Preventative Medicine
The NHS has been banging on for years about the need to invest more in preventative medicine, that the best use of scarce resources comes from early intervention rather than 'instant cures' at a later date.
For example, promising heavy smokers with a heart and lung transplant or hopeless alcoholics with a new liver when the old one finally packs up.
So what should the priorities of the NHS be these days - ever expanding its range of services to meet people health needs, even when these are arguably self-induced, or through a bit of tough love by insisting that somewhere along the line people have got to find the will power and determination to help themselves.
Rod Liddle writing inThe Sunday Times is in no doubt although he doesn't pull his punches in telling the Quacks to drop their staple guns and the 'Fatties' to take some responsibility for their weight.
Drop the staple gun, Doc, and tell Fatty to grow some willpower
By Rod Liddle - The Sunday Times
It is a great shame that I will probably not be alive in 2050 and, even if I am clinging on, it will be in an even more demented and drooling state than the one in which I reside at present. In any case, by then assisted dying will have become the norm and there are several people who have already volunteered to ease my passage to the afterworld, regardless of whether or not I am ill. I think it’s called pre-emptive assisted dying; a one-way ticket to Switzerland just in case. Off you go, Rod — all for the best.
Missing out on Great Britain in 2050 is a bit of a downer for many reasons — I’d like to read the conclusion of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war, for example, and also find out which light entertainers from today will be revealed to be predatory sexual perverts. I have a list of guesses but have been advised against publishing it.
Mainly, though, it is because 2050 is the year in which the health experts predict that at least 60% of our population will be morbidly obese and I think that will be a humorous scenario — a nation of wheezing blubber mountains waddling from one fast-food shop to the next, occasionally expiring right there on the newly reinforced pavements, still clutching their kebabs.
It is undoubtedly a flaw in my personality, but I have always found fat people funny. Fat people and foreigners. I cannot accustom myself to the notion that it is a disability that has been cruelly imposed on them — being fat, that is, not foreign. It seems to me, in 99% of the cases, that it is something they have imposed on themselves through a combination of gannetry, indolence and stupidity. I realise that this sounds a tad harsh and unfeeling, but I can’t help it.
Sometimes I even go to places where I know there will be lots of fat people and sit on a bench watching them clumping around, sweating and gasping, and snigger to myself.
Sheffield, for example, or Tamworth. In fact, for a vision of Britain in about 2050, you could do worse than take a trip to either of those places — or Sittingbourne or Wolverhampton. The guys there are, curvaceously, way ahead of the curve.
The latest news regarding obesity — which is one of our two obsessions at the moment; the other of course being paedophilia — is that the NHS may be about to spend a vast sum of money offering weight-loss surgery to an extra 1m people.
This is the advice from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which is clearly worried that the NHS does not cost us enough money at the moment and is swamped with cash it doesn’t know what to do with.
So, the range of surgical options for dealing with the unfortunate side effects of being morbidly obese — type 2 diabetes, cardiac problems and so on — will include gastric bands, stapling and sealing up the mouths of the fatties with piano wire. OK, I made up the last one. But it seems a reasonable option to me.
Missing out on Great Britain in 2050 is a bit of a downer for many reasons — I’d like to read the conclusion of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war, for example, and also find out which light entertainers from today will be revealed to be predatory sexual perverts. I have a list of guesses but have been advised against publishing it.
Mainly, though, it is because 2050 is the year in which the health experts predict that at least 60% of our population will be morbidly obese and I think that will be a humorous scenario — a nation of wheezing blubber mountains waddling from one fast-food shop to the next, occasionally expiring right there on the newly reinforced pavements, still clutching their kebabs.
It is undoubtedly a flaw in my personality, but I have always found fat people funny. Fat people and foreigners. I cannot accustom myself to the notion that it is a disability that has been cruelly imposed on them — being fat, that is, not foreign. It seems to me, in 99% of the cases, that it is something they have imposed on themselves through a combination of gannetry, indolence and stupidity. I realise that this sounds a tad harsh and unfeeling, but I can’t help it.
Sometimes I even go to places where I know there will be lots of fat people and sit on a bench watching them clumping around, sweating and gasping, and snigger to myself.
Sheffield, for example, or Tamworth. In fact, for a vision of Britain in about 2050, you could do worse than take a trip to either of those places — or Sittingbourne or Wolverhampton. The guys there are, curvaceously, way ahead of the curve.
The latest news regarding obesity — which is one of our two obsessions at the moment; the other of course being paedophilia — is that the NHS may be about to spend a vast sum of money offering weight-loss surgery to an extra 1m people.
This is the advice from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which is clearly worried that the NHS does not cost us enough money at the moment and is swamped with cash it doesn’t know what to do with.
So, the range of surgical options for dealing with the unfortunate side effects of being morbidly obese — type 2 diabetes, cardiac problems and so on — will include gastric bands, stapling and sealing up the mouths of the fatties with piano wire. OK, I made up the last one. But it seems a reasonable option to me.
The problem is that obesity costs the NHS — and by extension the rest of us — £5bn every year. The legions of the very fat do not drop dead quickly and cheaply, but progress towards the grave with a characteristic (and expensive) languor.
The decision to extend weight-loss surgery to the merely gargantuan, rather than just the monumental, is a sort of white flag of surrender; the more sensible and much cheaper option — which involves telling people that they are horribly overweight and that it’s something they have entirely brought upon themselves and could reverse if they had a soupçon of willpower and that it is in any case not a problem that should be franchised out to the state — is considered politically inexpedient.
Rather than offend people and possibly — Lord have mercy— damage their self-esteem, we prefer to wait until they’re at death’s door and then set about them with a B&Q staple gun. And that’s better, the thinking goes, than making them feel bad about themselves.
World Cup
- So, where’s Ray Whelan, then? Ray is the British boss of the Fifa partner Match, a company specialising in match-day hospitality packages. He was arrested last week by the Brazilian Old Bill for allegedly trying to flog football tickets to an Algerian, which is apparently an offence in Brazil. I’m not sure what they have against Algerians. Anyway, having been released on bail, he absconded and was last seen sneaking out of the Copacabana Palace hotel via a service exit. As a metaphor for England’s general involvement in — and exit from — the World Cup, it couldn’t be much better, could it?
