Hospitals aren’t safe for the sick
July 21, 2023 by Doctor Vernon Coleman
Before the industrial age hospitals were built like cathedrals in order to lift the soul and ease the mind. Hospitals were decorated with carvings, works of art, flowers and perfumes. Modern hospitals are built with no regard for the spirit, eye or soul. They are bare, more like prisons than temples, designed to concentrate the mind on pain, fear and death. Where there are windows they are positioned in such a way that patients can’t see out of them (though even if they could they probably wouldn’t be able to see anything more enthralling than the refuse bins or the air conditioning units). If there are windows with good views then those windows will be on the sides of offices occupied by bureaucrats. The most highly paid bureaucrats get the best views.
But patients aren’t just in danger because hospitals are badly designed and badly run.
One of the reasons why hospitals are no longer suitable for sick people is the fact that ambitious, modern nurses want to administer rather than nurse.
In the dark old days nurses were hired and trained to nurse. Aspiring nurses (mostly but not exclusively female) were inspired by the desire to tend and to heal. Nursing was a noble profession. Caring was the key word. The most powerful jobs in the profession were occupied by ward sisters and matrons — all of whom still had close, daily contact with patients.
Sadly, today’s career structure means that nurses whose desire to nurse is accompanied by even the slightest ambition must quickly move up the ladder to a point where they spend very little time with patients. Many senior nurses now spend their days closeted in their offices, staring at computer screens and filling in assessment forms. Many seem to regard themselves as above what they see as the menial tasks of nursing. They leave the hands-on work to untrained staff. The introduction of degrees for nurses has made things even worse by turning a fundamentally practical profession into one with entirely spurious academic ambitions. The modern career structure for nurses has taken the best nurses away from patients. The drive for this career structure was driven by a patronising and entirely inaccurate concept: that nursing is demeaning.
Today, many nurses go into the profession attracted not by the desire to tend the sick but by the salaries, perks, authority and career structure which will, they know, take them away from practical work. The system is designed to attract exactly the wrong people into nursing.
The actual hands-on nursing is done, very largely, by junior staff.
This is, without a doubt, one of the reasons why modern hospitals are so bad and it is the reason why serious hospital infections are now endemic; it is why nurses are too often rude and uncaring to patients and why, in so many hospitals, clusters of nurses are more likely to be found having meetings (more appropriately called coffee-breaks) than actually helping patients. It is, for example, why thousands of elderly patients are left in pain, left to starve to death, left to die of dehydration, left in soiled bedclothes and left, ignored and without dignity, while nurses complete their paperwork.
Time and time again patients report that nurses won’t lift them up the bed (it has been reported that some hospitals have posters with the slogan ‘Nurses are not weightlifters’ on their walls), won’t help feed them, won’t bring bedpans, won’t change beds, won’t do anything for patients in pain or distress and won’t respond when the call button is pressed. They will not, in short, do any of the things that nurses are traditionally supposed to do. They are not interested in soothing or healing or helping because, even at quite junior levels, they have become career administrators with ambitions.
In many hospitals it is the patients who can get out of bed who end up doing all the nursing work.
Stop a nurse in a modern hospital and ask her where such and such a patient can be found, or how he or she is progressing, and you will probably be met with a glazed, disinterested look. They don’t know and they don’t much care. You need to be strong and healthy to survive a hospital stay.
Betrayal of Trust
20TH JULY 2023 by Dr. Vernon Coleman
I have just republished my book Betrayal of Trust – which was first published in 1994. Among many other things, the book explains why doctors do more harm than good, why four out of ten patients given drugs suffer side effects and why one in six hospital patients have been made ill by doctors. The book also reports that 85% of medical procedures are a gamble and that only 1% of journal articles are scientifically sound. And the book names 50 drugs which cause serious health problems in animals but which doctors happily prescribe for humans (proving that animal experiments are ignored by drug companies and doctors and are entirely useless). Below is the preface which I wrote especially for the new edition of this book.
Preface to the 2023 edition
My first book, The Medicine Men, grew out of articles which I wrote for the Daily Telegraph in the early 1970s and described the unhealthy relationship which existed then (and still exists) between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. Two years later I followed The Medicine Men with a second book called Paper Doctors in which I described how the medical research industry had sold out to the drug industry and was betraying patients.
Both those books were widely praised in the national press, receiving fulsome reviews in most major newspapers and magazines. I continued the theme with other books, notably with The Health Scandal which was published in 1988.
Betrayal of Trust, grew out of a small book entitled Why doctors do more harm than good which was published in 1993. I don’t have a copy of that small book in my possession (it was self-published and I printed over 10,000 copies) and there don’t seem to be any for sale on the internet.
I wrote Betrayal of Trust without a contract and sent it off to my literary agent and thence to a number of publishers who had published my earlier books. None of them would touch it for legal reasons. In other words they were all terrified that if they had it printed they might receive one or more lawsuits for libel. Even when I offered to indemnify them they were still not prepared to take the risk. And so I published it myself. It was the first non-fiction book that I published and it did far better than I expected. To my astonishment the first print run of 10,000 hard back copies sold out quite quickly and was followed with another printing of the hardback edition and then a large paperback edition. For a privately published non-fiction book with a very specialist market these were astonishing figures and, I think, just went to show just how many people wanted to understand the extent of the corruption within the medical profession.
Betrayal of Trust has been out of print for well over a quarter of a century and I decided that it was time to bring it back to life. I haven’t changed a word because I think it still stands as a valuable record of how medicine has deteriorated under the control of the pharmaceutical industry.
The public trust doctors. But the public has been betrayed. Doctors trust drug companies. But that trust has also been betrayed.
Betrayal of Trust showed just how corrupt the medical establishment and the drug industry had become by the mid 1990s. Anyone who read ‘Betrayal of Trust’ in 1994 would have known how bad things were and how patients were being abused both by the profession and the drug industry. Medicine in the 1990s was all about money.
The sad thing is that the corruption has got worse, rather than better. Today, everything is worse than it was in the 1990s. And those who should have done something to end the corruption have done nothing to stop it. Doctors, politicians, academics and journalists should all hang their heads in shame.
The only thing that has changed is that today I am lied about, demonised and attacked even more than I was a quarter of a century ago. No one in authority wants the truth to be exposed.
Oh, and one other thing. You can rest assured that everything in this book is absolutely true. Despite the revelations in Betrayal of Trust I was never sued by any of the companies or individuals mentioned in the book. And the one thing we can be sure of is that if there had been just one error anywhere in this book my letter box would have been filled with writs.
Application Form for a Job with the BBC
20TH JULY 2023 by Dr. Vernon Coleman
I have managed to obtain an application form for those who would like to work for the BBC. As you might expect the form is very simple – all you have to do is to read the questions and decide whether your answer is YES or NO. Add up the number of times you answer YES.
Do you ride a bicycle and have a camera fitted to your helmet?
Are you a communist?
Have you had at least three covid-19 jabs?
Are you a good liar?
Would you describe yourself as either illiterate or innumerate or both? (If you have difficulties with the question just answer YES.)
Is it your ambition to hobnob with famous people in Davos and Wimbledon in the same year?
Do you love the European Union?
Were you devastated by the result of the Brexit vote?
Do people who know you well describe you as a snotty bugger with no sense of humour?
Do you spend at least four hours a week arranging your recycling?
Do you believe that the earth is flat and that if you travel too far you will fall off the edge?
Would you betray friends and family for a pat on the head from the Director General and/or Gary Lineker?
Has anyone ever complained that you are a sex pest?
Would you describe BBC superstars Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile as heroes?
Do you believe that it is important to suppress truths if they might upset very powerful people?
Do you think Bill Gates is a hero?
Is your IQ under 100?
Do you think you are better than ordinary people?
If you saw someone parking illegally would you telephone the police straight away?
Do you think old people are a nuisance especially if they are white and English?
Now add up all the times you’ve answered YES.
If you have answered YES to all the questions you would make a wonderful BBC employee and you can count on being accepted straight away. Just write to the Director General and tell him when you can start.
If you answered NO to ANY of the questions please look carefully at your answers and try to work out how you can improve your attitude and suitability for a career with the BBC.