The DH&SC isn't the NHS. How much of that money went from DH&SC to the NHS, vs to Tory pals selling defective PPE? Or private hospitals?
56,529 karma · joined September 22, 2011
The patient would go to the back of the NHS queue, so I'm not sure how they're jumping anything.
The real problem is that private healthcare over-treats people with unnecessary surgery, and cherrypicks the easy stuff, but dumps patients back into NHS care as soon as they get complex.
People who attempt suicide may be less able to see the situation with calm rationality.
It's always weird when people say "show me the evidence" as if it's a win. You don't know what you're talking about, and now you want me to do extra work for you? No. Maybe do the work before you leap into the conversation.
> People in the US might be particularly troubled to learn that the suicides there have increased by around 40% over the past two decades. Last year, almost 50,000 people in the US took their own life – one death every 11 minutes – and the nation now has one of the highest rates of wealthy, developed countries. (For comparison, the UK suicide rate is around 25% lower than that of the US).
"Last year, almost 50,000 people took their life" -- did they? Or was that the year their death was registered? Did the covid pandemic create a backlog that caused deaths to be registered later?
"the UK rate is around" - but they link to an old release of the data, and it's for England and Wales and does not include Scotland and Northern Ireland.
This paragraph has two links, and compares them. The first link is to "Our world in data" and the second is to the UK's ONS. These count death differently, you cannot directly compare them. In England and Wales the ONS defines suicide as "which includes deaths with an underlying cause of intentional self-harm (ages 10 years and over) and deaths with an underlying cause of event of undetermined intent (ages 15 years and over).", but the CDC's definition does not include that "undetermined intent" bit. In the US suicide definitions require intent to die.
The article then has a bunch of speculation about potential mechanisms for pollution to be causing suicide, and not one mention of poverty.
Do you have any examples please?
People keep saying "airborne" as if that's the only route of transmission, but we know there are three routes - droplets in the eyes, air that you breathe, and fomites that you eat.
Eyes and mouth are significant, and there's some evidence that these are more important than airborne transmission.
The swiss cheese model does not say "use masks, ignore the rest, you'll be okay". It says "here's a package of measures and if you use all of them you reduce the risk".
It's garbage front to back. We elect fucking idiots who are in thrall to a tiny clique of rabidly anti tax arseholes who would rather set their granny on fire than pay any tax at all. And then we wonder why the country is on fire.
World Health Organisation does a bunch of work on safer pesticides because it's so commonly used as a method in lower income countries.
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-12-2020-new-study-highlight...
(Reducing access to means and methods is part of a package of measures that can be used to reduce deaths by suicide, and suicidality. It's important to remember that it's not the only thing being done).
> Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8]
And these two are linked. If most people get their cancer in their 70s, but they're dying of heart attacks in their 50s, anything that stops people dying of heart attacks is going to increase the number of people getting cancer.
Most US road traffic deaths happen in cities and towns. Time to ambo is a factor, but it's not nearly as significant as you say.
> The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
This is a bizarre claim and it is untrue, and evidence free.
> I have certain metrics, that if they occurred, I'd like to be euthanised on the spot, but the govt via the NHS and ambulance service wants to carry on experimenting with me and millions more, like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
Most countries in the world do not allow euthanasia. I'd recommend you look at Advance Directives which is currently the closest you'll get in England. https://compassionindying.org.uk/how-we-can-help/living-will...
What data are you using please?
It's pretty blatant dishonesty to say that healthcare hasn't been defunded, and then only focus on NHS provision of healthcare while ignoring public health, social care, nursing care, etc.
And dentistry is why people in England are scared of changing the model for NHS healthcare, because we see that dentistry is fucking awful for huge numbers of people.
The problem with the NHS is not the model, it's the funding.
A hospital bed is a package that consists of the bed and the long list of stuff needed to support that bed, which includes all the staff (doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, allied health professionals, admin staff, cleaners, porters, food preparation, etc etc) -- and all of these staff are in short supply in England.
> I also really doubt there are many in government or politics who want a US style system.
You might want to read "Britania Unchained" which very much says that they want to dismantle the NHS. There's a bunch of current Conservative politicians who want to effectively dismantle the NHS and implement a US style system. They're very clear about this.
Problems with the NHS are not about the model, they're about the funding. The current government has defunded Public Health, has defunded social care, and has defunded the NHS. They've also made it harder for people to immigrate to the UK. These decisions have caused immense pressure on the NHS.
We already have a Euro-style insurance model for dentistry, and everyone agrees it doesn't work.
IARCs comms strategy isn't great, and science journalism isn't great either.
Don't forget that there are several multi-billion dollar companies who sell aspartame who are vigorously campaigning to promote the safety of their products. It's entirely unsurprising that the data is unclear when you have that level of interference in the research. It's also really tricky to do diet research on humans - we can't lock people up for a year to give them a controlled diet, so we end up asking them to write down what they've eaten and drunk. This means the data researchers have is pretty bad. Looking for a small signal in very noisy data is hard.
Important to remember that IARC just talks about the quality of the evidence, and not the strength of the effect. If they know that something does cause cancer it'll go into group 1, even if it only causes an additional 1 case of cancer per 100,000 population.
The IARC categories (1, 2a, 2b, 3) aren't that confusing, but they do seem to cause a lot of confusion. Here's a short summary I wrote in another place: https://tildes.net/~food/1774/aspartame_may_be_declared_a_po...
> Last year, the N.H.S. announced that it would be shutting down the country’s only youth gender clinic after an external review showed that the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service had been unable to provide appropriate care for the rapidly increasing number of adolescents seeking gender treatments.
The announcement was that Tavistock could not safely provide enough care and that Tavi staff were routinely transphobic, so they're having their contract taken away from them and the NHS is going to open more clinics across the country to meet the need.
I'm submitting this for a few reasons:
1) Moderation teams will also sometimes see this material, and they're often not given adequate support.
2) Tech has a role to play here. Sometimes law enforcement will release censored images and ask "Where does this Tee-shirt come from?", "Do you recognise this hotel room?" There have been apps designed for people who travel a lot who can take photos from standard locations of their hotel rooms. These are then used by law enforcement to identify locations. One example is TraffickCam. http://traffickcam.com/about But all of these feel a bit clunky.
Both involve statistics and probability, and the public (and a surprising number of health care professionals) really struggle with both.
To take your number: a disease exists. There's a test for that disease. The test is good, but not perfect. If you have the disease there is a 99% probability that the test will return "Positive". But if you do not have the disease there is a 10% chance that the test will also return "positive". 4 people in 100,000 people have the disease.
Hypothetical Bob takes the test. The test shows "positive". What is the probability that Bob actually has the disease?
Most of the public, and lots of healthcare providers, cannot even begin to answer this problem. They simply lack the math skill to start to work out what the answer is.
4 people out of 100,000 people have a disease. There is a test for the disease. If you have the disease the test will, 99 times out of 100, say "positive". If you do not have the disease the test will, 10 times out of 100, (100 out of 1,000, 1,000 out of 10,000 or 10,000 out of 100,000) say "negative". Bob has had the test. It said positive. What's the chances he has the disease?
Now people can see that only 4 people in 100,000 have the disease and most of those are going to get a positive result, but also 10,000 people who don't have the disease will also get a positive result.
We'd be overwhelming diagnostic services with people who do not have cancer because our test is terrible.
Of course, all of this changes if Bob has a mole that has changed shape, because the testing converts from a screening test to a diagnostic test.
Colonoscopy is low risk, but not no risk, and there are plenty of people who have a colonoscopy that goes wrong and bamn they're taken for surgery, anaesthetised, have part of their colon removed, and maybe have a (sometimes temporary) stoma fitted. Anaesthesia is not low risk.
Over-testing leads to over-diagnosis which causes over-treatment, and that causes harm.
Is it? There's lots of stuff (including lots of cancers) where finding it early doesn't have much impact on all cause mortality.
> Experts cautioned that the figures were likely to be a serious underestimate as staff are often deterred from making complaints when patients abuse them.
There are something like a million patient contacts every 36 hours in the English NHS. So over 5 years that's something like 1.2billion patient contacts.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/spoken...
Drug companies said that about ketamine, and then they realised they couldn't make much money from ketamine infusions, so they tweaked ketamine to get eskatamine and turned it into a nasal spray. That's patentable and it gives them more money.
The results are pretty poor though.
SSRIs had mind-blowing research, but that was based on very carefully selected test subjects. As soon as it got rolled out to the general population the efficacy drops pretty alarmingly. Some people don't get much benefit from them (SSRIs are a useful, life-saving medication. I am not saying these meds are useless for everyone). See also SNRIs, exercise, etc etc.