifted to drinking. That’s bad for our health too.

These things are being banned under the suggestion they are bad for us, but really it is because they are fun. To crush our spirit in a grey and grinding distopia, there must be no fun.

What else do Purtians hate? What else is fun? What else can be banned under the guise of being for the good of our health?


Couples should consider sleeping apart for the good of their health and
relationship, say experts.

Ahh yes, that’ll do it.

The next round of heated shot is sat in the fire waiting for the muzzle.

The One That Wants Them To Shut The Hell Up. . .

Cheap deals on alcoholic drinks should be illegal, a new report is proposing, with a call for tighter controls on the marketing of alcohol.

The British Medical Association (BMA) argues young people are highly influenced by advertising and price deals, which encourage them to drink excessively.

It is none of your fucking business. Doctors will moan that cheap booze leads to them doing more medical stuff on people.

It doesn’t. People drinking too much leads to them doing more medical stuff on people. If people didn’t get sick or do silly things they’d all be out of the job that pays them shit loads for not working evenings and weekends and allowing them to play golf four days a fucking week.

What is it about doctors? Why do they think that a 5 year medical degree makes them not just an expert on medicine, but also everything else in the whole fucking world?

This is like an association of mechanics asking for diesel to be banned because people keep putting it in petrol driven vehicles. Would they? No. They may feign sympathy when it happens, but inside a little voice is singing the words to the happy dance. It keeps food on their table.

Perhaps the Licensed Victuallers Association can start complaining about how long waits in A&E are making their customers stay out of pubs longer and that something should be done.

Wind your fucking necks in, shut up, make people better. That’s your job, it is not your job to be our guardians/nannies/camp guards or to make political policy.

Got it?

The One That Is On Tenterhooks. . .

Lord Mandelson has been admitted to hospital to have an operation for a “benign condition of the prostate”, a government spokesman has said.

I wish the Noble Lord a speedy recovery and hope that nothing goes horribly, tragically wrong.

[/sarcasm]

I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the words Mandleson and benign in the same sentence.

UPDATE

A truly stunning bit of Daily Mashesque writing from Mac The Knife. Do go and read it. . .

One of the UK’s best loved tumours has been admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington for urgent surgery to remove a malignant First Secretary of State.