Mr Cameron I’ve got a message for you: keep your hands off the NHS!
I know that I shouldn’t care about this, but I do! The truth is that some of my patients use the NHS and any cuts to the service affect them too.
Homeopathy is after all a complementary therapy!
If any of my colleagues is reading this, they are probably wondering which side am I on…but you see no one is one dimensional, and sometimes if we want to be coherent with ourselves we have to take controversial causes too. Just like that sceptic guy the other day on twitter who spotted my blog, tweeted it to all his followers and managed to included me on the Homeopathy is Out magazine - I thank you for that! Or was it by mistake…?
In the case of the NHS, I much rather know that my patients have a choice
That they've made an informed decision, not that they’ve come to see me out of despair from not having the medical support they deserve!
And if they chose the combined approach of homeopathy/healing and conventional medicine, I like to know that they are being closely monitored by their GP or their consultant, and backed up by proper tests.
The world becomes a better place if we all work together for the ultimate goal that is our patients' wellbeing!
Even for those patients who have decided that they can dispense with their doctor’s opinion, "because it’s their own body and they bloody well know what they want“, I still like to know that if they change their mind at any point they are able to rely on the NHS.
If you, Mr Cameron start to reduce services without listening to the 10,000 NHS staff telling you why you shouldn’t, we are all to become poorer.
Good health and education infrastructures are not only the preserve of a civilised world, they are also what makes us civilised in the first place…if you erode those under whatever pretext, whether financial or other, you are turning your vision of the Big Society into the very Sick Society that you abhor.
In a healthy society people are able to think and to make decisions for themselves
In order to do this they require proper education, they need to be aware of the many options available to them so that when they make a decision it is a deliberate, well informed one.
The less options we give them the more remote control we are exercising on them.
This is why I do not condone any sort of radicalism, there is never an excuse for that. To be able to have flexibility of mind and to adapt to every circumstance is the Holistic approach that you were trying to articulate in your speech when you mentioned that you were risking sounding like a homeopath…don’t worry, unless your change your policy a lot, you don’t sound like one at all…
Now on a different note, a tweet spiked my curiosity, so I decided to "follow the evidence"
Someone was expressing their disappointment with the Homeopathy display in the Natural History Museum. Well I couldn’t agree more! I spent over two hours looking for it, which when you are wearing stilettos and a pencil skirt is no mean feat, and I couldn’t find it!
I mean it’s so secret than not even the staff knows where it is…I looked everywhere! Where are they hiding it? In the gents? It’s the only place where I didn’t look…
In the end I decided to visit the “Sexy Beast” exhibition instead which is well worth seeing
It’s on until the 2nd of October only so if you are in London go and see it.
It is a multimedia display about animal magnetism…and sex: lots of it! It gives a good insight from a scientific perspective, to the range of reproductive variations in many species.
From courtship and mating rituals of some species, to the wonderful weirdness of their reproductive systems…
It’s fascinating! For instance did you know that roman snail lovers can spent hours in foreplay just rubbing and massaging each other’s heads and then shoot love darts at one another before copulating?
Or that the Gartner snake mating can involve one female and up to 25 males all in a ball, and that there is even a pseudo female who can mimic the female’s pheromones and fool all the other males into pilling up on top of him in order to keep him warm?
About keeping warm… there was a story this week that warmed my heart, and apparently those of many people: David Walliams
Perhaps even more so because he is the unlikely hero - a comedian with a very strange sense of humour sometimes borderline intimidating, offering us a grotesque caricature of society, and of himself.
He has spoken frankly and publicly in the past about his chronic depression which is nevertheless eased by keeping physically active practicing sport, and by his work as a comedian.
He also did what not many of us would have been prepared to do: he swam the length of Thames to raise money for disadvantaged kids through Sports Relief. He’s raised a lot of money and the donations are still going!
I hope that makes it all worth it, the raw sewage that ended up on his tummy causing tremendous colic and diarrhoea, his fear of the swans, the extreme cold, the insect bites, his fear of someone dropping a brick on his head from one of the bridges…
He did it!
And now on his priority list are a bath, a drink with his friends, spending some time with his wife and opening the post!
