Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday October 29 2016, @09:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the VERY-stiff-upper-lip dept.

"A former soldier cut off two of his gangrene-ridden toes with a pair of tin metal pliers without anesthetic in his living room after becoming frustrated at a six-week delay to being operated on by the National Health Service (NHS)."

[...] "He says he eventually developed gangrene and his doctor said his infected toes would have to be removed. Rather than wait six weeks for the operation, Dibbins took matters into his own hands.

He says the operation, performed without pain killers and in his living room while biting on a rolled up towel, took about an hour. His wife of 40 years was in the house but says she did not want to look.

“Knowing that it would take at least another six weeks to get me in front of a surgeon again, that’s when I bit the bullet and cut off the toes,” Dibbins told the North Devon Journal.

“I did it because it’s what had to be done. My doctor told me my toes were going to kill me."

https://www.rt.com/uk/364152-gangrene-frostbite-toes-cut/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @10:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @10:31PM (#420294)

    Oh, I know about the private medical options in the UK. More familiar than you might expect, even.

    But here's the problem: if you can afford private, you're a bleedin' toff who needs to be taxed harder so that everyone else can get more treatment, faster, under the exact same NHS that is growing like a cancer (seriously, take a look at its graph as a percentage of GNP, and as a percentage of revenue) and still can't tell its arse from its elbow. If you can't afford private, then you're a hapless woebegone symbol of everything that's wrong with Miserable Britain.

    The whole approach is broken, at this point.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by BasilBrush on Saturday October 29 2016, @10:59PM

    by BasilBrush (3994) on Saturday October 29 2016, @10:59PM (#420318)

    NHS spending as a percentage of GDP has been falling every year since 2010.

    The rest of what you say is shite too.

    --
    Hurrah! Quoting works now!
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:38PM (#420346)

      Right, because the tories, bless their twisted little hearts, have tried to stem the bleeding. They didn't manage to actually reduce the NHS budget, but they sort of shuffled the money around and redefined a few things and managed to put a lid on the cauldron and sit on it for a while. If you draw the graph, they slowed the climb rather than reversed it, and if you draw any kind of moving average the net effect pretty much vanishes.

      That reinforces the point, rather than weakens it, especially since the whingeing from the imploding left increases every time anybody bothers to listen to them. Even leaving aside Corbyn's pet madhouse, the centre is full of people who appear to think that the only problem with the NHS is that there isn't more of it. We're still bombarded with the message that the toffs are vampiric monsters who should be taxed until they couldn't afford anything better than the NHS could deliver anyway, while the poor shivering proles can't get enough coal to stoke their fireplace of a winter's night.

      It's enough to make one want to move to the US.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by BasilBrush on Sunday October 30 2016, @02:08AM

        by BasilBrush (3994) on Sunday October 30 2016, @02:08AM (#420410)

        Again, NHS spending as a percentage of GDP has been falling every year since 2010. That's not "slowed the climb". That's a decreasing.

        You're still talking shite.

        --
        Hurrah! Quoting works now!
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @02:55AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @02:55AM (#420422)

          Stop hyperventilating. Read the words.

          The actual budget is not reduced; the relative budget as part of GDP is reduced, (although the budget as part of revenue is questionably reduced) and this is in an era of growth when they made a big noise about working hard to trim the NHS.

          And this is just the last government.

          And the dip relative to GDP is tiny.

          Look at the actual graph in real terms, and it's not much of a decrease unless you handpick some bizarre measure of inflation.

          But hey - what do I know? HM government's numbers must all be nonsense, right? The tories are secretly chopping the NHS down by tens of millio ... er wait, they're not? In fact, the chancellor got a lot of stick from his own backbenchers for backing away from their promise?

          Up is down! Left is right! Cats and dogs living together! Total insanity!

          ... but right, must be all that shite I'm talking.

          Boom, boom.

          • (Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:32PM

            by BasilBrush (3994) on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:32PM (#422228)

            You brought up the measuring against SGP, tit.

            You're full of shite on your own measure.

            --
            Hurrah! Quoting works now!
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:11PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:11PM (#420325) Homepage

    Speaking of growing like a cancer, what are the effects of refugees and other unskilled dead-weight on Britain's healthcare system?

    • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:14PM

      by isostatic (365) on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:14PM (#420328) Journal

      Insignificant.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @10:56AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @10:56AM (#420475)

      Speaking of growing like cancer, how'd that Iraq war turn out for you guys?

      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 30 2016, @04:54PM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday October 30 2016, @04:54PM (#420552) Homepage

        Pretty shitty, but then again, I was always against both the Iraq war and opening the floodgates to refugee scum.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by naubol on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:29PM

    by naubol (1918) on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:29PM (#420339)

    I found some data that does say NHS went from 3.5% from 1960 to 7.2% in 08. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/dhtml_slides/10/blastland/img/slide3_v4.gif [bbc.co.uk]

    For the US, health spending went from 4.5% in 1960 to 17.8% in 2010. https://econographics.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/u-s-healthcare-spending-as-percentage-of-gdp/ [wordpress.com]

    It seems difficult to assert that this means the approach is wrong. The UK held costs down much better!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:39PM

      by edIII (791) on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:39PM (#420347)

      Do NOT compare any health system to the one in the U.S on a financial basis. We have the most hell bound pyschotic avaricious parasites in the world. THAT's why a fucking 2c band-aid costs $4.99 a piece and an Aspirin can cost $30.

      When you compare our costs against Cuba's costs for the same medicine, keeping in mind they're under a nasty double embargo, the U.S is TWO orders of magnitude higher. We're the fucking assholes that sell $2 worth of epinephrine for $600.

      Probably better off comparing the UK against Canada or some other country that is in the top 10 for medicine. The U.S? Not anywhere near the top 20 even. We're the greatest though right? ;)

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by naubol on Sunday October 30 2016, @01:24AM

        by naubol (1918) on Sunday October 30 2016, @01:24AM (#420398)

        So, don't compare a single payer approach with a market approach because the market approach is unfair due to avaricious pricing? That was sort of the point of my post. :p

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @04:49AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @04:49AM (#420436)

          The "market approach" ... excuse me while I laugh so hard I cough up a lung.

          The "market approach" - where the government decides who can decide which universities may graduate how many doctors.

          The "market approach" - where the government deliberately puts monopolies in place and refuses to do anything about them when they're abused.

          The "market approach" - where the government's sweetheart agencies and programmes can extract non-negotiable services at non-negotiable (and wildly uneconomical) rates and leave everyone else to pick up the slack as a hidden tax.

          The "market approach" - where participation is mandatory, backed with fines, and they can't even get insurers to make a profit with a captive audience more comprehensive than drivers' insurance policies have.

          The "market approach" - where actual pricing information is carefully hidden, varies wildly between customers, and is most definitely not open to bid or negotiation except where the counterparty is a large institution, or would otherwise simply default on payment.

          The "market approach" - with multiple, parallel, substantial single-payer operations in it.

          If the USA's approach is anything like a market-based approach, then maybe we need to give anarchy another try.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @11:45PM (#420352)

      Apples and oranges.

      But even assuming those numbers are utterly comparable on every level (they're not, but what the hell ...) that mostly reveals that when you have a market strongly constrained by a buyer with the force of law, you're apt not to get a lot of price rises.

      The situation in the USA actually fostered a whole series of abuses.