From non life threatening conditions?
(I did say NON LIFE THREATENING).

You're on exceedingly thin ice saying that we shouldn't bother providing people respite and assistance if it's not a life-threatening condition.

HIV is a non life-threatening condition, for example.

Indeed, and it's also hideously expensive. Therefore, the NHS shouldn't offer it, in my opinion, as I think I've mentioned earlier.

at what you actually wrote.

at what you meant.

What if they're absolutely fucking massive & causing back problems? IIRC that's one of the main causes of taking unscheduled time off work (back trouble, not massive mammaries). Surely reducing the risk is in the NHS' & the national interest?

Isn't that kind of what NICE is meant to do? Weigh up the cost / benefit ratios and recommend whether to purchase a certain drug or not, and when and when not to use it?

That's exactly what they do. And then they get pilloried in the press for not allowing people to have £3,000,000,000 a day cancer treatments that extend their life by two days.*


*Numbers may be approximate.

Simples. Only do 'cutting off' procedures and no 'sticking on' ones.

Well, they're not doing it very well are they, given the aforementioned size of big pharma profits. By the sounds of it, they just take the purchase price of a given drug as read, too, only comparing benefits vs. this 'cost'. Not exactly the brightest procurement strategy, given the 20-year patent monopoly scenario for newly patented, exclusively manfactured drugs.

That's exactly what they do. And then they get pilloried in the press for not allowing people to have £3,000,000,000 a day cancer treatments that extend their life by two days.* WE DRESERVED AN EXTRA TWO DAYS WITH OUR MAM AND THE NHS KILLT HER

Why all the blankets and pillows? Couldn't doctors ask patients to wear extra clothes and get them to sleep on the floor too, beds are fucking pricey.

Any NHS mission statement should contain the line, near the top, that says 'We recognise that everyone is going to die one day'.

I am sick of reports that 'More people are dying of cancer than ever before' or similar, and ludicrously expensive strategies to reduce the death rate attached to that illness. More people are dying of cancer, partly because less people are dying of TB and Smallpox.

When my ex was a nurse in Birmingham, her hospital had very expensive new facilities for heart disease which were full of very old people who were probably also nearly dead from 10 other things at the same time. There was also a specialist cancer care unit that had cost hundreds of millions dealing with trendy cancers.

Her ward (bowel cancer, generally) was full of dying middle aged and young people who were otherwise healthy but couldnt get treatment for their condition priortised as there were no funds, as bowel cancer wasn't headline grabbing enough. Still isn't.

Quite - the problem with Cavey's suggestion is that it would prioritise spending that money on giving an old lady two more days of life over improving the quality of life for someone who could live for 30 years by, for example, allowing them to walk.

Deciding what the NHS spends its money on is one hell of a minefield and I'm glad I'm not in any way involved.

one hell of a minefield

allowing them to walk

Any NHS mission statement should contain the line, near the top, that says 'We recognise that everyone is going to die one day'.

Her ward (bowel cancer, generally) was full of dying middle aged and young people who were otherwise healthy but couldnt get treatment for their condition priortised as there were no funds, as bowel cancer wasn't headline grabbing enough. Still isn't.

You know there's an NHS pricing thingy, right? That limits the prices companies can charge? And that it isn't set by NICE?

Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies – not the health of humanity.

The idea of ring-fencing life-saving medical knowledge so a few people can profit from it is one of the great grotesqueries of our age. We have to tear down this sick system – so the sick can live. Only then we can globalise the spirit of Jonas Salk, the great scientist who invented the polio vaccine, but refused to patent it, saying simply: "It would be like patenting the sun."

Psychiatry?

What's wrong with psychiatry, Grim...?

He is perhaps referring to this.

Psychiatrists are frauds and charlatans who refuse to acknowledge that thetans are the cause of all mental health issues.

Oh, and for the record, I am not, of course, saying that the NHS should only treat life threatening conditions, obviously. Just that it shouldn't necessarily be treating non life threatening conditions @ £1000/week (or more), using the latest designer drugs, where much cheaper (and perhaps less effective) remedies are available (indeed were the only drugs available perhaps 2 or 3 years ago).

If the drugs companies cannot sell for such exorbitant prices, they'd soon come down even without any formal regulatory framework. That's the law of the market a very simple concept to understand yet sadly there's been precious little of that these last 13 years. It's why we are where we are in the first place.

I always get those confused with psychologists, who do magic tricks on telly.

Your problem is that the UK NHS isn't the sole market for the big pharma companies, not by a long shot.

Oh, none taken - but it is both acute and chronic. And trust me, those costs are a bargain compared to what gets shelled out elsewhere.

There are also several different categories of drugs arrangements within the UK, which is quite important. Prescription drugs and generics are subject to centrally set price controls, and I think the DoH has the PPRS sewn up reasonably well there, but the hospital only drugs aren't price regulated, and that's where you get your cancer treatments. If all the big pharma companies want to charge shit loads for granny's breast cancer treatment, what else can you do? The fact the big pharma companies have been investigated for collusion in price fixing tells you something too.

Oh yeah, course. That was just a joke around the whole "people don't think psychiatrists are real doctors" thing.

Although I am wary of just how good a job they actually do, as it hard to quantify.

See also: Bollock cancer. always overshadowed by the boobies. 'nads aren't as photogenic for the campaigns, clearly.

Everyone goes on about Big Pharma profits but how big are their profits as an actual percentage of their operating costs? What I mean is even if you found some way to batter them down on price through some sort of legislation how much would it even be possible for you to save before the profit margins became such that embarking on expensive and possibly fruitless research was no longer attractive to them?

I'm never going to buy the first pill then. Do they think we're fucking stupid?