“When Doctors Go On Strike, Death Rate Falls”

“When doctors go on strike the death rate falls”, according to Professor Robert Mendelsohn, who monitored medical malpractice for the US government for several decades.[1] This is what happened all around the world.

Right now, in the UK, we’ve experienced doctors, nurses, paramedics on strike, all for legitimate reasons. They are overworked and underpaid. But, ultimately, it is isn’t MORE of anything that will ‘solve healthcare’. There is only one solution and that is LESS patients.

This would be remarkably easy to achieve if the P word were taken seriously – prevention. If the true causes of the most resource heavy diseases – diabesity, dementia, cancer, heart disease – were actually addressed the burden on these impoverished health professionals, overworked and underpaid in Britain’s fastest growing, failing business, the NHS, would reduce.

The frustrated resignation of Henry Dimbleby, employed by the UK government to help solve the obesity crisis by tackling junk food, is an example of why nothing will change. The Hewitt report [2] reaches the same conclusion – prevention is the only way. Yet, last week, in the Times, Lord O’Shaugnessy, who is charged with wasting £160 million a year of tax-payers money in the UK government’s ‘dementia mission’, lamented how few UK patients with dementia end up on drug trials which have cost $50 billion to date. He says “The FDA took the decision to grant accelerated approval for the first-ever drug shown to demonstrate signs of slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s.” Last week these drugs were shown to accelerate, not reduce brain shrinkage.[3] Giving these drugs to anyone is, in my opinion, unethical since no actual clinical benefit occurs and a third get brain bleeding and swelling. Nine out of ten FDA experts voted NOT to licence it. One abstained. Three resigned when the drug was approved.

Meanwhile, the UK’s leading prevention scientists have failed for five years to get any funding for the definitive trial combining B vitamins and omega-3, which have been shown to reduce brain shrinkage by two thirds.

References

[1] R. Mendelsohn, Confessions of a Medical Heretic, Contemporary Books, 1976

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-hewitt-review-an-independent-review-of-integrated-care-systems

[3] https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2023/03/24/WNL.0000000000207156