Health

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Is Coffey good for health?

Even though Liz Truss won’t start forming her government until after she has seen the Queen at Balmoral, many of the top roles are already nailed down. The latest dead cert is Thérèse Coffey, who will be Health Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister. The seniority of this role tells us a number of things. One is that Truss wants her strongest supporters close to her. Not only was Coffey pro-Truss from the outset, she is also one of her closest friends in politics. Linking the deputy and health jobs also signals that the new Prime Minister is taking the NHS backlog seriously. It would be a bizarre choice for a

Monday

Sam Leith

We still love our failing NHS

A new poll about the NHS, the Sunday Times tells us, has discovered ‘a decline in support’ for the National Health Service. The story spoke of ‘wide dissatisfaction about the state of the health service’, under the headline: ‘Britain falls out of love with the NHS’. The figures from the poll itself tell a slightly different story. The headline finding was that three people in five are now not confident that they would receive timely treatment were they to fall ill tomorrow. But these three people in five aren’t necessarily saying they’ve ceased to approve of the NHS. It seems to me that they are simply affirming what they’ve read

Thursday

Peter Jones

How the ancients treated gout

Medical problems come and go in the media, and at the moment the flavour of the month appears to be gout (from Latin gutta, a ‘drop’, seeping into a joint). For the Greek doctor Hippocrates, gout (Greek podagra, ‘foot-trap’) was the ‘fiercest, longest and most tenacious of all joint diseases’. But since the ancients did not know that excess uric acid, a natural product of the body, was its cause, their remedies were futile. Pliny the Elder claimed that wet seaweed was the answer. Scribonius Largus was at least original, the first to suggest electrification for medical purposes: he backed torpedo fish (an electric ray) for curing gout (some types

Robert Gore-Langton

Why I donated a kidney to a stranger

One year ago I walked into an operating theatre, dressed in a tiny surgical nightie. Over the next three hours, through various keyhole incisions in my belly, my left kidney was cut from its pillow of protective suet and extracted from below the belt line. The kidney was rinsed through, put on ice and boxed up. It was then zoomed by car from my Bristol hospital to Birmingham, where a surgical team was waiting with a prepped male patient. Over the next few hours, the kidney was plumbed into the groin of a man whose name I still don’t know. He was in his forties and extremely ill. That evening

Rachel Johnson

Yoga has become a hot cultish mess

Ommm… are you in the lotus position? Then I’ll begin. The studio was literally Hades, four industrial heaters blasting in each corner. We were crouching on our knees, sweat dripping, foreheads to the floor. It was a weekday morning. Then our instructor said the six words I can never unhear. ‘Flower your anus to the sky,’ he ordered all the middle-aged WFH men in shorts and yummy mummies in crop tops in this crunchy-granola bit of north-west London. He jutted his rock-hard buns heavenwards as an exemplar of the uttana shishosana pose or, as I prefer to call it, ‘kneeling’. When did the lines blur and yoga become a hot

Sunday

Theodore Dalrymple

How we fell for antidepressants

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By then, of course, this famous neurochemical had become the key to a perfect human existence, too little or too much of it resulting in all the little problems that continue to plague mankind. If only we could get the chemical balance in our brains right, all would be well, life would return to its normal bliss! After the commercialisation of Prozac, people started talking about the chemical balance in their brains in much the same way as they talked about the ingredients of a recipe. As Peter D. Kramer put

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Finally, some justice for the infected blood scandal’s victims

Why has the greatest patient scandal in the history of the NHS rumbled on for so long before its victims even start to see justice? It shouldn’t have taken 40 years for there to be an answer Today the government awarded £100,000 in interim compensation to around 4,000 survivors of the contaminated blood scandal, as recommended by Sir Robert Francis, who published a report on the matter earlier this year. They have been fighting for 40 years for justice that, as yet, does not cover the bereaved parents and children of those who were infected with HIV and Hepatitis C when they were given dirty blood products for their haemophilia

Thursday

Fiona Mountford

The small NHS failings that let down patients like my mother

I would be the first to admit that the NHS has done a lot for my mother this year. It gave her the emergency blood transfusion that undoubtedly saved her life, followed by several iron infusions and umpteen scans and tests. It has treated a series of infected leg ulcers and provided consultations with senior medical figures and countless more outpatient appointments. It has supplied her with swanky new hearing aids and nursed her through Covid. During her four months in hospital, in two separate stays of nine and seven weeks, it came up with three meals a day, not all of them involving ravioli, mash and gravy, and a

Tuesday

Tim Knox

How to fix the NHS

That the NHS is in intensive care appears to be beyond doubt. The health service in England needs 12,000 doctors and 50,000 nurses and midwives, and waiting lists are expected to rise to 9.2 million by March 2024. The question now is what to do. It’s a question that has been asked before, and the answers have been poor. One more heave at reform, a task force here, a task force there, another few billion all over the place and all will be well, so the defenders of the NHS claim. What they overlook, however, is that there have been more than a dozen major reform programmes over the past

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Why I won’t have a Covid booster

In the news recently, we’ve heard from multiple Britons who’ve lost family members or sacrificed their own health to Covid’s not-really-vaccines. But anecdotes lack statistical heft. Sceptical viewers might too easily dismiss individual stories of the harms caused by the biggest inoculation rollout in history as freakish aberrations, mere coincidence (could relatives who happened to have been recently vaccinated really have died from something else?) or put it down to the cost of doing business at scale. An official UK government report recently said that more than 2,200 Britons may have been killed by vaccine-induced injuries, but there’s plenty more hard evidence in governmentally collected databases that these fatalities are

Tuesday

Kate Andrews

There’s little to celebrate on the NHS’s birthday

Birthday celebrations for the NHS this year are relatively quiet. In recent years the health service has received multi-billion pound top-ups from the taxpayer, not to mention high praise from politicians across the political spectrum. This may be in part because the government has already seen to the big NHS pledges, including the 2.5 per cent National Insurance hike, split between workers and employers, which is bringing in roughly £6 billion to pay for Covid catch-up. But no doubt this year’s notable silence is also linked to just how bad that catch-up is going. It’s never been credible to claim the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’; the health

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

The NHS’s disturbing trans guidance for children

Sajid Javid spoke some sense earlier this week when he said that the word ‘woman’ should not be removed from NHS ovarian cancer guidance. The Health Secretary was responding to the revelations that the NHS website had been stripping the word ‘woman’ from its advice pages. But fine words are only a start. The Health Secretary needs to get a grip on an NHS website that seems in thrall to magical thinking on sex and gender. The problem is wider than he might realise. Quite apart from the row over the advice to women seeking advice on cervical cancer and ovarian cancer, the NHS is currently hosting a page entitled,

Wednesday

J. Meirion Thomas

Medical emergency: general practice is broken

In March 2020, as the health service prepared for the first Covid wave, NHS England encouraged GPs to adopt a new system called ‘total triage’. The aim was to reduce the number of patients in clinics in order to protect GPs, their staff and patients themselves from the virus. If patients hoped this system was a temporary, emergency measure, they were wrong. Under ‘total triage’, patients had to provide far more details of their (sometimes sensitive and embarrassing) symptoms to a receptionist or on an e-consultation form. They would then be allocated a telephone consultation with their GP or another health professional such as a nurse, pharmacist or physiotherapist. In

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Monkeypox, Covid and the trouble with our species

I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking back this week through the vast underground vaults at Spectator HQ I see that centuries ago in April 2020 I explained the problem with us humans as a species. As I said back then, someone always shags a monkey. There are almost eight billion of us on this planet today, and the likelihood that we’re all going to make judicious decisions all the time is vanishingly small. The mating decisions of the species alone are notoriously prone to trial and error. And the entire future of our species rides perpetually

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The truth about Britain’s Covid deaths

There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally during the pandemic. The measurement chosen has been ‘excess deaths’ – the difference between the number who died during the pandemic and the number who, on average, died in the same place before the pandemic struck. This has enabled us to compare the British figures with excess deaths across the rest of Europe per 100,000 of the population; and it appears we’re not, after all, at the top of the death-league, but near the middle. Though its methodology has attracted serious criticism, I was struck by the report. But what

Michele Kirsch

The march of the ‘menosplainers’

I think we’ve reached peak menopause. You simply can’t switch on the radio, open a newspaper or watch telly without some fiftysomething media babe banging on about her hot flushes, sudden rages and the feeling of going mad. Davina McCall has just made a whole TV show about it (Sex, Mind and the Menopause), and her book Menopausing is out this month. McCall has likened her symptoms to those felt by people with a brain tumour. Clearly, she has never known anyone with a brain tumour, because those symptoms are a little more significant than simply forgetting where you left your keys, or feeling suddenly hot. I’m not saying there

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

The NHS failing mothers is nothing new

Can Sajid Javid really say, as he did this afternoon in the Commons, that the government is taking action to ensure ‘that no families have to go through the same pain’ experienced by those affected by the biggest maternity scandal in the history of the NHS? The Ockenden inquiry into the maternity services at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust published its final report today, concluding that ‘repeated’ failures in care may have led to the deaths of more than 200 babies, and of nine mothers. The individual stories of stillborn babies, infants severely and sometimes fatally harmed, and women’s pain being dismissed are deeply distressing. What is worse

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Are we falling out of love with the NHS?

Clap for carers now feels like ancient history. Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest since 1997, according to a new study out today. The British Social Attitudes Survey finds overall satisfaction with the health service at just 36 per cent, a record-breaking fall of 17 points since 2020. People often relate to the health service through GPs and their experience of A&E. The latter has experienced a record-breaking 15 point fall, now at 39 per cent satisfaction, its lowest level since the BSA started asking questions about A&E in 1999. It’s worth remembering that in 1997, when public satisfaction with the NHS as a whole was at just 34

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Could the private sector help fix the NHS backlog?

The Conservative plan to tackle the NHS backlog has, so far, run roughly along the lines of the New Labour approach to the hefty waiting lists in the health service at the turn of the century. More money, more flexibility when using the private sector and greater ‘patient choice’ (which in this context translates as patients who’ve been waiting a very long time being able to get treatment in another part of the country where waiting lists aren’t quite so bad). So far, the main difference is that ministers are just shouting a bit less at hospitals (though GPs might argue they are bearing the brunt this time instead) than

Sunday

Professor Gordon Wishart

Britain is facing a cancer care timebomb

As many as 100,000 patients had a cancer that was missed, or had their diagnoses or treatments delayed during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. That’s the shocking finding of a recent study by the Institute of Cancer Policy at King’s College London. The experts conclude that some patients will already have died, many still haven’t been diagnosed and others will already have a more advanced cancer as a result of the delays. And it is likely this figure of 100,000 will continue to rise as more data from 2021 and early 2022 is analysed. In other words, there could not be a more important time to fix cancer care