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Title: Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections
Source:
U.K. Telegraph
URL Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h ... or-painkilling-injections.html
Published: Aug 02, 2009
Author: Laura Donnelly
Post Date: 2009-10-29 19:05:56 by scrapper2
Keywords: health care rationing, cost savings, patients live in pain
Views: 182
Comments: 15
The Government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known. Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy. Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment. The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million. But the British Pain Society, which represents specialists in the field, has written to NICE calling for the guidelines to be withdrawn after its members warned that they would lead to many patients having to undergo unnecessary and high-risk spinal surgery. Dr Christopher Wells, a leading specialist in pain relief medicine and the founder of the NHS' first specialist pain clinic, said it was "entirely unacceptable" that conventional treatments used by thousands of patients would be stopped. "I don't mind whether some people want to try acupuncture, or osteopathy. What concerns me is that to pay for these treatments, specialist clinics which offer vital services are going to be forced to close, leaving patients in significant pain, with nowhere to go," The NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, including those it recommended. Where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group. But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use. Dr Jonathan Richardson, a consultant pain specialist from Bradford Hospitals Trust, is among more than 50 medics who have written to NICE urging the body to reconsider its decision, which was taken in May. He said: "The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients. It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate." One in three people are estimated to suffer from lower back pain every year, while one in 15 consult their GP about it. Specialists say therapeutic injections using steroids to reduce inflammation and other injections which can deaden nerve endings, can provide months or even years of respite from pain. Experts said that if funding was stopped for the injections, many clinics would also struggle to offer other vital services, such as pain management programmes and psychotherapy which is used to manage chronic pain. Anger among medics has reached such levels that Dr Paul Watson, a physiotherapist who helped draft the guidelines, was last week forced to resign as President of the British Pain Society. Doctors said he had failed to represent their views when the guidelines were drawn up and refused to support the letter by more than 50 of the group's members which called for the guidelines to be withdrawn. In response, NICE chairman Professor Sir Michael Rawlins expressed outrage over the vote that forced Dr Watson from his position, describing the actions of the society as "shameful". He accused pain specialists of refusing to accept that there was insufficient scientific evidence to support their practices. A spokesman for NICE said its guidance did not recommend that injections were stopped for all patients, but only for those who had been in pain for less than a year, where the cause was not known. Iris Watkins, 80 from Appleton, in Cheshire said her life had been "transformed" by the use of therapeutic injections every two years. The pensioner began to suffer back pain in her 70s. Four years ago, despite physiotherapy treatment and the use of medication, she had reached a stage where she could barely walk. "It was horrendous, I was spending hours lying on the sofa, or in bed, I couldn't spend a whole evening out. I was referred to a specialist, who decided to give me a set of injections. The difference was tremendous", Within days, she was able to return to her old life, gardening, caring for her husband Herbert, and enjoying social occasions. "I just felt fabulous – almost immediately, there was not a twinge. I only had an injection every two years, but it really has transformed my life; if I couldn't have them I would be in despair".
Poster Comment: This UK socialized medical health care is positively YUMMY! "...Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment. The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million..."
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#1. To: Destro (#0)
(Edited)
This is the stuff that scares me about government health care. Stories like this are posted on this site at least once a week. Now you may say that health insurance companies do the same thing, which may or may not be true. However, when an insurance company does it, you have a recourse - the courts. However, what recourse do yo have when it is the government itself doing the denying and the government itself who gets to decide who can and cannot sue them in court?
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." ~ William Colby, Director, CIA 1973–1976 The purpose of the legal system is to protect the elites from the wrath of those they plunder.- Elliott Jackalope "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." - Frederic Bastiat
A) Private insurance routinely denies coverage = they make money by denying coverage as much as possible as a business model. B) The court resource as a last resort is the exact same statement someone made to me was made on Libertypost so that means this is something some political lobby group put out there as a talking point which filters down through talk show hosts and online forums and blogs. Let us hope you don't die before your court case comes up and if you can afford to hire a lawyer as you struggle to pay for medicine or the medical procedure out of pocket. I don't know who feeds this info to the GOP base (Sean Hannity?) but in Europe where I live for part of the time 90% of European countries have a private national healthcare system - the employer and the employee both pay for insurance with govt oversight. England is an all socialist model - France and Germany are not. This may shock some people but the Brits are not the model of Europe. The only reason I can think of that the UK is brought up is because it serves as a boogie man for those against the Obama plan which at his point is a hybrid private/public plan.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
Who "feeds" this info???? Destro, do you deny this article is based on FACT? Are you saying this article is some TALL TALE fabricated by goper agents in league with Sean Hannity? Are you suggesting that this article is a part of a "vast right wing conspiracy?" What's your game, Destro, or are you just an uninformed moron, who refuses to take off the blinders from his eyes, to face reality?
I'll bet two-fiddy that non-white/non-indigenous "residents" will get all the pain killers they need to keep them from rioting.
_________________________________________________________________________ Who "feeds" this info???? I was commenting on the can't sue the govt for health insurance claim like you could a private entity. The exact same scenario was used on another forum site so when two different posters mention it then it had to have filtered down to them from a talking head source. Scrapper, poor reading comprehension skills on your part since I was not commenting on the specifics of this article but rather the claim that the reason why private is better than public is you can't sue the public. I thought conservatives were against lawsuits anyway?
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
The game is Destro is a rat: Destro: "The host site at http://www.inetebiz.com/ will soon act on the fact LP is a hate site, uses perveerted language and images and members advocating the violent overthrow of the government, promoting racism, etc. No ISP that would want to be associated with that." 63. To: Destro (#40) Destro: "I am getting this website banned from public access computers like in libraries because of it." A Pole: "Do you mean that I will lose my library access to LP? "
And if you don't believe that countries with socialized medicine do the exact same thing then you are uninformed. The question is why do you feel it's OK for the government to do it but not private insurers. B) The court resource as a last resort is the exact same statement someone made to me was made on Libertypost so that means this is something some political lobby group put out there as a talking point which filters down through talk show hosts and online forums and blogs. Let us hope you don't die before your court case comes up and if you can afford to hire a lawyer as you struggle to pay for medicine or the medical procedure out of pocket. I don't know who feeds this info to the GOP base (Sean Hannity?) but in Europe where I live for part of the time 90% of European countries have a private national healthcare system - the employer and the employee both pay for insurance with govt oversight. England is an all socialist model - France and Germany are not. This may shock some people but the Brits are not the model of Europe. The only reason I can think of that the UK is brought up is because it serves as a boogie man for those against the Obama plan which at his point is a hybrid private/public plan. I try and have a polite conversation with you and give you an example of the things that worry me about Obamacare you insult me? Fuck you asshole. I do not listen to Sean Vanity, nor Rush Limpballs, nor any other talk radio show. I have never been a member of the GOP and the only Republicrat I have ever voted for was Ron Paul. I do not get talking points from anyone you insufferable prick. As for your problem with the court system, it's a damn site better chance than you'll get when the government makes its decree. Oh that's right, I forgot, it's OK if the government denies you coverage because government servants are naturally selfless individuals with only the people's good in mind. LOLOL! As for your claim of living in Europe for much of the year (on your parents dime I bet), I'm not impressed. Being that I grew up in a military family and spent 15 years in the US Army, the first 33 years of my life were spent living in either Europe, Asia or the United States. I don't need to be lectured by you about Europe. I also spent the first 33 years of my life personally experiencing American style government run health care. The reason the British system, as well as Canadian system are used as examples is because those are the health care systems the media shoves in our faces as being the ultimate utopia. We already have British and Canadian style systems in the form of Medicare, yet NO ONE is happy with Medicare. We also have military medicine as an example, and I've never met anyone, retired or active duty, who were happy with the military health care system or the VA system. The problems with the American health care system is a matter of pure economics - bad economics. Since WWII Americans have depended upon private insurance and payments from state and federal agencies to make payments that at one time would have (and should be) paid by individuals. This has driven up the demand for medical care because people are going to the doctor for the smallest of reasons, thus driving up prices. It's called supply and demand. You are probably unfamiliar with that term since you central planning collectivists believe that you make your own reality. Now add into the equation the fact that doctors must cover their asses by ordering tests they know are unnecessary in order to protect themselves from being sued if one of their patients is stricken with some one in a million rare disease. Another problem is that the government is doing the bidding of the AMA by restricting entry into the field of medicine by not having enough medical schools. For instance, the University of Missouri School of Medicine only accepts 96 students per year. Just a little investigation will show that these small numbers are the rule, not the exception. Once again, it's all a matter of supply and demand. The lower the number of people in the field of medicine, the higher the wages of those in the medical field. Of course we cannot forget governmental "Certificates of Need" which restrict the number of allowable medical facilities, as well as medical equipment. Once again, a problem with supply and demand. Pure economics. There are dozens of more problems with health care that are strictly problems of economics that have been either created or exacerbated by government intervention. Yet instead of fixing these problems, your answer is to increase them exponentially by having the government intervene even more. Yeah, you're a real fucking Einstein aren't you. Re to malaka! Instead of relying on American and European big government talking points, you should try and do a little research on the matter. For instance, you could research the history of collusion between the AMA and federal and state governments, specifically how both derailed the successful health care model of private organizations like the Knights of Columbus or the Lion's Club providing health care services for their members as well as the poor. In the early 20th century there were literally hundred of these organizations throughout the country. The again, you government worshipers just cannot imagine a world in which governments did involve themselves into every aspect of your lives. One last thing, a simple Google search proves your lie that the French System is the be all to end all Utopian health care system you want to portray it as.
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." ~ William Colby, Director, CIA 1973–1976 The purpose of the legal system is to protect the elites from the wrath of those they plunder.- Elliott Jackalope "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." - Frederic Bastiat
Why should I trust a private entity that makes money by denying me service as much as possible. I did mot insult you and I apologize if it sounded that way.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
http://exiledonline.com/get-sterilized-or-die-fertile-wombs-also-a-pre-existing- condition/ Get Sterilized Or Die: Insurance Company Tells Mother Her Fertile Womb Is “A Pre-Existing Condition” Just when you thought you’d seen all the health-insurance evil possible, now comes another shocker: a UnitedHealth subsidiary in Colorado denied coverage to Peggy Robertson, mother of two, because she wasn’t sterilized after her caesarian-section delivery procedure, according to a letter made public. Almost 1/3 of all deliveries are done by c-section–meaning that in Colorado and likely elsewhere, fertile women are regularly denied coverage unless they agree to sterilize their wombs. This comes after reports that a health insurance company considered rape to also be a “pre-existing condition.” The meaning is clear: America’s health insurance industry hates us all, and they hate fertile women most of all, if only because they represent two detestable Americans in one body.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
Calling people rats is what the mafia does. Let the "reich-wing" reap the whirlwind. Let it be hanged by its own words and behavior.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
If what you say is true, how are we any better off with the Dems' "reform" health care plan? Private insurance companies are still in the picture and I've read that even the "public option" will be administered by private insurance.
I am shocked you ask me that......you mean you are still one of those that thinks there is a marked difference between the two parties? Really? http://exiledonline.com/get-sterilized-or-die-fertile-wombs-also-a-pre-existing- %20condition/ In the letter, UnitedHealth’s Colorado subsidiary tells Robertson that normally they would simply waive coverage on her womb for a period of three years following a c-section, but since Colorado banned pre-existing waivers, poor UnitedHealth had no choice but to deny the mother of two coverage of any sort [full letter below, hat tip to eXiled Online reader Tyler]: In order to consider coverage without a rider, we require certain requirements to be met. One requirement is that some form of sterilization has occurred since the caesarian section delivery. Also, women age 40 or over, who had their last child two or more years prior to applying for coverage, will not require a rider. The letter was dated 2007–that same year, UnitedHealth profits rose to over $4 billion, on earnings of over $70 billion, pushing the company’s Fortune 500 ranking up to number 21 from 37 in 2006. 2007 was an interesting year for UnitedHealth on a lot of fronts: the SEC slapped a $468 million fine on the CEO, William McGuire, who created the UnitedHealth monster, for stock option fraud. That may sound like a serious punishment until you realize that UnitedHealth gave McGuire a golden parachute retirement package worth $1.8 billion–on top of his 9-figure annual pay packages.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
Miltitary Hellthcare is Great! If you have a bird shitting on your collar or higher. Otherwise it's get in line sucker.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
Why are you dodging my question? You stated previously: "The meaning is clear: America’s health insurance industry hates us all, and they hate fertile women most of all, if only because they represent two detestable Americans in one body." a. You demonize private insurance companies. b. You promote the Dems' "reform" plan. When I ask how is it that you like the Dems' "reform" plan when it still involves private companies, even in the "public option", you punt with a cryptic response about the Dems and GOP being similar. What does that have to do with my question?
Learn to read. I did not state a thing - the line is from the article. And you are damn right I damn the private insurance companies and the Dems suck but they are better then the Republicans who gave us Bush for 8 years and were offering up McCain and Sarah Palin as the new wave and whose base is composed of idiot tea baggers and birther kooks.
"We have oil. We have Putin - all that Russians think they need." - Vladimir Dubin, senior researcher at the Moscow-based Levada Centre.
#2. To: Hayek Fan (#1)
(Edited)
Stories like this are posted on this site at least once a week. Now you may say that health insurance companies do the same thing, which may or may not be true. However, when an insurance company does it, you have a recourse - the courts. However, what recourse do yo have when it is the government itself doing the denying and the government itself who gets to decide who can and cannot sue them in court?
#3. To: Destro, Hayek Fan (#2)
(Edited)
I don't know who feeds this info to the GOP base (Sean Hannity?)
#4. To: scrapper2 (#0)
"This man is Jesus,” shouted one man, spilling his Guinness as Barack Obama began his inaugural address. “When will he come to Kenya to save us?”
-Schweizerische Schuetzenzeitung (Swiss Shooting Federation) April, 1941
#5. To: scrapper2, Hayek Fan (#3)
I don't know who feeds this info to the GOP base (Sean Hannity?)
#6. To: scrapper2 (#3)
What's your game, Destro, or are you just an uninformed moron, who refuses to take off the blinders from his eyes, to face reality?
#7. To: Destro (#2)
A) Private insurance routinely denies coverage = they make money by denying coverage as much as possible as a business model.
#8. To: Hayek Fan (#7)
And if you don't believe that countries with socialized medicine do the exact same thing then you are uninformed. The question is why do you feel it's OK for the government to do it but not private insurers.
#9. To: Hayek Fan, scrapper2, randge (#1)
This is the stuff that scares me about government health care. Stories like this are posted on this site at least once a week. Now you may say that health insurance companies do the same thing, which may or may not be true.
#10. To: randge (#6)
The game is Destro is a rat:
#11. To: Destro (#9)
The meaning is clear: America’s health insurance industry hates us all, and they hate fertile women most of all, if only because they represent two detestable Americans in one body.
#12. To: scrapper2 (#11)
If what you say is true, how are we any better off with the Dems' "reform" health care plan?
#13. To: Hayek Fan (#7)
We already have British and Canadian style systems in the form of Medicare, yet NO ONE is happy with Medicare. We also have military medicine as an example, and I've never met anyone, retired or active duty, who were happy with the military health care system or the VA system.
#14. To: Destro (#12)
am shocked you ask me that......you mean you are still one of those that thinks there is a marked difference between the two parties? Really?
#15. To: scrapper2 (#14)
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