Professional Theft – PIP Breast Implants
It has been reported that Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS medical director has looked in to the sub-standard breast implants supplied by French company PIP and has said that despite their double-than-normal failure rate, they did not appear to be linked with increased levels of cancer.
It would appear that where the NHS is concerned, the organisation has offered to remove any implants it made, but the problem in England lies with the 95 % of women, who had the operation done privately.
I’ll give an example here. Suppose I had taken my Jaguar to an approved dealer after the air-conditioning pump had failed and it had been replaced by a sub-standard import, non-approved part. If I’d have noticed this, I’d have asked the dealer to replace it with the approved part at no charge and I suspect that Jaguar would have backed up my demand.
The NHS seems to be fulfilling its similar obligations, but many private clinics seem to be washing their hands of the whole thing. Surely, to use a sub-standard part and probably charge for the kosher one is theft. I call this professional theft, where the customer is milked by a professional, who should know better.
And when the report from Professor Keogh doesn’t take a robust attitude to those of his profession, who didn’t put the best interest of the patients first and insist they replace the offending implants, some might think he is putting the doctors before the patients.
In my view these women should have their implants removed and replaced and those done outside the NHS, should be paid for by the skimping clinics and doctors involved.
Who’s Eating All The Pies?
And it would appear everything else!
Accordiung to a report on BBC Breakfast Time, a third of the obese people in the world, live in North America. But only six percent of the world’s population live there!
I think that the answer is a no brainer!
Doing Cancer Research
Was this lady doing cancer research, by having a quick cough and a drag outside Cancer Research UK?
Doing Cancer Research
I think smokers are one of the reasons why people prefer shopping malls.
Memories of Euro 2004
2004 is the only time since 1966, that I’ve been in a country that has won a major tournament. C and I were actually staying at a place called Sani at the top of the Haldikiki peninsular in Greece. It had just opened and I think C had got a very good deal through a travel magazine. It was very much worth it.
Everybody in the hotel, in addition to their own teams, were cheering on Greece and most were surprised when they won the tournament.
Perhaps one of the biggest memories of that holiday was a long walk down the coastal path for perhaps ten kilometres stopping at the various bars and hotels on the way. One turned out to be a holiday camp, that was very much a Teutonic version of Maplins from Hi de Hi! A bell would ring every twenty minutes or so for a strenuous keep fit session. Judging by the laughs from the bar we were in, the Germans found it funny too! We finally ended up in a fish restaurant on the beachside, before taking a bus home.
C was strangely uninhibited that holiday and did a lot of things she wouldn’t normally do. One was to sleep in very late in the morning, rather than get up early for her daily swim. She went down with breast cancer in October of that year from which she fully recovered. Perhaps her body was telling her something and trying to get her in the mood for the struggles to come. I will never know. The only other fsctor, was that she had just done a very harrowing child care case and perhaps she was wiping it out of her mind.
How to Cut Down Strokes and Their Effects
The more I learn about strokes the more I know that the one I had in Hong Kong might well have been avoided.
my stroke was caused by atrial fibrillation. This was detected hen I had a small stroke in March 2010. I now feel that I should have been put on Warfarin, but why the doctors didn’t take this route, I do not not know. Could it be that my previous surgery in Suffolk, wouldn’t use a simple hand-held instrument, but still relied on expensive weekly blood tests? I don’t know, but having been on a system based on a machine since moving to London, I can honestly say that the the system is better from a patient’s point of view. My previous cardiologist, who has an International reputation assured me that if I kept my Warfarin regime, I would not have another stroke.
I am now under the care of University College Hospital in London. I happened to tell the nurse doing my electro-cardiogram there, that twenty or so years ago, I had had one that missed a beat in a flying medical. She said that that should have been followed up as it was indicative of atrial fibrillation. Instead over the past twenty years, I’ve had the odd cholesterol and blood pressure tests and that is about all.
It strikes me that, if I had had a proper heart medical, twenty years ago, then my stroke might have been avoided.
But I didn’t even see a cardiologist after my first stroke.
It strikes me that GPs either need to be better trained with regard to heart problems or less reluctant to refer patients to cardiologists.
I was also lucky in that I had my major stroke in Hong Kong.
There I was given a drip of a clot-busting drug, that provably mitigated my lasting problems. It is common place in some countries and regions of the UK. A BBC London report, showed that it saved money against conventional treatment, by avoiding lots of expensive after care. Additionally, in London, you are always taken to a specialist stroke unit.
So it does look like things are improving in the treatment of strokes.
Pharmaceutical Packaging
If ever there was something that was almost designed to cause mistakes, it is the packaging for pharmaceutical drugs.
The first thing, I do, when I open a packet of drugs is to throw the leaflet in the middle away, as it gets totally in the way, when you want to put a half-used strip back in the box.
I don’t find the bubble packs difficult, but I know some do. But one of the drugs I have, has some bubbles that don’t contain drugs and these could easily cause confusion with someone with limited vision.
Incidentally, I never read the leaflets, supplied with drugs, preferring to read about the drug on the Internet on an appropriate web site. So why doesn’t each drug packet have an easily readable code on it, that you just type into a web site and it gives you everything you could want to know, including the various generic names. One of my drugs comes in two different shapes and sizes, which could easily cause confusion.
The system is a complete mess.
Incidentally, I have to take two groups of drugs; one when I get up and one in the evening. I take them out of the silly bubble packs and put everything I need into old 35mm. film canisters; white for the morning and black for the evening. Usually, I fill the morning one as I go to bed, so that it gets checked again in the morning when I take it. I do the evening one after breakfast and always keep a second set in my coat, so that if I get delayed and stay out, I have my drugs with me. I also have reminders set in Outlook in my computer about when I should take my drugs.
Smoking is so last century: the new stigma is obesity
This is the title of an article in the Evening Standard tonight.
I very much agree, although in many ways they are equally bad.
Two Years On
It is now over two years since I had the stroke in Hong Kong and as you know I’ve now moved to London. So how have I improved in the last year? I’ll intersperse the comments into a copy of last year’s post.
So how am I feeling?
Bodily, I have few issues.
My nails used to be firm and hard, but now they are soft and brittle. My toenails are actually worse than my fingers. My nails were always soft before I went gluten-free and I used to bite them badly and my skin too. I’m not biting them now at all.
My nails went bad at the start of the year and aren’t too bad now. If my left hand wasn’t gammy, they would be better as I could cut them properly.
Q 1. Could it be that as my body is repairing itself from the stroke, it’s using up what I need for healthy nails?
I never got an answer to this question, except that this house has a very dry atmosphere. But they were bad soon after the stroke.
I have an almost cramp-like pain in my left lower leg, which is very like the pain I got, when I trod on a razor shell on the beach in Norfolk in the summer of 2009. It tends to get worse at night.
I still have this, but it certainly doesn’t get worse at night. I think also it’s true to say that I’ve had this problem off and on for ten years or so. Sometimes I get it in the right leg, but not at the moment.
My left humerus is also painful a lot of the time at the same place where it was broken by a bully at school. I think as the nerves for my arm and hand pass close to the bone, it affects them at times.
This is still the case and no-one listens except my physio. But then he’s paid to listen.
I did have pain at the end of my spine, but now that has virtually gone unless I sit on the wrong sort of chair. This again was an old injury, which was very much aggravated by the hospital bed in Hong Kong. I should say that I always sleep face down because of the end of my spine, which curls outwards and I get less cramp in my lower leg, which I’ve always had since a child. I can still feel the cold lino, which I used to put my foot on to cure it.
It’s almost as if my old physical problems have come back!
Q. 2 Does your brain develop new pathways to get round the pain from injuries?
I think now, that’s taken as the case.
Facially, I haven’t too much pain, but my scalp and left hand side are rather tender. My skin actually feels like it did at times before I went on a gluten-free diet before I was diagnosed as a coeliac. One of my main symptoms of coeliac disease was chronic dandruff. It went immediately, I changed to a totally gluten-free diet.
It’s come back with a vengeance this winter and I put it down to the hot dry air in the house. I’ve installed air-conditioning to hopefully kill it.
In fact, at some times, I feel like I’ve been glutened. Not seriously, but my motions are rather loose nearly all the time. Full tests at Addenbrooke’s have shown that there is nothing serious there, although I haven’t had another endoscopy to see what my gut is like.
I still do.
I have just re-read a post on this blog, which was a pain diary, describing how I was trying to control the terrible pain I was having last summer, with codeine and paracetamol. It wasn’t that successful and a few days later or so, I collapsed and ended up in Addenbrooke’s. Nothing was done and I just struggled on. And then a few weeks later, I ended up having a fit like symptom, when I was putting on my coat. I can remember feeling a bolt of pain in my humerus and then I went into oscillation. It’s funny, but I may remember something similar happening, just after I broke the bone, as I walked home from school. Addenbrooke’s put me on Keppra to stop it happening again. It hasn’t.
But I did collapse again.
Q.5 Should I keep taking the Keppra?
I’ve changed to Tegretol.
Because of the pain and because it felt like someone was pouring awful muck down my throat, I went to see an ENT specialist to see if my sinuses were bad.
He found everything clear, but thought that I was suffering from a serious pollen allergy. Now as a child, I was very sickly and was always off school. In my first year at Grammar School I virtually missed all the second term. Gradually it got better and it really improved when first we went to live on the 11th floor in the Barbican and later when I started flying aircraft for pleasure.
I’ve also had some bad winters and springs before, but not as bad as this one, when for much of the time, I just couldn’t breathe. Although in the last twenty years or so, I’ve lived on top of a hill with a strong westerly wind and my late wife and I could afford to take holidays in the sun in January. Funnily, my cardiologist,said that everybody should take two weeks in the sun every winter. I did try to do this in April by going to Greece and backpacking around the islands, but was irritated by everyone smoking all the time.
I know from travelling around the UK in the last year, that when I get out of the pollen I feel better. For instance, I went to Barnsley in March on a breezy day to see the football and felt a lot better that day. On the other hand, I walked past a tree-shredding machine at Euston a couple of weeks ago and it set me off coughing for half-an-hour.
Q.6 So why should all of this reaction to allergens get so much worse after the stroke?
On the other hand, in 2009, I was travelling to Holland a lot in the spring and suffered worse than I had done for years. I put it down to different pollens at different times. It was almost as if I got used to the English ones and then when I went to Holland, a load of different ones set me off.
Some days it’s so bad that all I can do is lie down indoors and listen to the radio. On the other hand, when I went down the London sewers, it helped my breathing immensely.
I do this less often, than I used to.
So how am I managing otherwise.
I have no problem getting around on buses and trains and of course by walking. I did fall over on a bad pavement in Upper Street in March, but haven’t hardly stumbled since, especially since I was fitted properly for a pair of trainers. I have no problems using the top decks of buses and climbing up and down ladders.
I like cooking and do quite a bit, although, as there are now so many Carluccio’s with a gluten-free menu, I am lazy quite a bit of the time.
I do eat a lot of soft comfort food, like bananas and ginger cake between meals. But my weight is still the same as it was five or six years ago.
My only problem with cooking is that my left hand diesn’t seem to like hot or cold, although the finger movement is now almost back to normal. I notice this most with my typing, where although I type mainly one-handed, I now use the left properly for the shift. Incidentally, I’ve always typed with my right hand, because of my bad left arm.
My eyesight to the left isn’t good, but in the last month or so, I’ve been able to play table tennis again, something that I couldn’t do a year ago. On the other hand, it does seem to be worst, when my eyes are streaming from the allergies.
Not really much change here, except that my nose seems to leak like a drain. My eyes are a bit better.
Vandalism In The Service of Ignorance
The title of this post comes from a phrase, describing the protestors, in the third leader of The Times, which defends the work at Rothamsted to create a strain of wheat , which has a natural repellant effect to pests, by crossing it with mint using gentic engineering,
Genetic engineering is a touchy subject to many, but properly used it should benefit mankind. The aim of the Rothampsted experiment is to produce a strain of wheat that uses less pesticides.
On the other hand, I would be against genetic engineering, that produced wheat with the so-called terminator gene, that meant farmers couldn’t use some of this year’s crop for next year.
There are now drugs coming on the market, that have been created by genetic engineering using plants or hens’ eggs as a starting point. Would these protestors stop this process as well? If I suffered from a disease, where the drug could be produced by genetic engineering, I would not be happy.
As I said, provided that the purpose of creating the organism by genetic engineering has a moral purpose, I can see no reason to ban it.
I’m also a coeliac, which is a minor genetic disease. I suspect a few decades down the line, they’ll be able to correct the faulty genes in babies by some clever genetic modification.
The New Leicester Square Emerges
Leicester Square is an iconic place and I took some pictures as it completed its transformation on Thursday.
Note that two pictures, show the old Royal Dental Hospital, which is now a hotel and the sandwich bar, where my mother used to take me as a treat after a visit.
The Anonymous Widower 