The Coalition’s plans to overhaul the NHS are idiotic, but they are also the culmination of a decade of stupid thinking about the National Health Service. The Conservatives plan to get rid of all 10 strategic health authorities and the 152 management bodies known as primary care trusts. In their place, GPs will be asked [...]
I did something different this Saturday. I stood in a freezing park in London and took a deliberate overdose of tablets in the company of some of the UK’s most well known scientists.
No I haven’t joined some kind of doomsday cult. In fact, none of us were ever at any risk. We were overdosing on [...]
Massachusetts was not won by the Republicans, it was lost by Obama
Yesterday’s big news from the far side of the Atlantic was the loss of one of the safest Democratic seats to Scott Brown, a man who represents possibly everything that should make us very worried about the Republicans. In Ted Kennedy’s former seat, which [...]
The Obama administration will be breathing a sigh of relied today as the House of Representatives narrowly approved the President’s flagship health reforms. A battle still remains in the Senate, of course, and amongst the crazed zealots in the country crying ‘freedom’ whilst attempting to deny millions of the poorest Americans the right to basic [...]
Guest post by Chris Girffiths
It’s not been an easy summer for Barack Obama. This month has seen yet more shrieking from the right-wings as he attempts to introduce a ‘radical’ scheme to offer US Government-backed health insurance scheme so the poorest people can get medical treatment. Hardly trying to append “SR” to the “US”, is [...]
Watch how Barney Franks reacts to a woman pushing the Obama=Hitler line.
I was planning to avoid writing about the US healthcare row. A lot of very good stuff has already been written on it, not least on this blog, and I wasn’t sure I had anything to add. But then this article on the Telegraph website caught my eye, and I couldn’t help myself. In case [...]
Whilst I am always in favour of a ‘re-politicising’ of politics, or a reclamation of politics as an ideological entity rather than a form of droll, pseudo-scientific administration, some of the scenes in the USA this week, with Republican Party activists actively promoting a situation which is bordering on civil disorder in protest at Obama’s [...]
As you may or may not have noticed, there’s recently been a series of ads in various places urging us all to give blood. This is because the National Blood Service (NBS) wants us all to donate now so it can boost its stocks before the winter when we’re all going to have swine flu [...]
Today the Observer published an extremely alarming report that Dr Denis Walsh, “one of the countries most influential midwives,” has argued that women should be receiving less pain relief in child-birth, in favour of “yoga, hypnosis, massage, support from their partners, hydrotherapy and birthing pools as natural ways of alleviating their pain.” Walsh mixes up [...]
