Steroid Victim Campaigners: Babs Diplock and Janice Fairbridge - How Eagerly MPs Strove to Help Them!

You've got to be joking! Read this archived article from The Northern Echo of 1 December 2003 and see how these two very ill, very courageous women got precious little help from MPs in trying to prevent other people from suffering as they had done, from the many appalling side-effects of prescribed steroids.

I've experienced the same kind of 'help' from the dozens of MPs to whom I've written on the subject, e.g. a pre-printed House of Commons postcard dated 18 July 01, which says:

The Rt. Hon. Menzies Campbell Q.C. MP
acknowledges with thanks the receipt of your communication of the
July 2001
the contents of which have been noted.

Well that was a ton of help! - MPs of all three main parties were similarly useless, though I remember there were some kind hand-written words from Charles Kennedy and from Boris Johnson, both of whom had realised that I was a human being.

Innocent British citizens are still being transformed into steroid victims in their thousands every year, even though I have informed MPs, journalists, broadcasters, doctors, etc precisely how to prevent this, but nobody does a damn thing about it, and most sufferers from drug-induced morbid obesity and its attendant host of chronic illnesses and disabilities are treated very poorly indeed by health professionals who are scandalously ill-informed about these matters and routinely add to the problems and suffering of the victims.

I urge you to read http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page. And if you are intending to vote in the forthcoming election you may like to think about how/whether your favoured candidate/party would act to put an end to this wholly unnecessary suffering. My MP, Nick Clegg, has done nothing effective about the matter as yet, though I have written to him many times about it.

See also prescribed steroids and HRT

Further correspondence with Nick Clegg, MP, Leader of the LibDems

First read my recent blog post about Nick Clegg.

Yesterday I received a letter from Nick Clegg, dated 25 February. It says:

Dear Mrs Wilde

I understand from my caseworker that you became very upset during the conversation she had with you today.

I am sorry for this. I believe she was trying to explain that my diary commitments make it impossible for me to come to visit you again and that there are limits to how much pressure I can put on the food industry and on Government to improve the information given to people on the damage that salt in the diet can cause.

She apologises for any misunderstanding caused.

Yours sincerely

Nick Clegg

Today I responded with an email to this email address: libdemleader@parliament.uk
I wrote:

Dear Mr Clegg

Thank you for your letter of apology, dated 25 February 2010. It really is incredible that, after all the letters and emails I have been sending to you since 2005 even before you were elected to Parliament, you still, apparently, have not actually read enough to know what I am wanting your help with! - I have not wasted my scant energy as a steroid victim writing to you countless times in order to ask you to "put pressure on the food industry"! Good grief! I've not asked you to put pressure on the food industry! - Have you never read any of my letters?

It is abundantly clear that the leader of the LibDem party is not interested in helping me or the many thousands of other suffering victims of drug-induced morbid obesity in this country, nor in preventing thousands of other people from becoming new victims of reckless prescribing by some NHS doctors so ignorant of the side-effects of the powerful drugs that they do not give the VITAL warning that while on the medication the patient should avoid eating any salt or food containing any added salt.

What use is a constituency MP who doesn't bother to read any of the letters from a disabled constituent who needs his help? No use at all.

I've got the message. The LibDem leader doesn't care about steroid victims.

Yours sincerely

Margaret Wilde (Ms)

Nick Clegg? - I don't think he'll be getting MY vote!

The other evening I had a phone call from a pleasant person called Angela, who was hoping to secure my vote for Nick Clegg, the incumbant LibDem MP in my constituency. I explained that although I had voted for him previously, I was not inclined to do so again because he had done nothing effective to help me as a steroid victim, and by extension had done nothing effective to help the scores of thousands of other victims of NHS medical negligence who suffer drug-induced obesity but have not been given the vital information they need to reduce or to prevent it. Patients are not being warned to avoid salt and salty food when taking steroids and HRT and the many other drugs that cause sodium and water retention, and so these drugs initiate morbid obesity and a host of other grave and painful health problems in the innocent patients.

My understanding of how Angela and I left it at the end of the phone call was that someone would ring me to arrange for one of the LibDem local councillors to come to see me to discuss the matter, because as a steroid victim I am too ill and disabled to go to see him at his 'surgery'. Instead, unfortunately, I received this afternoon a most unpleasant phone call from one of Clegg's staff, who clearly has a personal agenda and holds an entrenched position, and does not want people to know the truth about steroids and salt sensitivity and how obesity is caused. I asked her never to call me again as I had found the phone call very distressing. I suggest that such an abrasive, combative person is wholly unsuitable to ring ill, disabled people, and furthermore I find it disgraceful that a party worker should seek to deny a disabled constituent a visit from her MP or from one of her local councillors. Goodness knows we all pay a great deal of money for these privileged political beings who, we are told, "work for us", and we should at the very least be assured of courtesy and proper help.

If you would like to help me in my mission to prevent/reduce great and needless suffering you might like to write to my MP, Nick Clegg, at nickclegg@sheffieldhallam.org.uk asking him to visit me, Margaret Wilde, as soon as possible and not be in a rush as he was when he came in 2006.

If you want to read more about the politics of this matter and about Nick Clegg's previous involvement, see my 'political' page.

Prescribed Steroids: - Potential for Grave Harm. Poor prescribing practices.

It was reported yesterday (19 July 2006) in Britain's "Daily Telegraph" that the British Pharmacological Society has drawn attention to the widespread poor prescribing practices among doctors. See Overdosing doctors - Extracts:

"An alarming warning was issued yesterday by the British Pharmacological Society about the quality of training given to British doctors in the prescribing of drugs. Perversely, as the sophistication and variety of modern medicines have increased, so the amount of time devoted to prescribing skills in the medical curriculum has decreased.

At a briefing to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the society, a number of senior pharmacologists, including Mike Rawlins, chairman of the National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence, and David Webb, his Scottish counterpart, described what they clearly regarded as a significant failing in medical education.

Some patients, they said, were undoubtedly dying as a direct result of incorrect prescribing, and many others were having their conditions worsened or were suffering unnecessary complications. It was estimated that between five and 10 per cent of hospital admissions were a result of adverse drug reactions - most of which were avoidable. "

"A doctor who is poorly trained in pharmacology is likely to be more susceptible to heavily advertised and aggressively promoted drugs, and to fashions in prescribing that suit the interests of drug manufacturers more than individual patients. "

I was glad to see this report, especially following on as it does, the Sunday Telegraph's report 'Sleaze in the Medical Profession' of July 9th. Doctors who take drug firm 'freebies' face being struck off -

Extract:

"Last month, a report by Consumers International, a campaign group, said that doctors were continuing to accept kickbacks, gifts, free samples and consulting agreements in exchange for prescribing or promoting drugs. It said that such inducements accounted for a substantial part of the £33 billion spent on product promotion by the industry worldwide each year. In February, it emerged that a senior manager at Abbott Laboratories, the drug company, had taken a hospital doctor to a lap dancing club.

Abbott also admitted providing senior hospital consultants with Wimbledon tickets and taking 63 doctors to a greyhound race meeting in Manchester.

The junkets came to light when a "concerned member of the industry" alerted the authorities. Abbott was later suspended from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, but none of the doctors was disciplined."

As a steroid victim myself, damaged and made morbidly obese by being inappropriately prescribed HRT (without hormone levels being tested first) and by inadequate monitoring and testing thereafter, I feel peculiarly well-placed to add my critical comments.

We are not just badly served by our extremely highly paid doctors, we are ill-served by our politicians and by the Department of Health and by the Parliamentary Select Committees and many other individuals and agencies and professional bodies who should be monitoring these matters. - I wrote well over 30 letters to MPs and Select Committees, medics, scientists, media people and others in 2001 about the dire consequences of inappropriate prescribing - often in high dose - of certain steroids and of HRT and of amitriptyline, an antidepressant drug. And I have sent hundreds of letters since then. To date I have received only one helpful reply - from Professor Sir Richard Doll, agreeing with what I had written about the obesity problems caused by poor prescribing and indicating that these could be lessened by diuretics and/or eating less salt/sodium, a fact I had already deduced. He wrote that all doctors should know this. - Mine didn't - and furthermore, mine CATEGORICALLY refused me diuretics when I asked to try them!

It is over 50 years since steroids were first prescribed and it is beyond belief that most doctors are still unaware in practice of their potential for causing sodium and water retention and morbid obesity and the multitude of of serious health problems attendant on these - high blood pressure, osteoporosis, most types of cancer, stroke, high cholesterol and other degenerative diseases.

If you have gained a lot of weight and become obese because of taking prescribed steroids or HRT (or any other prescription drug) then I have very good news for you! - You have gained weight because of excess water stored in your body - mainly in the veins. You are suffering from what is called hypervolaemia - that is, abnormally high blood volume - and it is easy to reduce this abnormally high blood volume by losing some of the excess water. Another name for the problem is sodium retention. - This is the name that often appears in the reference books doctors have, that they use to look up correct doses of drugs they prescribe and side-effects that can result from taking the drugs.

To prevent or reduce the weight gained, you need to cut down on salt and salty food, because the sodium retention has made you sensitive to salt.

I invite you to visit my website - www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk -

and in particular How to lose a lot of the weight gained because of prescribed steroids

and http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html