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  The Irreverent Buddhist: writing from a Buddhist perspective on
  subjects from the deeply personal to the thoroughly political.


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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

      University College Hospital: Professor Spiro, Professor of Whitewash.

Last week when my Consultant, Richard Cohen, was away on holiday the ward manager Martin Bruce came and saw me. We had a discussion for about twenty minutes. He explained that their job was to get me out of hospital. He made no bones about it: success had nothing to do with my health or otherwise: it was all about “moving me through the system”. His plan was that when Cohen returned there would be a meeting with the ward sister who best knows my case, Mr Cohen and a representative from the team responsible for my psychotherapy. The purpose of the meeting would be to get me out of his bed.

During the week another senior consultant who had first referred me to Mr Cohen was due to visit. She never arrived.

When Mr Cohen returned yesterday he came and saw me in the morning. He explained that this consultant had about-turned on her decision to see me. She had written to him by email and said that she had “been advised by a senior colleague not to come”. She is the medical director of the hospital she works at.

Mr Cohen explained that there was nothing more the hospital could do to help me. He was clearly trying to move me towards discharge without any such meeting. I protested that it was not safe for me to be moved home, that despite Mr Cohen doing his honest best the hospital as a whole had not done so, that it was inappropriate that so many of the people he had tried to refer me to had refused to see me, that there was no understanding of what is wrong with me and that I was not happy to be sent home. I explained that I want to be moved to a rehabilitation unit or to another hospital that would try and understand what is wrong with me.

Mr Cohen said he would try and get the medical director of the hospital to come and see me. This morning he returned and explained that Professor Stephen Spiro would be coming to see me at lunch time and asked me to be here from 11am until 2pm to be sure I didn’t miss him. Spiro, a former medical director of the hospital, had been asked “not to look at my notes” before meeting me and arrived at arout 20 minutes before 1pm. After about ten minutes of questioning he conducted a two or three minute physical examination with me on my bed. Professor Spiro did not ask me to get off of my bed and did not watch me walk.

He appeared friendly, understanding and helpful. He’s a pretty good actor.

As he left I asked him if he had reached a conclusion. “No”, he said, “I am going to read your notes and then let Mr Cohen know my thoughts”. My notes are in a folder nearly two inches thick. They contain around 100 pages of material and reports from this hospital and elsewhere. He walked over to the nursing station, sat there for one minute and wrote the following in my notes:

“Very complex Psychiatric/Psychological situation. Whatever the patients muscular problems are there is no need for admission. Fit for discharge.” - I am allowed to read my notes in the presence of a nurse and did so the minute Spiro left.

This took him about thirty seconds. He certainly did not even attempt to read my notes. He then left the ward, met Martin Bruce, the ward manager in the lobby and exchanged a few words with him. I couldn’t hear the conversation. Martin Bruce looked happy smiled and waved Professor Spiro off. Clearly Bruce was happy that Spiro had rubber stamped my discharge such that the hospital can pour whitewash over the whole incident of my being here.

As Spiro got into the outer lobby he was already on his mobile telephone to Mr Cohen to tell him the good news that despite having no understanding of what is wrong with me (”Whatever the patients muscular problems are”) he had happily written me up for discharge. Within the hour Mr Cohen had arrived with his new puppy-dog Senior Registrar, James Arbuckle, and was telling me I would be discharged by the end of this week to my home. No understanding of what is wrong, no care plan, no treatment plan, no rehabilitation plan. However this is of course a great success for the hospital. After all I will have “left their bed” and be “off their plate”.

Nice medicine. I think University College can be very proud of itself. The smell of whitewash however is rather overwhelming.

On the subject of things white … this building is a complete white elephant. It cost twice what it should, nothing works properly, the staff hate it and complain about it constantly. The lifts fail. They were put in on the cheap as the trust had overspent and what’s more, they even designed and built it complete with a trunk:

University College Hopital Building - A white Elephant

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Filed under: Medical History, Politics, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 11:15 am
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Monday, October 1, 2007

      Medical Protection Society, Briefs And Faecal Incontinence.

The Medical Protection Society have been reading freedomforall.net again. I do hope this, and the appearance of a Bedford Row based Law Chambers on my log, does not mean ill-advised legal action will be attempted again.

Much as it would be undoubted fun to be in court, you won’t win, and of that you can be one hundred per cent certain. How can I be so sure? I know your client won’t have told you all the relevant facts - had he done so you’d refuse to take instruction.

In the lift at University College Hospital last week I filled my briefs with shit, due to the faecal incontinence I suffer. The lift was crowded and it is always stuffy in them in any case. People looked miffed and I whistled. You get used to these things.

When a solicitor or barristers’ client fills their ‘brief’ with shit it usually comes into the light of day under cafefull cross questioning rather than falling down the leg of your pyjamas in a lift. I’d suggest carefully cross questioning your client before launching any ill-fated action.

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Filed under: Medical History, Politics, Website, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 1:22 pm
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Thursday, September 27, 2007

      Patientline Treading On Human Rights: What A Fecking* Lame Excuse.

The use of the word feck* was the problem … yeah … If you read this from a bed on a Patientline system go search google for feck* or try wikipedia.

They can all use feck* but I can not? Doesn’t make sense sorry -lame, lame, lame.

Also does not explain why one site I own got blocked as it contained a blank hosting page from my reputable webhost.

Like I said lame. If Patientline wish to respond, the lovely lady is welcome to register with freedomforall.net and leave a comment.

* U know what I mean: if you don’t search google for feck, the first page at Wikipedia.org explains.

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Filed under: Medical History, Politics, Website, Life, Computers Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 1:48 am
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

      University College Hospital, Metropolotian Police Corruption and Patientline: Subverting Human Rights.

I have been in hospital for three weeks today and am sicker than when I came in. Dr Giles Bond-Smith made what I believe to be a deliberate and transparent attempt on my life through mismedication (see story below “University College Hospital”). No independent investigation has been possible, because;

He then told the Camden Metropolitan Police Force I was mad and that they did not need to come and take a statement from me. So they didn’t bother. Then I telephoned New Scotland Yard (who confirmed what he had done). The operator realised they had accepted the word of a man accused of attempted murder against his accuser and that that was wrong - she said she would ensure the police attended.

Within two hours the Camden police did show up, took a small amount of evidence, but refused to take a statement. An hour after that the Consultant turned up in his tennis shorts on a Sunday morning - the first time I had seen him in a week - and tried to talk me out of pressing charges. this was intermingled with a conversation about my healthcare needs and I think the two should not have been so mixed up.

Since then - more than a week ago - I have telephoned the Camden Police on two occassions and asked what is happening. I was told an officer would call me back. My telephone calls do not get returned.

Today the Patientline system in the hospital -  which patients can use to watch TV, browse the internet and make phone calls, started refusing me access to all the website I own including this one. That happened at some point between 12pm and 6pm. I can only assume that all these events are related:

- The suppression of my human right to health is long documented on this site and now under investigation by a number of journalists and my MP. UCH are dilly-dallying at best and denying plain facts their own staff have seen and witnessed at worst.

The suppression of my human right to justice and fair access to the law has been accomplished it seems by joint enterprise of University College Hospital and the Camden Metropolitan Police force.

The attempts at understanding my health needs appear to be half hearted at best. The neurologist I met last week told me today there is “nothing wrong with my back”. He said the physiotherapist’s report completed over three weeks and which goes into great detail about the muscle wasting - naming most of the major groups in the back of my body by name as atrophied - is “wrong”.

Now Patientline are seemingly collaborating to supress my human right to freedom of speech and expression by denying me the right to write about my life and the denial of rights my “democratic” “motherland” offers. they are doing this by blocking my website so I can not publish without walking down the road to the internet cafe.

The material on this site is only objectionable to two groups of people: The first group is those doctors who lie and cheat. The second is paedophiles.

My lawyer will be on this in the morning.

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Filed under: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Medical History, Politics, Website, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 2:30 pm
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Thursday, July 26, 2007

      Monsoon Britain: A Taste Of What Is To Come

This summer we are enjoying a monsoon in England. Aside from the ten thousand or so homeless our antiquated water management system seems to have created, the main worry seems to be whether the weather justifies spending even more money on a roof for the Olympic Stadium.

Of course, this additional economic activity will only add to the speed of climate change but at least the two week festival will pass without an umbrella crisis. That man is so shortsighted in his activity is no surprise to us. But the conesequences are coming. For Britain, the permanent change in position of the Gulf Stream will change our weather patterns completely. We will end up enjoying a three season pattern of weather.

Monsoon will run from around the end of April until the middle or end of August. The there will be a hot season lasting until the end November by which stage it will be cooler, before a short sharp and very cold winter begins in December and runs through until March.

Our farming and crops and insects and parasites and much else will change. The pattern will enshrine itslef within the next twenty five years, and quite clear agreement that it is where we are headed will be reached in five years or so. Just around the time of the Olympics, be they roofed or unroofed.

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Filed under: Politics, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 1:09 am
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      US Economy: Prime Down, Private Equity Short: It’s Here: Prepare For The Bear

The US economy has run on cheap oil and cheap foreign money for many years. With the current levels of Dollar dominated indebtedness at all time highs the strain in the system is starting to show. The dollar, standing at $2.05 to the british pound, has continued the steady decline I commented on in October 2004. Since that date that drop has been around 6% against the Euro. Now we are seeing a potential implosion in the US sub-prime mortgage market which will have inevitable knock on effects on the US domestic economy as mortgages are pulled and lives turned upside down.

The overspill into the business sector of the potential funding shortage that may now arise has also begun I believe. Private equity buy outs are facing a shortage of funds as the underwriting banks are still carrying on their books much of the stock they issued for transactions earlier this year. Since Bush was re-elected for the second time, delay of an economic bear market in the US has only been managed by spending lots of dollars on very unpopular wars. The Republicans do not believe theirs will be the next president so the current situation suits them fine.

The Democrats will be handed a Basket economy on the point of implosion and two wars they can neither win, withdraw from or pay for. When I was at Las vegas airport earlier this year a Trucker from New Jersey gave me a light. We chatted as we smoked outside the terminal. “You watch”, he said, “The Democrats are down to a black and a woman for President. The Republicans aren’t gonna let a black or a woman run the show. There will be another major terrorist attack”. I do not believe he is right there. Another terrorist attack would only ensure the Democrats are in for ten years, whomever they chose. Without it they will be in for five, crisis managing through the bear to the beginning of the upside, before a shiny young besuited whiter than white Republican can take over to ride the good times.

Prepare for the bear because it is coming. Luckily we will be protected from the wash to some extent by the trading block of Europe and the trade we have with China and India who are of course leading world growth. But any major remolding of the shape of the US economy will not be without knock on effects. In the UK we can expect inflation up 1 -1.5% over the next two years and interest up 2 - 3 points. At the same time many people are coming off low fixed rate mortgages set five or ten years ago. The effects on consumer spending will be quite significant, slowing growth to near zero for a short sharp spell.

The worst affected will be the same borrowers as in the US: those who are mortgaged at higher rates because they have less resources and lower credit ranks. Oh, and those who own businesses.

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Filed under: Politics, Life, economics Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 12:38 am
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Tuesday, May 8, 2007

      Parliamentary Health Committee: “Consultants Have Power Without Accountability”

The Parliamentary Health Committee session on the “new” consultants contract within the NHS grabbed my attention on BBC Parliament as I scanned the TV channels today. What was being said shockingly backs what I have written here about the fault lines within the National Health Service.

The Chairman of the committee quoted a National Audit Office report to the committe “Consultants have power without accountability and managers have accountability without power”. Mr Williams MP quoted another report saying “Consultants have told us that they have a natural tendancy to support each other”. Yes, it’s called “Doctors Etiquette” - and it regularly kills people.

“Power without accountability” is exactly why what I have written below is being allowed to happen - not just to me but throughout the health service. You may find it hard to believe but that does not make a word of it untrue. “Consultants have power without accountability”. Read that again - it is frightening. Earlier I wrote “It is time doctors stopped protecting each other and pretending they are godlike, admitted their faults and engaged patients as equals. Then physical symptoms might not be ignored and lives might not needlessly be ruined.” This is the sort of damage that power without accountability leads to.

From “Humanitarian Plea: Can You Or Someone You Know Help?”, “The body of evidence that I am now being deliberately denied medical care in the UK is now overwhelming. Perhaps this is to protect reputations of these doctors who early misdiagnosed my situation without proper investigation, perhaps the reasons are more nefarious. I do not say this lightly and have documented evidence”. This is a situation that could only develop under a regime where consultants have “Power with no accountability”.

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Filed under: Medical History, Politics, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 7:41 am
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      Humanitarian Plea: Can You Or Someone You Know Help?

I was raped from infancy through to age twelve by multiple abusers. It wasn’t nice. It hurt me psychologically and physically.  I have appropriate psychological support after a long battle. There has, however, been an ongoing failure to deal with the physical damage my body sustained in an appropriate way. Initially this was probably due to misunderstanding and an assumption that my problems were principally psychological. That simply no longer appears to be the case.

In discussion with my friend who is an Osteopath, we have arrived at the conclusion that there is quite probably a central nervous system issue. I occasionally enjoy a sporadic and progressive return of sensation from the neck down into my upper torso. I have no control of many of the muscles in my pelvis. I have suffered lifelong urinary incontinence attributed to the problems with my neck. My anal sphincter has been shown to be “stretched” and in part made of scar tissue. My rectum is internally prolapsed. The muscles in the back of my body have progressively failed over the last three years, starting with the right side, and progressing to the left. My diaphragm does not significantly displace at any stage of respiration. My theory/experience is that it the right hemisphere is paradoxically enervated in part and constantly drawn up to compensate for the failure of my pelvic floor - it effectively reduces the pressure in my abdomen - and this has been borne out by electromagnetic phrenic nerve testing.

I want to recount an experience from May 2004 that may shed light on what is going on, what I have just written. I had been concentrating my physical recovery work on strengthening and balancing muscles in my pelvis and back but shifted my focus somewhat to how I moved my neck. One day I was being very careful with the movements of my neck and something at the top of my neck clicked into place. My head rebalanced and twisted round to accommodate. The next thing I knew, as I stood before the mirror cleaning my teeth, a whole bunch of muscles in my pelvis started working. First I think was the urinary sphincter - I felt it close an unusual and unfamiliar experience. Then the anal sphincter and rectum - I felt my rectum uncurl up inside of me – it has now been shown that my rectum is prolapsed internally. Then muscles in the back of my hips and legs started working. My hips rotated a little and a muscle on the left of my spine seemed to relax, lengthening my lumbar spine, and my abdominal contents were pushed up inside of me as my pelvic floor and some other muscles in my pelvis started working. As I turned round, a muscle I had never before felt contract sucked in my belly, and I felt my lumbar spine supported. My friend the Osteopath explained to me this might have been the transverse abdominus as that muscle is co-enervated with the pelvic floor. I had never felt that sensation and it was amazing. Within half an hour the muscles behind my shoulders that were not working started doing so, the muscles behind the middle of my spine in my back engaged and I was standing two inches taller than I had been all my adult life.

This was all a shock to me. I had no Idea what I had done. I could walk properly, in a balanced fashion, and my body felt amazing. I could breathe properly and had never known that I was not doing so. I was two inches taller. I never realised before that people didn’t have to fight their own legs to walk, which is how it feels for me. As I moved to sit in a chair my body collapsed back and all the gains of that morning were immediately lost. My body corkscrewed back down into its habitual position. My feeling is that something somewhere was strong enough for me to stand but not for me to sit – or perhaps that some of those muscles that had just started working relapsed into their old patterns setting off the collapse as I tried
to sit.

I realised afterwards that this physical experience meant my body had been desperately hurt by the abuse and made the link to former physical problems.

I was unable to recreate this situation – I was unsure what I had even done. Shortly afterwards, perhaps with mistaken attempts to do so, I sustained an injury to my neck and lumbar spine. These structures were already dysfunctional as a result of the compensatory pattern to the organic damage sustained in the abuse. One morning on stepping out of the shower I experienced a spasm that started in my pelvis and ricocheted all the way up my spine. Some muscles behind my right shoulder stopped working immediately and I felt very unbalanced. Since that time my body has progressively decayed to the point where almost all the muscles of my back have failed and atrophied as I have progressively lost control. This started with the back right side of my body but has progressed to the left side as time has ticked by. My neck and pelvis are shot. My sacrum has curled into a ball and my lumbar sacral joint has collapsed back on itself, whilst from its base my spine is in kyphosis to the base of my neck. This has become more pronounced as my shoulders have collapsed over my chest as the muscles in my back have failed. Walking, sitting, standing, sleeping – everything is now painful and increasingly so.

In October 2004, my doctor referred me to The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. The first doctor I saw there undertook a very thorough examination (2 hours) and came up with a care plan: I would be referred to a neuro-urologist, an appropriate specialist to deal with my colo-rectal problems and when these reports were in I would be admitted for intensive inpatient physiotherapy. He told me I could expect to be in hospital for several months.

Unfortunately the person to whom I was referred to investigate my colo-rectal problems was a Gastroenterologist. She conducted an extremely painful rectal exam, told me “everything is quite fine up there but you will never recover”, “we must get you to stop worrying about your body so much” and “you’ve been reading the anatomy books haven’t you” - complete with wagging finger in the air. A year later when my GP re-referred me as she had become certain something had been missed, this person admitted she had been acting outside of her specialty and could not further any more investigations. She had also acted against the psychiatric advice in her hands that my physical problems were not a psychological manifestation but most likely due to organic damage from the abuse. This person formed the opinion my problems were psychological. She was a very famous doctor and current president of the British Medical Association. Her colleagues have now reluctantly proved some of the damage to my body but it has been like getting blood out of a stone. The first thing said to me by the person who took over was “we don’t normally do anything for people like you”.

I went back to the Orthopaedic Hospital and the boss of the unit I had been referred to saw me this time. This man, Joseph Cowan, basically told me he did not believe a word I said and that my attitude needed to improve. He said he might admit me to his unit if my attitude did improve. I asked for a second opinion, which he organised. I then complained about the way this man had treated me and he wrote to the other doctors I had been referred to asking them not to see me as I had complained about him. This is against the General Medical Council’s guidelines and clearly highly unethical. I have since found out under freedom of information laws that the maximum time from GP referral to admission to doctor Cowans unit is 21 weeks. He kept me out of his unit on spurious, manipulative unprofessional grounds for a year whilst my physical health deteriorated and then ensured they were not investigated thoroughly when those investigations started proving useful to me and damaging to him.

The body of evidence that I am now being deliberately denied medical care in the UK is now overwhelming. Perhaps this is to protect reputations of these doctors who early misdiagnosed my situation without proper investigation, perhaps the reasons are more nefarious. I do not say this lightly and have documented evidence. This has been allowed to progress to the point where frankly it threatens my life. At the current time, despite my knowing quite clearly much of what is wrong, there is no overall understanding of my situation from the doctors, no care plan or treatment in prospect, after three years of reluctant investigations. I am having to fight tooth and nail for needed investigations and spend all my money and now go into debt to pay for them privately.

The latest manifestation of this is that when I see a doctor now they say “even if we discover what is wrong with you we don’t think there is anything we can do to help”. Talk about “putting the cart before the horse”. How can you know you won’t be able to help in the future when you admit you don’t know what is wrong now? This is seemingly an attempt to evade British negligence laws, which demand some intervention must have been possible before negligence can be proved. The doctors here don’t seem to understand I don’t want to prove negligence - I want a body that works, or is at least not decaying further. My main concern and that of my family, friends and have the team supporting me psychologically is my physical survival.

If you know someone who can help, a philanthropist who might med-evac me out of this medical backwater,  a media person who can cast the spotlight of publicity on this case, or just friends who might know one of these people, please, do it.

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Filed under: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Medical History, Politics, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 6:47 am
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Friday, May 4, 2007

      Our Leaders: The Real Terrorists, Love Our Horrid Economics, The Starvation Of Children And War

On the eleventh of September last year I wrote, “It is the fifth anniversary of September the eleventh and everyone is making lots of noise about it. It was indeed a horrific and unwarranted act, debased and obscene in every way. I do not wish to pretend that it was not that.

However since September the eleventh, 2001, a total of approximately fifty four million, seven hundred and fifty thousand children have died needlessly in the third world because of the economics of market forces that the terrorists so hated”.

Some one pointed out this article, “Rockerfeller Admitted Goal of Microchipped Population” you will be as shocked as I was. Rockerfeller admitted to some guy, apparantly, that 911 was a set up, as was womens lib (to enslave women to work and free children to be indoctrinated by the state) which was also funded by the Rockerfeller’s. A reduction in world population is something else on the agenda apparantly.

So the real terrorists love our horrid economics, the starvation of children, the wars, oil, global warming, the lot. They are our leaders of society in business and politics. No wonder Blair looks so like Thatcher. Groomed from day one he was. Poor lad. If only he understood.

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Filed under: Politics Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 3:58 pm
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Wednesday, April 18, 2007

      God Bless America - And According To Their TV He is Doing So, Driving Round In A Four By Four (SUV), Viewing Real Estate In Which To Invest His Instant Get Rich Quick Profits.

I really loved California - at least that little bit I saw.  Not their TV though. According to American TV God is blessing America, driving round in a four by four (SUV), viewing real estate in which to invest His instant get rich quick profits.

This is not a paid for website.

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Filed under: Politics, Prose, Life Stumble it! zigzagzen @ 10:28 am
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