SELF OWNERSHIP

To do as one wants – whilst acting within rules which protect the rights of others – is a defining condition of freedom. Over-mighty government, however, has long looked on the bodies and consciousness of the governed as a kind of threat on the one hand and as a battlefield in its warped war against morality on the other. Medical and recreational needs and desires are often in conflict and third-party harm questions continue to divide freedom-lovers and patriots into opposing camps.

It’s a knotty subject and raises all sorts of problems and divisions amongst and those who cherish our way of life, but here goes…

How well does our envy-of-the-world National Health Service do to look after your weak and feeble flesh?
There's a blog called National Death Service which features, and I quote "Examples of death and injury caused by bureaucratic rationing."
Nigel Lawson said that the National Health Service has the status of ‘the national religion.'
Read the words and discover the facts from some of Britain's leading unbelievers here.

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Here, Angus Dei tell the horrifying story of the death of Mrs Angus - at the hands of our beloved National Health Service: The Envy Of The World And What All Good Americans Deserve. He urges us to join this Bloggers Unite page dedicated to exposing "all the horror stories of relatives and partners suffering injustice at the hands of the NHS, the Healthcare Commission and the GMC."

I suppose that that must include me, then.

Going back to the mid-1970s when my father visited a GP to complain about stomach pains. He prescribed indigestion tablets for Dad: a man with a history of high blood pressure and shortness of breath and possessing the distinctive club fingers of those prone to heart disease. The doctor never took his pulse or checked Dad's blood pressure. And away came Dad, and off we went to the chemist's for the useless pills. He was having his first heart attack there and then in the clinic.
He lived through a year's convalescence until he went out for a heathy stoll and never came back.

Oddly enough, that self-same surgery prescribed tranquillizers for the insomniac and grieving new widow, and so mum was given Temazepam, which is "for the short-term treatment of sleeplessness in patients who have difficulty maintaining sleep...
Temazepam is officially indicated for severe insomnia and other severe or disabling sleep disorders. The prescribing guidelines limit prescribing of hypnotics to two-four weeks due to concerns of tolerance and physical dependence."

The NHS was so thoughtful and caring that the original diagnosis was never reviewed and for 10 years this habit-forming drug was repeat-prescriptioned on the nod by a succession of incurious State-employed physicians with no interest in changing her treatment or even in questioning the growing illness and depression in an increasingly sickly and sleepless woman. In the end, someone noticed that it was doing her no good, but by the time she had signed herself into a mental hospital and been taken off Temazepam she was so sick and dispirited and messed-up by the drug and still a grieving widow that she decided that the bottom of the local river would be the quickest and best route to sleep, peace, and maybe to my father.

So do visit Justice for bereaved patients partners and relatives and read what it has to say - and use it, if you wish, to use Angus's angry grieving page send the Health Secretary your heartfelt wishes...

The NHS got both my parents. Nuke from orbit.

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