A message to Dr Crippen, Dr Rant and Tom Reynolds

I visit your blogs every day.

I respect your opinions of the service, the National Health Service, to which you are contracted in one way or another.

I assume you contracted yourselves with the NHS because you believed in the principles of the NHS.

Kezia, my daughter, is being treated tor Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia under the NHS. She is receiving superb treatment.

To hear your stories distresses me when there are obviously sections of the NHS that are functioning as they should. But your posts on the defects in the NHS, (of which I myself am critical), should neither stop you blogging on the NHS, nor criticising the NHS, nor, deity forbid, stop working for the NHS.

Dr Crippen - you disappear for months. Tom and Dr Rant - you seem 100% depressed.

Please don't do this to us - we need you.

Medical Update and more

I haven't given my regular readers, those concerned with Kezia's health and progress, an update for some time now ... why? Because there is nothing to report. Her neutrophil counts go up and down as they should do. When they go below a certain level, she comes off the IV methotrexate and mercapturine and when they recover, she goes back on them. The Dexamethasone trip occurs once a month and I (and others) have described (all too often) how shitty that is. No crises, everything routine. The cancer routine.

So what's new?

Dr Crippen reported last week on NICE's choice of the two Human Papillomavirus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, that will be offered and administered to teenage females throughout the world to prevent cervical cancer. However, in the UK it seems, contrary to the rest of the world, NICE has chosen Cervarix that protects against less strains of cervical cancer and does not protect against genital warts. Why? Because it's cheaper, of course. Oh, and even though boys can spread around HPV and develop genital warts (which in their turn can spread HPV), there are no plans to extend HPV vaccination to boys (as I reported here - come on Dr Crippen, don't you ever read me?).

Dr Rant reports that top surgeon and health minister Lord Darzi, on whom the Department of Health is depending to push through its National Health Service reforms, found time to appear on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on Sunday. For our non-UK readers Desert Island Discs is a weekly radio programme that has been running for decades whereby a famous personality is requested to select ten pieces of music s/he would take with her/him if s/he were to be abandoned on a Desert Island + three other items.

Perhaps, 50% of Lord Darzi's musical choice I was in agreement with ... but his choice of a pencil and notepad seriously lacked a pencil-sharperner ... or perhaps even a knife - then he could perform surgery as well as sharpen his pencil.

Oh ... and we are honoured to have been added to Dr Rant's list of links.

Clinton and Obama

Drs Crippen and Rant often quote or cite the Devil´s Kitchen and Wat Tyler in their critiques of the UK National Health Service and the last and current Prime Ministers' handling of government health policy.

Both the Devil´s Kitchen and Wat Tyler seem to be at the Conservative end of our British (English) political spectrum. They also have many well-informed arguments so when Drs Crippen and Rant guide me there, I visit. They are the intellectual faces of Conservative thinking. And although I link them to on this post, their political viewpoint seems to be anathema to my own and I will not be linking on the right.

I have occasionally worried about the political leanings of Drs Crippen and Rant.Today I am relieved to read Dr Crippen´s endorsement of both the Democratic Party and his endorsement of Barak Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate. To the extent he has set up a new blog Brits for Barak Obama.

Dr Crippen was apparently inspired by Obama´s speech regarding or in defense of his attendance at a church presided over by a radical black preacher. Having now listened to the speech and read the transcipt, I am in accordance with Dr Crippen. If they dug up the dirt on my wearing of a Socialist Workers´ Party Stuff-the-Jubilee badge back in 1978 when I was 16 years old, my membersip in an anti-hunting activist organisation, an admission that ¨I inhaled¨ that spliff, having had ¨intimate relations¨ with someone of my own sex (etc etc), then in the US, and most probably the UK, I would be political dead-meat.

I am not as confident as Dr Crippen in the fundamental probity of any politician (whether UK, the US or elswhere) but, as he says, we do need to break the monopolies of both the Clinton and Bush dynasties.

And if the next US President is female or black, (we will have to wait a long time for a black lesbian president), it will be a big step forward