Women More Likely To Die After Heart Attack
March 17, 2010
WebMD
By: Charlene Laino
Better heart treatment of women could help close the gender gap in heart deaths. Women would be more likely to survive a heart attack if they were treated more like men, French researchers say.
In a study of more than 3,500 people admitted to the hospital for a heart attack, women were far less likely than men to get angiography to visualize heart artery blockages or angioplasty to open up blocked arteries.
Women were about twice as likely to die within a month of having the heart attack, according to the study, presented at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting.
The higher death rate in women “is related to the fact that they don’t get the same treatments as men,” says Maria Rosa Costanzo, MD, an American Heart Association spokeswoman who was not involved with the study.
“If women had the same access to procedures and medication as men, they would derive the same benefit,” says Costanzo, of Midwest Heart Specialists in Naperville, Ill.
Study researcher Francois Schiele, MD, chief cardiologist at the University Hospital of Besancon in France, says that when possible, “women should be treated with all recommended strategies, including invasive ones.”
Closing the Gender Gap
Costanzo tells WebMD that it’s been known for some time that women fare worse after a heart attack than men, but it’s been unclear why. Some studies point to biological differences such as women’s smaller blood vessels that raise the risk of complications during angioplasty, she says.
Also, women tend to be older and have poorer overall health when they have heart attacks, and wait longer to seek medical care than men, research suggests.
But other studies suggest that women are undertreated, Costanzo says.
The new study attempted to level the playing ground by using statistical techniques that took into account women’s and men’s different characteristics and treatments when they had heart attacks.
The researchers analyzed data from a regional registry that included more than 3,500 patients, about a third of whom were women, treated for a heart attack between January 2006 and December 2007.
Women were, on average, nine years older than men, had more health problems, and received fewer effective treatments for heart attack. They were nearly twice as likely to die, both during the initial hospital stay and over the following month.
When the analysis was adjusted to take into account the differences in the women’s ages, blood pressure, kidney function, and other characteristics as well as the treatments they received, there was no difference in death rates, either in the hospital or at 30 days.
“Once they compared apples to apples, it shows women get the same benefit from [procedures to open blocked arteries] and medication as men,” Costanzo says.
Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and Sanofi-Aventis helped fund the registry.
Click here for the full report.
Over a Million Patients in the U.K. Addicted to Pain Killers
March 16, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Approximately 1.5 million people in the United Kingdom are addicted to prescription or over-the-counter drugs, many of which were legally acquired.
In July, the Department of Health launched a review of the problem, after the House of Commons All-Party Group on Drug Misuse called for greater awareness, better doctor training and more treatment options.
Although medical guidelines discourage doctors from prescribing benzodiazepine tranquilizers such as Valium for more than four weeks at a time, many patients still become addicted.
“There are still lots and lots of patients being put on these drugs and kept on them for a long time,” said Pam Armstrong of the Council for Information on Tranquillizers and Antidepressants. “I have some sympathy with [doctors] — they get a lot of pressure from patients who want these drugs. But the problem has been ignored.”
Other highly addictive drugs include sleeping pills and narcotic painkillers. A recent study found that painkillers containing codeine can be addictive within as little as three days.
The increasing prevalence of Internet pharmacies has made prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse an increasingly popular alternative to the abuse of wholly banned drugs.
Yet not all addicts intended to abuse drugs. The Telegraph cites the case of one man who was placed on an antidepressant and a benzodiazepine in 2001, and remained on them for the next seven years. When increasing fatigue led him to attempt to quit “cold turkey” under hospital supervision, the results were devastating.
“In two days I was a train wreck. I felt I had woken up in a horror film, I couldn’t walk or think and I had lost my memory. It was indescribable torture,” he said.
Nine months later, he is still unable to work.
“I am still terrified of going outside, I can’t think straight or concentrate and I have very bad depression,” he said. “I have seen several doctors since and they cannot believe my doctor kept me on these drugs for seven years.”
Click here for the full report.
New Jersey Mom Aspires to be World’s Fattest Woman
March 16, 2010
Fox News
Meet Donna Simpson. She’s going to cost you. A lot.
Simpson, of Old Bridge, N.J., is 42 years old, has two kids and a boyfriend, and she weighs 602 pounds. That’s right … 602 pounds.
She’s on a diet, of course, because she has a goal in mind:
She wants to weigh 1,000 pounds.
That’s right … 1,000 pounds. It’s a nice, extra-round figure — almost as big as what her unhealthy choices will ultimately cost taxpayers.
Simpson claims she is normal and healthy, and she has a right to eat what she wants and weigh what she wants.
“I love eating and people love watching me eat,” she says. “It makes people happy, and I’m not harming anyone.”
But she needs to use a motor scooter when she goes grocery shopping, because she can’t walk more than 20 feet. The human body, after all, is not designed to scarf down 12,000 calories a day in the quest to weigh half a ton.
Simpson is definitely harming someone — herself, says Dr. Carla Wolper, a registered dietitian and research faculty member at the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.
And you, the taxpayer, could wind up paying for it.
“We don’t know her medical history, but one of the most dangerous health issues she faces is an increased risk of sudden death from having a heart attack due to electrical problems in the heart,” Wolper said.
Other possible causes of death for Simpson include stroke, immobility, breathing problems, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and inflammation of heart tissue. Each year, nearly 300,000 Americans die from heart failure.
Simpson, experts say, is putting herself at risk for all these medical conditions, and those conditions have a hefty pricetag.
“The baseline cost for someone like to go to the emergency room is $993 for one visit,” Daniel Emmer, public relations manager of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest health insurance provider in New Jersey, told FOXNews.com.
Simpson’s main source of income to support herself financially is by appearing on a Web site where men pay to watch videos of her gorging on food and showing off her hundreds of pounds of extra bulge in a bikini.
But it’s anyone’s guess whether her revenue from Web videos will cover the cost of her inevitable health risks.
“Someone with diabetes costs $11,744 more per year to provide health care, which is twice as much as the average person,” Emmer said.
It is unclear what type of insurance Simpson has, if any. But there is no question that whatever her health care position is, it could come at a high cost.
“Obesity causes a minimum $1,429 increase, or 42 percent in medical costs,” Emmer said. “Research shows lifestyle choices and behaviors drive 87.5 percent of the cost for health care claims.”
“When people are very, very overweight, they are at an increased risk for a condition called prolonged QT syndrome,” Wolper told FoxNews.com.
Prolonged QT syndrome is a heart rhythm disorder that can potentially cause fast, chaotic heartbeats, the Mayo Clinic says on its Web site. In some cases, the heart may beat erratically for so long that it can cause sudden death.
“Another problem this woman faces is related to the circulatory system,” Wolper said. “When people are that big, circulation is often impaired in the legs. This can cause blood to pool in the legs leading to formation of blood clots. This leaves morbidly obese people at an increased risk for a pulmonary embolism.”
A pulmonary embolism occurs when one or more arteries in the lungs become blocked. In most cases, pulmonary embolism is caused by blood clots that travel to your lungs from another part of your body — most commonly, your legs, according to the Mayo Clinic. One of the major risk factors is excess weight, which increases the risk of blood clots, especially in women who smoke or have high blood pressure.
“The work of the heart is tremendously increased when someone is that big because there’s so much more blood in the body,” Wolper said. “When this happens, the heart has to pump against the pressure of all that fat that is pressing against the blood vessels, and as a result the heart enlarges, and not in a good way.”
As Simpson’s appetite increases, so will the cost of health care for the severe medical conditions that she is likely to have — conditions that are preventable by healthier lifestyle choices. Whereas her $750-a-week grocery bill is merely gastronomical, her hospital bills will be astronomical — and the taxpayers of New Jersey may well have to pay her tab.
Meanwhile, in her effort to boldly go where no woman has gone before, Simpson says she tries to stay sedentary, so she burns as few calories as necessary.
She consumes five times more than the recommended daily calories for a woman her age.
“My favorite food is sushi. But unlike others I can sit and eat 70 big pieces of sushi in one go,” she told the Daily Mail.
“I do love cakes and sweet things, doughnuts are my favorite.”
The current record for fattest woman is held by a woman also from New Jersey, who weighed an unbelievable 1,800 pounds when she died in 2008. She was 49 years old.
Simpson is proud of the Guinness World Record she holds now for the world’s fattest mother, and her boyfriend is proud of her too.
Philippe, 49, supports her thousand-pound goal, even if that is nearly seven times his own weight of 150 pounds.
“I think he’d like it if I was bigger,” Simpson said. “He’s a real belly man, and completely supports me.”
Someday, the experts say, we all may support her.
Click here for the full report.
Erectile Dysfunction May Predict Heart Risk
March 16, 2010
Los Angeles Times
By Thomas H. Maugh II
For the first time, researchers have shown that erectile dysfunction is a strong predictor of the likelihood that men will die of heart disease.
Men who suffer from the problem, which some consider more an emotional than a physical issue, are twice as likely to succumb to cardiovascular disease or heart attacks as those who do not have the problem, German researchers reported Monday in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Assn.
Researchers have known for years that there is a link between erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated as ED, and heart disease, said Dr. Sahil Parikh, an interventional cardiologist from University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland who was not involved in the study. “But now there is pretty clear evidence that there is a substantially increased risk of heart attack and death when patients have erectile dysfunction.”
The results are probably not too surprising, added Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, “because arteries in the penis are smaller, so atherosclerosis shows up there sooner,” perhaps three to four years before the onset of cardiovascular disease.
The take-home message, both experts said, is that when a patient seeks treatment for ED, typically from a general practitioner, he should be given a full physical work-up to look for heart disease and referred to a cardiologist.
“When they are treated aggressively early, we can prevent heart attacks and stroke and they can have many years added to their lives,” Parikh said.
Existing guidelines for treating men with ED from the Princeton Consensus Conference already state that “a man with ED and no cardiac symptoms is a cardiac (or vascular) patient until proven otherwise.” Kloner, a coauthor of those guidelines, said that when the guidelines are updated this year, they will probably carry a stronger recommendation that a patient presenting with ED get a cardiovascular examination.
Dr. Michael Bohm, a cardiologist at Germany’s Saarland University, and his colleagues studied 1,519 men from 13 countries who were involved in a study of two drugs to treat cardiovascular disease. The men were also queried about their ED at the beginning of the study, two years into it and at the end at five years. A full 55% of the men had ED at the beginning of the trial, nearly double the normal incidence of about 30% in the population at large.
The team reported that, in the five years of follow-up, men with ED were 1.9 times as likely to die from heart disease, twice as likely to have a heart attack, 1.2 times as likely to be hospitalized for heart failure and 1.1 times more likely to have a stroke. The risks increased with the severity of the ED.
Disappointingly, the two drugs tested in the study, ramipril and telmisartan, did not improve the course of the ED.
That’s not surprising, said Dr. Peter Pelikan, a cardiologist at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, “because it takes years and years and years to get any resorption of cholesterol” that would reduce blockage of the penile arteries. “The study was too small and too short to see that.”
Many men with ED see a general practitioner or a urologist to get treatment and are prescribed drugs like Viagra or Cialis, Bohm said in a statement. “The drug works and the patient doesn’t show up any more. These men are being treated for ED, but not the underlying cardiovascular disease. A whole segment of men is being placed at risk.”
Click here for the full report.
The True Price of Health Care Spending
March 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
The U.S. healthcare system loses between $505 and $850 billion a year to mistakes, inefficiency and fraud, according to a report by Thomson Reuters. This amounts to one-third of all national healthcare spending.
“America’s healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars,” the report says.
According to the report, unnecessary medical procedures and treatments — including antibiotic overuse and superfluous tests — account for 37 percent of all wasted spending, $200 to $300 billion per year. Fraud — including false Medicare claims and kickbacks for referrals or prescriptions — accounts for another 22 percent, as much as $200 billion a year. Medical errors are responsible for 11 percent of excess spending, or $50 to $100 billion yearly. Preventable health problems, such as diabetes, cost the healthcare system $30 to $50 billion per year.
One of the easiest areas to repair might be administrative inefficiency, which accounts for a full 18 percent of medical overspending.
“The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada,” the report says. “American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada.”
Administrative inefficiency can also lead to other wasteful practices.
“It is waste when caregivers duplicate tests because results recorded in a patient’s record with one provider are not available to another or when medical staff provides inappropriate treatment because relevant history of previous treatment cannot be accessed,” the report says.
Although the United States has the highest per capita healthcare spending and spends a higher proportion of its GDP on healthcare than any other nation in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (a group of predominantly high income Western democracies), it has the highest rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and neonatal death in the developed world, as well as the unhealthiest population.
Click here for the full report
CDC Panel Calls for Flu Vaccine for All
February 26, 2010
The Washington Post
By Mike Stobbe
A government panel is now recommending that virtually all Americans get a flu shot each year, starting this fall.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had gradually been expanding its recommendation for flu shots – 85 percent of Americans were already included.
On Wednesday, the panel voted to recommend a seasonal flu vaccination for everyone except babies younger than 6 months and those with egg allergies or other unusual conditions.
The panel’s recommendation now goes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC usually follows the panel’s advice and spreads the message to doctors and hospitals across the country.
“Now no one should say ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’” said Dr. Anthony Fiore, a CDC flu specialist.
CDC vaccination recommendations tend to be influential with the doctors who give the shots and the health insurers who pay for them.
Flu shots are already recommended for 85 percent of the U.S. public, including pregnant women, children older than 6 months, adults 50 and older, people with certain chronic health conditions, health care workers and those who take care of people in a recommended group. The only people who weren’t specifically included were healthy people ages 19 to 49 who don’t have close contact with anyone at risk of flu and its complications.
But only about 33 percent of Americans actually get a flu shot, and unusually millions and millions of doses get thrown away annually.
The swine flu pandemic that hit last year caused a new momentum for flu vaccinations. Virtually all the 114 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine doses made were distributed, and more young adults and children got the swine flu vaccine than usually come out for seasonal flu.
The panel voted 11 to 0 – with one abstention – for the recommendation, prompting a short round of applause in the CDC auditorium where the meeting was held. Some public health experts and physicians had been pushing for a universal flu vaccination recommendation for more than 10 years.
Also on Wednesday, the panel gave its nod to a proposed formulation of next year’s seasonal flu vaccine. The vaccine will be built to protect against three strains of flu scientists think will be circulating next fall and winter. Swine flu is to be one of the strains incorporated into the vaccine.
At past meetings, the panel stopped short of recommending flu shots for everyone. Panel members were mindful of a history of temporary flu vaccine shortages in the United States. They worried a universal recommendation might cause demand to far surpass supply and endanger those at the highest risk of life-threatening flu complications.
Click here for the full report
Scandal Over Death at Hospital – None Blamed
February 26, 2010
Mail Online
By Fay Schlesinger, Andy Dolan, and Tim Shipman
Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.
Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.
But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction.
Indeed, some have either retired on lucrative pensions or have swiftly found new jobs.
Former chief executive Martin Yeates, who has since left with a £1million pension pot, six months’ salary and a reported £400,000 payoff, did not even give evidence to the inquiry which detailed the scale of the scandal yesterday.
He was said to be medically unfit to do so, though he sent some information to chairman Robert Francis through his solicitor.
The devastating-report into the Stafford Hospital-shambles’ laid waste to Labour’s decade-long obsession with box-ticking and league tables.
The independent inquiry headed by Robert Francis QC found the safety of sick and dying patients was ‘routinely neglected’. Others were subjected to ‘ inhumane treatment’, ‘bullying’, ‘abuse’ and ‘rudeness’.
The shocking estimated death toll, three times the previous figure of 400, has prompted calls for a full public inquiry.
Bosses at the Trust – officially an ‘elite’ NHS institution – were condemned for their fixation with cutting waiting times to hit Labour targets and leaving neglected patients to die.
But after a probe that was controversially held in secret, not a single individual has been publicly blamed.
The inquiry found that:
• Patients were left unwashed in their own filth for up to a month as nurses ignored their requests to use the toilet or change their sheets;
• Four members of one family. including a new-born baby girl. died within 18 months after of blunders at the hospital;
• Medics discharged patients hastily out of fear they risked being sacked for delaying;
• Wards were left filthy with blood, discarded needles and used dressings while bullying managers made whistleblowers too frightened to come forward.
Last night the General Medical Council announced it was investigating several doctors. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is investigating at least one nurse and is considering other cases.
Ministers suggested the report highlighted a dreadful ‘local’ scandal, but its overall conclusions are a blistering condemnation of Labour’s approach to the NHS.
It found that hospital were so preoccupied with saving money and pursuit of elite foundation trust status that they ‘lost sight of its fundamental responsibility to provide safe care’.
Health Secretary Andy Burnham accepted 18 recommendations from Mr Francis and immediately announced plans for a new inquiry, to be held in public, into how Department of Health and NHS regulators failed to spot the disaster.
But Julie Bailey, head of the campaign group Cure the NHS, condemned his response as ‘outrageous’ and backed Tory and Liberal Democrat demands for a full public inquiry into what went wrong.
Tory leader David Cameron said: ‘We need openness, clarity and transparency to stop this happening again.’ Gordon Brown described the scandal as a ‘completely unacceptable management failure’ and revealed that the cases of 300 patients are now under investigation.
He told MPs the Government was belatedly working on plans to ’strike off’ hospital managers responsible for failures. The hospital could also lose its cherished foundation status.
Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said ‘These awful events show how badly Labour has let down NHS patients. It should never again be possible for managers to put a tick in a box marked “target met” while patients are pushed off to a ward and left to die.’
The Francis probe was launched following a Healthcare Commission report on Stafford Hospital in March last year. It found that deaths at the hospital were 27 to 45 per cent higher than normal, meaning some 400 to 1,200 people died unnecessarily between 2005 and 2008.
Click here for the full report
More Over-Radiated Cancer Patients
February 26, 2010
The New York Times
By Walt Bogdanich and Rebecca R. Ruiz
A hospital in Missouri said Wednesday that it had overradiated 76 patients, the vast majority with brain cancer, during a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been set up incorrectly even with a representative of the manufacturer watching as it was done.
The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, said half of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment — stereotactic radiation therapy — were overdosed by about 50 percent after an unidentified medical physicist at the hospital miscalibrated the new equipment and routine checks over the next five years failed to catch the error.
The revelation comes at a time of growing concern about safety procedures for a new generation of powerful, computer-controlled medical radiation equipment.
Stereotactic therapy delivers radiation in such high doses that usually only one treatment is required. It is commonly used to treat small tumors in the head, which must be firmly stabilized, allowing radiation to be delivered to a precise location.
The error was discovered in September 2009 only after a second physicist received training on the equipment, made by BrainLAB, and the hospital began questioning whether the machine had been installed correctly in 2004, in a process called commissioning.
The overdoses at CoxHealth occurred in a state where there is little or no government oversight of radiation therapy, a fact that Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s president and chief executive, chose to emphasize.
On Wednesday, he released a letter that he wrote to the Food and Drug Administration, saying that its recent decision to toughen oversight of diagnostic radiation did not go far enough.
“The initiative should be broadened to include regulation of medical radiation therapy as well,” he wrote. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country. Without increased regulation and oversight, these instances of medical overradiation will likely continue.”
The hospital promised to work with state legislators on ways to better regulate radiation therapy.
Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result from radiation errors when basic safety rules are not followed. It also found that in a variety of ways, the pace of technology had outpaced the ability of the medical profession and regulators to keep up.
The overdoses in Springfield echoed what occurred at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., where a similar commissioning error resulted in 77 brain cancer patients’ receiving 50 percent more radiation than prescribed in 2004 and 2005. The failure of medical facilities to properly commission new radiological equipment was cited as a concern last November by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.
A testing service for institutions participating in National Cancer Institute trials recommends that certain newly installed radiotherapy equipment undergo an external, independent review before patients are treated. That did not occur at either Moffitt or CoxHealth.
CoxHealth said that so far it had not found any patients who had been harmed beyond the complications of routine radiation therapy. But patients are still being contacted. Some patients, who were seriously ill, have died, and the hospital is looking into those cases.
“The review of their charts and situation is still ongoing,” said Dr. John Duff, senior vice president for hospital operations. “It would be premature to speculate whether the overexposure was a contributing factor to their death.”
Dr. Duff said he did not know why the BrainLAB employee who was present while the new equipment was being installed had not caught the mistake. He said that the hospital did not have any reports from BrainLAB indicating a problem.
The physicist who incorrectly installed the equipment no longer works at the hospital. Officials there declined to explain the circumstances of his departure.
“It’s unacceptable to us that an error like this occurred, and we are taking steps to make sure that an error like this doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Bezanson said.
The hospital said its stereotactic system “remains suspended indefinitely while we are auditing the entire program.”
Kate Franco, a spokeswoman for BrainLAB, issued a statement Wednesday that said the company had assisted CoxHealth in figuring out what went wrong. “Reviews determined that BrainLAB equipment performed as designed and did not malfunction,” the statement said.
Click here for the full report
Many Cancer Patients Over Radiated
February 26, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
One of the advantages of natural medicine is that if you make a mistake on your dosage, it’s usually no big deal because natural medicine is inherently safe. But conventional medicine, with all its toxic chemotherapy poisons and irradiation machines, can be fatal even when simple mistakes are made. Numerous patients have already been killed by miscalibrated chemotherapy pumps that drip poison in to the bodies of patients. And now there’s news from Springfield Missouri where an actively-used brain cancer irradiation machine has been miscalibrated since 2004.
Oops. Gee, didn’t anyone wonder why the burn marks were so severe and patients were losing brain function so rapidly?
Oh, wait. I forgot: Nobody noticed because losing cognitive function is a “normal” side effect of conventional cancer treatments. Harming patients in the cancer industry is now so routine that nobody even notices it anymore!
Nobody bothered to check the machine
The facts of this case are a bit frightening because this could happen anywhere, in any hospital: For the last five years, patients undergoing brain irradiation treatments have been over-exposed to very high levels of radiation. The radiation machine at the CoxHealth hospital in Springfield, Missouri was apparently never calibrated correctly. The incompetent technicians who set up the machine (who probably lost their own brain function as a result of being around so many miscalibrated radiation machines) apparently never bothered to configure it correctly. They just used the default setting the machine came with, which happened to be the “Fry my brain” setting.
Now here’s the really scary part: The massive radiation overdose problem was only discovered when the hospital trained a new physician on the machine. They were apparently going over all the settings and functions of the machine when the new doctor asked something like, “Hey, why is this dosage knob turned all the way up to ‘Hiroshima’?”
Hospital administrators scratched their heads (after which clumps of hair fell out) and then began to realize something was wrong. “This might explain all the severe radiation burns on patients skulls…”
Oops.
So what, exactly, do you do in a case like this? Do you call all the brain cancer patients who suffered radiation burns and a loss of cognitive function and say, “Um, we’re really sorry that we fried your brain because we were too stupid to configure the radiation machine correctly…”
Or do you just hope no one notices because cancer patients are too frightened to know the difference between “treatment” and a radiological assault?
I have a solution to this problem
This accidental irradiation overdose issue is a huge problem all across the country. Radiation machines are often miscalibrated, and there’s virtually no oversight by anyone. Hospitals can openly operate miscalibrated machines for years on end without anyone doing a single thing to stop them.
But I have a simple, highly-effective solution to this problem: Just require cancer doctors to irradiate their own brains using the machines before treating patients. If such a rule were enforced, I’ll bet you that all of a sudden those machines would be correctly calibrated.
Naturopathic physicians, by the way, aren’t afraid to take the same medicine they’re about to prescribe to patients. You need these anti-viral herbs? I’ll take some too just to show you how safe they are, see? No big deal.
But conventional cancer doctors would never inject themselves with chemotherapy or stick their heads under an operating radiotherapy machine. You know why? Because those treatments are dangerous! That’s why they’re reserved solely for patients. Only the patients get poisoned and irradiated.
Why do you think radiology technicians flee the room before they fire up their machines on patients? They flee the room because they don’t want to be anywhere near that radiation!
Cancer doctors aren’t very bright about curing cancer, but they are smart enough to figure out that radiation = cancer. Which makes it all the more hilarious that they use radiation to treat cancer, huh?
Click here for the full report
British Hospital Causes ‘Unimaginable Suffering’ To Patients
February 26, 2010
Times Online
By David Rose
Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.
An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.
The inquiry report, published yesterday by Robert Francis, QC, included proposals for tough new regulations that could lead to managers at failing NHS trusts being struck off.
Staff shortages at Stafford Hospital meant that patients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal. Many staff did their best but the attitude of some nurses “left a lot to be desired”.
The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused. Regulators said last year that between 400 and 1,200 more patients than expected may have died at the hospital from 2005 to 2008.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said there could be “no excuses” for the failures and added that the board that presided over the scandal had been replaced. An undisclosed number of doctors and at least one nurse are being investigated by the General Medical Council and Nursing and Midwifery Council.
Mr. Burnham said it was a “longstanding anomaly” that the NHS did not have a robust way of regulating managers or banning them from working, as it does with doctors or nurses. “We must end the situation where a senior NHS manager who has failed in one job can simply move to another elsewhere,” he added. “This is not acceptable to the public and not conducive to promoting accountability and high professional standards.”
A system of professional accreditation for senior managers would be considered and the Mid Staffordshire trust might lose its foundation status.
Some NHS chief executives have received six-figure redundancy packages or moved to other trusts despite poor performance. Martin Yeates, the former chief executive at Mid Staffordshire, received pay rises that took his annual salary to £180,000, while standards at the trust deteriorated.
The Liberal Democrats claimed that he had also received a payoff of more than £400,000 after stepping down last March, though Mr Burnham said he had received “no more than his contractual entitlement”.
The Care Quality Commission, the NHS regulator, said that the trust under its new management was now “safe to provide services”. But it still had concerns about staffing, patient welfare, the availability and suitability of equipment at the trust, and how it monitored and dealt with complaints. The inquiry made 18 recommendations for the trust and the wider health service, which the Government accepted in full. They include a new review of how regulators and regional health authorities monitor NHS hospitals and a report on “early-warning systems” to identify failing trusts.
But the families of those who died or suffered poor care branded the inquiry a “whitewash” and repeated calls for a full public investigation. The Conservatives accused ministers of trying to blame managers rather than taking responsibility for problems with national targets.
Julie Bailey, who founded the victims’ campaign group Cure the NHS after her mother died at Stafford Hospital, said that the handling of the scandal was disgraceful and unacceptable.
“It is time that the public were told the truth about the very large number of excess deaths in NHS care and the very large number of avoidable but deadly errors that occur every day.”
The NHS Confederation, which represents health trusts, said: “The responsibility for the way this hospital was run rests with its board, management and staff but, as the report says, the framework of targets, regulatory systems and policy priorities it worked within are also very important.”
Click here for the full report
