On Easter Monday with a still dramatically swollen, overheated and badly discoloured right hand (the one I fell on 3 April), I got the bus over the bridge to a small private hospital. Everything was done. The helpful and tactful Iraqi woman doctor checked the price of the package before doing it, and I saw the trauma/hand specialist the following day.
No, not the NHS . My choice. Yes, more than I wanted to spend but better value investing in health. Worth it.
So this is an advance apology for an abbreviated piece. Can’t ask too much too soon of a fractured thumb.
And I have a separate question which has never been asked.
As the striking junior (now known as resident) doctors enter their 15th strike in 3 years,
and it is clear that apart from money, they have concerns about the way the NHS is run – structure, systems, etc., – is there any legal reason why they cannot practice outside the NHS ?
I keep waiting for a group to announce “Right, we’re gong to call ourselves Practical Medicine and work directly for a scale of fees as of this date.”
No love lost for China but the initiative of the barefoot doctors
– look it up – under Mao’s revolution, captured my imagination. (Especially on reading that half the people who go to A&E don’t need to be there.) In the Chinese experience, I am sure there were great mistakes – China is indifferent to the wastage of human life through famine or accident – but I am equally sure that great good was done in the back doubles of that enormous territory by doctors with basic skills.
This country is nothing like so big but the numbers now using the NHS are enormous.
And I don’t want to read another thing about plastic surgery. I worked for a plastic surgeon before the extraordinary social development which made people think that a different nose
or bosom or bottom would improve matters.
I am all for making the best of yourself. Have seen men and women transformed by the right haircut but my life changed when the man I worked for refused to touch my nose. “It’s in perfect proportion” he said. “Leave it alone” … and he made me gown up and watch a rhinoplasty so that he could explain it to me.
Well, here am I – not the Charlie’s Angels model ie three pretty woman of roughly 80 trying to be 50 forever which is a show biz thing. I am not in show business or the image business or any other business but the business of living which for all its various and several complications, I still love.
And I love writing annalog – though perhaps this week, not quite so much.
Annalog 