We’ve gained, but we have also lost…
I listened to a sad story last week.
A woman in her late 30’s told me her mother had died this year aged 59. She was usually healthy but had developed pneumonia after recurring bouts of chest infections following a cold. She had contacted her GP when she felt unwell and he had dispensed antibiotics, and then referred her to 111 NHS advice number when she didn’t improve instead of seeing her in person. There was a series of attempts to get help from paramedics, but she was bumped down the list as there were more urgent cases ahead of her because she ‘didn’t sound ill enough’ over the phone.
The next day, she died.
Apart from the very sad fact that a daughter had lost her Mum, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had been told.
In the face of ill health, disease, infection or whatever – we have come to rely almost totally as a nation on the NHS for advice and action. It is as if we have become impotent to help ourselves.
I am a great believer in the NHS, without its trauma care I would be dead. But are we shifting too much responsibility onto its shoulders? If we knew how to treat chest infections ourselves, would they ever need to progress to pneumonia? This is no criticism of what anybody did or didn’t do in the story I heard, but I began to wonder…
Before we reach the stage of involving our GP in the case of ill health what can we do? It is hard enough to see or speak to a doctor, so that we can often be left floundering with no direct help or advice. Health can deteriorate very rapidly in some circumstances with some people, and it can be scary. But since we have come to rely on the NHS, we been left in a position where we don’t know how to help ourselves when we become ill. We as communities have lost the knowledge and impetus to try to sort simple health problems out ourselves before they get too bad.
It may be that the NHS actively discourages patients to think for themselves, because of the concern that they may fall prey to quackery and scams. And if people do think for themselves and seek something else, they can be too scared to let their surgery know that they have seen a herbalist or taken herbs because of what their GP may say. Possibly because of this fear of the GP’s reaction, or the suspicion of quackery, the general public has historically dismissed medicinal herbs so far from view that they do not even know they exist.
I was shopping this week and the cashier apologised for the fact she had a cold. I said cheerily, ‘What you need is hot ginger tea!’
She looked up, surprised, ‘Really? Is ginger good for colds?’
And I thought, what if? What if the woman who died of pneumonia had dosed herself up with fresh ginger and garlic while she still had just a cold? What if she had a thyme chest rub? What if she had taken a mix of herbs which are therapeutically active for the respiratory system? Would it have staved off the worst?
When I was a young Mum, I was interested in social history and wondered what parents did when their kids were ill if they couldn’t afford the doctor’s fee. There were many things practised in the past that are now labelled as old wives’ tales – some didn’t work, but a lot did. If you really investigate the medical knowledge that was developed in central Asia around the time of Avicenna, then you come to realise that there was an effective system of medicine that dealt effectively with a lot of ill health.
Modern medicine has brought us surgery, trauma care and life changing drugs – but apart from that essential intervention, where are we?
If we can’t get hold of a GP, we now go to the Pharmacist who will advise us on what over the counter tablets to buy, whether antacids [a bad idea] or pain relief [wonderful when you need it] or cough syrups, sleep aids, and laxatives, among other things.
I wouldn’t want to go back to a time before we had many of the interventions that we have now become used to. But surely there is a place where we should be confident enough to help ourselves for minor complaints without needing to phone our local surgery…
How many of you who read this feels competent enough to administer remedies for yourselves and family for reflux, coughs, colds and constipation?
