Leading British retailers such as Boots and Tesco will be invited to bid to open GPs' surgeries in their stores.

Fruit, veg and a trip to the GP as stores are asked to open surgeries

Extract:

"Leading retailers such as Boots and Tesco will be invited to bid to open GPs' surgeries in their stores in areas with too few doctors under an initiative to be announced by the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, today.

Advertisements calling for "experienced healthcare providers" to apply for four contracts initially worth £30m over five years will be placed in the national and local press this month.

Entrepreneurial GPs, social enterprises and companies in the FTSE 100 will be asked to apply. But supermarkets will have to team up with existing GP groups before they can be considered. The expectation is that supermarkets would provide the space for GPs to open surgeries within their stores, an idea in which several have expressed interest.

The initiative, first mooted in the 2006 health white paper, is designed to increase the number of GPs in deprived areas that have the fewest doctors.

The first four primary care trust areas to benefit will be Hartlepool, County Durham, Mansfield and Great Yarmouth, all areas that have significantly fewer GPs than the national average of 57.9 for every 100,000 people. Great Yarmouth and Waveney PCT has 48.5; Hartlepool PCT 47.5; County Durham PCT 46.5; and Nottinghamshire county teaching PCT 43.6.

All four areas will have their centres set up by the end of the coming year, and 26 further areas are expected to join the programme in the coming months.

As services will be offered by private providers, the initiative means GPs will not be covered by the controversial GPs' contract - which allowed GPs to opt out of providing 24-hour cover - and so can offer "breakfast", evening and Saturday morning surgeries. Last week the Commons public accounts committee condemned the government's handling of this contract as "shambolic"."

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Evidence-based medicine? - You're joking...)o:

Medical 'experts' who assert their arrogant, prejudiced views with no scientific evidence to back them do terrible harm. Unfortunately there are far too many people who lack the courage to dare to believe them to be other than saints...)o: - Their biased opinions should not be called evidence at all. Very often their 'diagnoses' are mere guesswork. But doctors are extremely powerful and most people are scared of criticising them in case they 'get into trouble' in some way for doing so.

Think back to what doctors used to advise about how babies should be placed in their cots. - They used to advise mothers to lay their babies on their stomachs. - There was no EVIDENCE for the correctness of this advice. It was later shown that it is safer for babies to be laid onto their backs and not their stomachs. - Were there any apologies from the medical profession? - Of course not! - It was Anne Diamond who, after sadly losing a baby to cot death, fought for the truth to be told about how best to lay a baby down, and since her successful campaign there has a significant fall in the incidence of cot death in the United Kingdom. - Many people have reason to be profoundly grateful to Anne Diamond and her 'Back to Sleep' message.

Similarly, it was Esther Rantzen that fought to curb the terrible consequences of the medical profession's reckless overprescribing of tranquillisers, which even decades later are still wreaking havoc on many, many lives.

I am myself struggling to draw attention to the horrific harm that prescribed steroids, HRT and many other drugs do when prescribed by doctors unfamiliar with the side-effects and negligent about monitoring patients who innocently take these dangerous drugs because the doctor has prescribed them. My website is www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk

If you visit my website you will see that there has never been any scientific evidence to support the usual medical advice about how to reduce obesity. See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html and Obesity and the Salt Connection

I wrote to the Power Inquiry about the abuse of power by the medical profession, but they did not pursue the matter at all...)o:

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Friends of Sally Clark, who died on Friday, have attacked the authorities for failing to support her after she was freed from prison.

Sally Clark was 'let down' by authorities - Observer article

Extracts:

"Friends of Sally Clark, who died on Friday, yesterday attacked the authorities for failing to support her after she was freed from prison.

Clark was wrongly jailed for the murder of her two sons and was later cleared. Angela Cannings, who was also falsely convicted for the murder of her two sons and was close to Clark, launched an angry broadside against health and social service teams for leaving the former solicitor to cope without professional help."

"Penny Mellor, a friend of the Clark family, said that Mrs Clark's time in prison had left a stain on the rest of her life. She was assaulted by other prisoners and lived in fear that they would try to poison her food. 'If you've been convicted as a child killer you become a focal point for all the hatred in prison,' Mellor said.

Mrs Clark, 42, was found guilty of murdering her sons, Christopher and Harry, but was cleared by the Court of Appeal in 2003 in a landmark ruling that highlighted serious flaws in the use of evidence provided by expert witnesses. She was found to have been wrongly convicted of the two murders after medical evidence emerged which had not been presented at her trial.

Professor Sir Roy Meadow gave evidence during her trial, claiming that the probability of two natural unexplained cot deaths in the family was 73 million to one. That figure was disputed by the Royal Statistical Society and other medical experts, who said the odds of a second cot death in a family were around 200-1."

I wonder whether Professor Sir Roy Meadow ever even apologised to Mrs Clark or the other women whose lives he destroyed when he wrongly accused them of murdering their babies? - I doubt it.

Victims of medical negligence also get little or no help from the authorities, and the so-called complaints procedures are just a waste of time and effort for the complainants.

Patients experience very little benefit despite huge increases in cash for the NHS.

Patients miss out as NHS cash floods in

Extract:

"Billions of pounds of taxpayers' money pumped into the National Health Service has gone on improving the salaries of GPs and consultants and paying for increased pensions rather than on improvements in patient care and frontline services.

A damning report by the highly respected health think-tank, the King's Fund, reveals that productivity in the health service has actually declined, despite the huge injection of cash.

The report reveals that only 30 pence in every pound of the Government's record NHS budget has been aimed at directly improving patient care. As well as salaries, the rest has gone on a growing bill for clinical negligence payouts and rising drug costs."

Patients seem to come last in importance for the NHS. Doctors' pay and drug company profits seem to be the priorities.

Pregnant women should avoid alcohol. - New warning.

'No alcohol' warning for pregnant women

Extract:

"Women will be told not to drink while pregnant or even when trying for a baby in controversial government guidelines which will mean warning labels being put on bottles of wine, spirits and beer.

The plea for total abstinence follows growing fears over the rise among binge drinking among young women and concern that maternal drinking can cause possible brain damage in the womb. The new warnings are being fiercely resisted by the drinks industry on the grounds it contradicts the Department of Health's own official health advice to expectant mothers, which allows up to two units a day - the equivalent of a single glass of wine - once or twice a week."

Of particular concern is the prevention of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, which sometimes results from drinking alcohol during pregnancy.

Pregnant women should also be strongly urged to cut down on salt and salty food while they are pregnant. This would benefit both their own health and that of the baby-to-be. See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/pregnant_mothers.html (Extract: If you eat as little salt/sodium as possible you will avoid unhealthy weight gain and also protect yourself from high blood pressure and will lower the risk of pre-eclampsia. You will suffer less tiredness during the pregnancy.") and also see http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/sodium_foods.html

Do you often wake up with a headache or a migraine? or with the visual disturbance that precedes a migraine? flashing lights? jagged lines...?

Do you often wake up with a headache or a migraine? or with the visual disturbance that precedes a migraine? flashing lights? jagged lines? blurred vision? Not finding tablets very helpful?

These symptoms are often caused by salt sensitivity or by sodium retention. - You may like to try cutting down on salt/sodium. (You can be sensitive to salt even if you do not eat a lot of salt.) - Why not try it? - It costs nothing and does not involve taking drugs/pain-killers.)

There are many illnesses and many symptoms that can be cured or made less severe by eating less salt. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html and http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/sodium_foods.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Is your cholesterol level high? Do you take statins?

If you want to feel younger, forget your statins - Sunday Telegraph article by Dr James LeFanu

Extract:

"A doctor accused of wittingly prescribing useless or possibly lethal drugs would vehemently - and understandably - deny it. This makes it rather difficult to oppose the prevailing medical consensus on statins - the cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to four million people in Britain at a cost of £1 billion a year.

That's quite a sum. It could pay the salaries of 700,000 nurses or build two spanking new teaching hospitals.

An even bigger sum is £15 billion. That is the profit the pharmaceutical industry made last year from this, the most profitable class of drugs ever invented. They are so profitable that the latest statins to reach the market came with a £600 million promotion budget, to "promote" the notion to family doctors and policymakers that the lower the cholesterol the better, and that at least half the population would benefit from the drugs.

But it is not so. Statins are useless for 95 per cent of those taking them, while exposing all to the hazard of serious side-effects. Hence my ever-growing file of letters from those who regrettably have had to find this out for themselves, illustrated by this all-too-typical tale from Roger Andrews of Hertfordshire, first prescribed statins after an operation for an aortic aneurism (that he had cleverly diagnosed himself)."

The drug-free way to reduce your cholesterol level (or to prevent ever developing problems with cholesterol) is to cut down on your salt/sodium intake, because you are much more likely to have cholesterol problems if you are sensitive to salt.

And remember, high cholesterol levels are often the result of taking prescribed steroids or HRT, because these drugs often cause salt sensitivity and obesity.

Remember - many prescribed medications do more harm than good.

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

NHS is wasting money by using costly locations for junior doctor job interviews.

NHS waste thousands on doctor interviews

Extract:

"The NHS is spending thousands of pounds to hold job interviews with junior doctors in luxury hotels, football stadiums and even at a racecourse.

Despite the health service having a deficit of more than £500 million at the end of the last financial year, meeting rooms in hospitals have been shunned in favour of expensive external locations which include the Reebok Stadium, home to Bolton Wanderers, and Newmarket Racecourse."

This is disgraceful - and would still be disgraceful even if the NHS were not strapped for cash.

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Disabled patients were humiliated and treated cruelly by carers in a care home. The carers have been jailed.

Carers jailed for 'humiliating' disabled patients

Extract:

"Three "cruel and despicable" care home staff who encouraged patients to fight and racially abuse each other were each jailed for six months today.

During an "abhorrent" year-long reign of terror they systematically preyed on the mentally and physically vulnerable from behind a facade of love and concern, the court heard.

In one incident a carer encouraged a Down's Syndrome patient to "beat up" a fellow resident afflicted with autism."

Are you a Steroid Victim? - Do you suffer from Steroid-Induced Cushing's Syndrome? - Then you are also "sensitive to salt". - Read on.

A personal note from me: - Almost all of the following side-effects are not side-effects of the drug itself; they are the effects of the doctor not observing the correct protocol for prescribing steroids: so they are the effects of being prescribed too high a dose and/or being prescribed it for too long a time and almost certainly because of not being adequately or appropriately monitored while taking the drug - and CRUCIALLY of not being warned to avoid eating salt or food containing added salt while taking the medication, because these drugs cause sodium retention and sensitivity to salt, which can lead to massive fluid retention and morbid obesity. - i.e. the side-effects are the effects of MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE. - There are hundreds of thousands of steroid victims the world over - victims of medical negligence on a VAST scale...)o:

The following list of side effects that steroid victims suffer from is taken from one of the webpages of the Steroid Warning Network

LIST OF SOME STEROID SIDE EFFECTS

WEIGHT GAIN
HYPERTENSION
SKIN ATROPHY (wasting away)
MYOPATHY (muscle disease/weakness)
IMPAIRED WOUND HEALING
POST TRAUMATIC (after-shock) STRESS (anxiety, fear)
SUPPRESSION (lowering) OF IMMUNE RESPONSE (defense of body against virus, bacteria)
SUBCUTANEOUS (under skin) TISSUE ATROPHY (decrease)
MOOD SWINGS (ranging from Euphoria to Suicidal thoughts)
STEROID PSYCHOSIS (including Hallucinations, Mania, Delusions)
SKIN INFECTIONS
DEPRESSION
HAIR LOSS
EXCESSIVE FACIAL HAIR GROWTH
INGROWN HAIRS
ARTHRITIS
CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE
OSTEOPOROSIS
CONTACT DERMATITIS
ACNE, ECZEMACYSTS, RASHES
LESIONS, BLISTERS
OPEN-ANGLED GLAUCOMA
FATIGUE
CATARACTS
MENSTRUAL IRREGULARITIES
PREMATURE MENOPAUSE
SECONDARY DIABETES MELLITUS
SLEEP DISORDERS
WATER RETENTION
GROWTH RETARDATION IN CHILDREN
CUSHING'S SYNDROME (affects almost every system in the body; moonface, humpback, central obesity, chronic fatigue and other symptoms)
STEROID INDUCED ASTHMA
HEADACHES
SHAKINESS AND TREMORS
EASY BRUISING
ADHESIVE ARACHNOIDITIS (from Epidural Steroid Injections)
NECROSIS (a localized death of tissue)
OSTEONECROSIS
INCREASED SUSCEPTIBILITY TO INFECTION
REDISTRIBUTION OF BODY FAT
INCREASE IN CIRCULATING BLOOD FATS (Triglycerides)
TOXIC SHOCK
MUSCLE CRAMPING, JOINT PAIN

A person with steroid-induced Cushing Syndrome suffers from the symptoms of BOTH CUSHINGS and the Systemic effects from the STEROIDS. Cushing's syndrome can take years to recover from. Many of the devastating effects from steroids are permanent and life-threatening.

I am a steroid victim. - I am trying to put an end to the medical negligence that results in more and more steroid victims, and gives damaging advice to the existing steroid victims. - I need my MP to visit me because I am too ill and too disabled to go to see him at his surgery. - He came to see me nearly two years ago but did not understand about the problems of steroid victims because he had not read the information I had sent to him. He does not seem to intend visiting me again despite my many requests to him to do so.

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 before.


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk and in particular,
page http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.

Detectives are investigating seven deaths among residents at an elderly people's home in England

Care home shuts after two arrests as police investigate deaths

Extracts:

"Detectives are investigating seven deaths among residents at an elderly people's home, which was closed yesterday following the arrest of a nurse and a chef on suspicion of poisoning.

The couple were released on bail after police questions about the death of 97-year-old Lucy Cox at the 16-bed private Parkfields home, in the Somerset village of Butleigh, near Glastonbury.

The pair were named as Rachel Baker, 45, a registered nurse who ran the home for 19 years until resigning in January, and her 48-year-old husband, Leigh."

"Health and safety rules at the home were flouted regularly, there was inadequate staffing, and muddled record keeping. The report, which included evidence from 10 residents, found the management to be "poor" with residents confined to their bedrooms for long periods, amid low standards of cleanliness and health care."

Dangerous side-effects of sleeping pills, including Zolpidem.

Pills can make you 'drive in your sleep'

Extract:

"America's most popular sleeping pills can cause users to drive, eat and make phone calls while asleep, the US Food and Drug Administration warned yesterday.

The FDA said it had asked manufacturers of 13 sedative-hypnotic sleep aids to place strong new warnings about such potentially dangerous side-effects on the labels of their drugs.

One of the drugs, zolpidem, is widely prescribed in Britain under six different brand names. The FDA also received reports of people making phone calls, buying items over the internet and having sex under the influence of the drugs."

If you can avoid taking prescribed medications, you will obviously avoid the harm they often do. - To improve sleep without using drugs, one of the little-known ways is to reduce your salt intake. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/conditions.html - Since this is a completely safe measure which has many health benefits, why not give it a try?

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)