Creation and Failure of the NHSChapter 1, The Failure of Conventional Medicine: Past failure has always led to further demands for resources, which have usually been found, but always with a similar lack of success—and so the cycle continues.by Steven Scrutton10 August 2011 
The book's introduction is here. Chapter 1 - Synopsis This Chapter looks at the original hopes and expectations for the NHS, and contrasts these initial hopes, plans and intentions with the current reality. It seeks to identify a new, more convincing reason for the failure of the NHS, both in terms of its finances, and its impact on the health of our nation. In doing so, it comes to a radical conclusion that the rest of the book goes on to support - that ConMed (conventional medicine) has dominated and monopolised it, virtually bankrupted it, and has failed not only to live up to the health promises it made, but has been instrumental in causing an unprecedented epidemic of sickness, ill-health and disease. Alongside this, the NHS-ConMed Establishment has sidelined traditional therapies, and lost the millennia-old insights about how illness is best treated. 1. Political ideals, hopes and expectationsThe Labour Government of Clement Attlee established the UK's National Health Service on 5th July 1948. When the Health Secretary, Anauren Bevan, its chief architect, opened the world's first and most comprehensive health service it was the realisation of a socialist dream, the cornerstone of the Labour Government's commitment to rebuilding a nation impoverished by war, and struggling to recover. A Land Fit for HeroesThe creation of the NHS was an enormous achievement. The Labour government had won the 1945 General Election largely because people decided they wanted to build a 'land fit for heroes' following the traumas and sacrifices of the Second World War. The patchwork provision of medical services and health insurance schemes that had existed before had left millions of people with little or no reliable health care. The NHS transformed this. The socialist ideal - free health care for all at the point of useThe creation of the NHS fulfilled the socialist ideal of a health service available to every citizen, regardless of status and wealth, and free at the point of use. The nations's health - the best medicine for allIn future, everyone would have access to the best medicine available. The concept was simple. Look after the health of the population, and people would be happier, more productive, and the nation would become more prosperous. There was no concept that one single form of medicine would predominate; or that 'traditional' medicine would be excluded - just the provision of the 'best' medicine for all the people. Indeed, how could it have been so? Nye Bevan himself was a supporter, and user of homeopathy himself! Financing the NHS - a reducing commitment?Moreover, there was optimism at the time that once everyone received the 'best' medical treatment available, the massive costs of the new NHS would begin to stabilise, and thereafter decline as the health of the nation improved. In 1948 there was no sense that health expenditure would escalate in the way that it has done. Why should it? Sick people would receive treatment - and get well.
There appears to have been a naive assumption that, although costs might rise in the early stages, ultimately they would be stabilised through an improvement in the general health of the population Doyle 1983.
2. The Reality - the vicious circle of NHS failureThe reality of the NHS, now over 6 decades old, is quite different. If the hopes and expectations of 1948 are compared with what we see today the only conclusion can be one of total disappointment. Whilst year-on-year an ever-increasing amount of money has been poured into the NHS there has been no corresponding improvement in the nation's health. The UK population is not getting healthier. Instead, we have witnessed a vicious circle of repeated NHS failure:
So past failure has always led to further demands for resources, which have usually been found, but always with a similar lack of success - and so the cycle continues. This unhealthy cycle of sickness, demands for resources, ever-increasing investment, followed by increasing levels of sickness, has been allowed to continue, unchanged decade-by-decade, government-by-government. Ongoing and continuous failure demands a different explanation, a new diagnosis, one that makes sense of what is actually happening - on the one hand, the enormous resource commitment given to NHS every year, and on the other, what is happening to the state of our health as a nation. The cost of the NHSThe NHS has proven to be an enormously expensive creation where costs continue to rise exponentially. As a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it represented 3.46% in 1949, and this has risen annually to an estimated 7.71% in 2005, and continues to rise. The process of political parties 'bidding up' health expenditure has had amazing results over the years. In 1949, £437m was spent on the NHS, representing £9 per head. Now NHS spending represents £1,567 per head - a staggering increase of 174 times the 1949 figure. Moreover, the rate of growth in NHS spending has increased in recent years. In the 13 years of ‘New’Labour government (1997-2010), expenditure on the NHS increased massively - from £46 billion in 1997 to an estimated £120 billion in 2010 - the biggest increase in NHS funding since its inception. The new Coalition Government is committed to maintaining, even increasing this level of spending, even though all other departments are to be drastically reduced. The political struggle to spend more on the NHS, and to get the NHS to work, has brought down successive governments since 1951 - and it continues to do so. Yet despite this, the NHS continues to demand more resources, and remains unable to cope with the demands for health care. It regularly over-spends on even these current, vastly increased budgets. The massive 6-decade NHS spending spree has ensured at least one situation - the UK population is now more heavily 'drugged' than ever before - and perhaps with the exception of the USA, it has become one of the most heavily drugged nations in the world. So, given this investment, what has the impact been on our health? Epidemic levels of sicknessThe amount of sickness and disease in the UK is now at unprecedented levels - and the situation seems to be getting worse. The pattern of illness has certainly shifted - away from the old 'acute' diseases that once killed people in large numbers (cholera, typhoid, smallpox, influenza, et al) and towards the 'chronic' illnesses that do not necessarily kill, but which makes our quality of life increasingly miserable, especially in older age, which in turn makes increasing demands for both medical and social care. Those familiar with the film 'Brief Encounter' made in 1946 (the year prior to the inauguration of the NHS) Dr Harvey (who had a 'brief encounter' with Laura), worked in a hospital. Their affair was conducted in the afternoon as he was apparently able to finish his work by 12.30pm! I cannot imagine any scriptwriter being able to get away with that scenario now! Perhaps we were less ill in those pre-NHS days! Certainly, we are living in the midst of an epidemic of disease. Diseases like autism, Alzheimer's disease, ADHD, cancer (in all its forms), asthma, allergy, COPD, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, and so on, and so on - are all at levels that would have been unimaginable when the NHS was established. Chapter 5 discusses this situation further. So increased expenditure on the NHS is not leading to improved health. And neither our politicians, nor NHS management, is seeking an explanation that makes sense of this situation. This represents a massive failure of political and professional insight. It is the failure to recognise that what is important in health care is not about the AMOUNT of resources being invested - it is what the money is being spent on. It is time that politicians began to explain these two parallel trends - increased sickness and increased spending. Any other business would have done so many years ago. The fact is clear The more money the NHS spends on ConMed, the sicker we are becoming. An 'under-funded' NHS?So how do politicians and managers currently explain the failure of the NHS? The most common one is to claim that the NHS is 'under-funded'. Public dissatisfaction with the NHS, and its failure to deliver 'good health', has always been focused almost exclusively on resources - doctors just never have enough of them! This is the first lie that should be put to rest - forever! The efforts of the ‘New’ Labour government (1997-2010) should certainly have done so; but the NHS remains in the midst of ongoing financial pressures - with demands being made everywhere for increased resources. If the NHS-ConMed had been capable of maintaining health and overcoming illness and disease, it would have done so by now. As it is, even with the prodigious resources spent on the NHS, there is little corresponding improvement in health. A badly-managed NHS?The other favourite scapegoat for NHS failure over the decades has been 'bad management'. It is inefficient, and wastes money. There are too many bureaucrats, and too few doctors and nurses. Or the entire NHS edifice is just organised in the wrong way. From the mid-1960's onwards, rising NHS costs have led to a succession of policies to increase 'patient throughput', reduce waiting lists, and to make management more efficient. And so, with monotonous regularity, the NHS embarks on 're-organisations' and 're-structures' - in other words, new ways of packaging the same, old, failed product. The ‘New’ Labour government made fundamental changes to the way hospital and GP services were organised. Now, the Coalition government is undertaking another, even more fundamental re-organisation. 'Patient choice' is now the new 'buzz' word. But the 'choice' on offer within the NHS continues to be an exclusive diet of ConMed - the same failed medicine that has been on offer for over 60 years - only it is to be delivered more efficiently, of course! Each successive NHS re-organisation has failed. And the NHS will continue to fail until the real problem has been properly identified. Since 1947 the NHS has placed all its eggs increasingly in one single basket. It has become a monopoly supplier of just one type of medicine. And it is this medicine, ConMed, that is failing. What is NHS-ConMed - a definitionConMed is shorthand for 'Conventional Medicine'. It is the medicine that we routinely receive within the NHS - whether we visit our GP or our local hospital. Indeed, the NHS and ConMed are now so inextricably entwined that the medical establishment can be called ‘NHS-ConMed’. NHS-ConMed has three distinct strands - medical drugs, medical testing, and surgery. Medical DrugsConMed is a medical practice based on the pharmaceutical drug culture that has developed rapidly over the last 100 years, although its roots go back to the 12th and 13th centuries. ConMed drugs are usually based on highly toxic substances, and they have been proven to be, with monotonous regularity, ineffective, unsafe, and usually excessively expensive. ConMed is often called 'scientific' medicine. However, as will be seen in Chapter 6, every ConMed drug found to be dangerous or ineffective has previously been subjected to the most rigorous 'scientific' testing, and then subjected to statutory, 'science-based' regulation. So the 'science' underlying ConMed drugs has been proven to be ineffective with monotonous regularity, and certainly quite incapable of protecting patients, or making them better. Indeed the 'science' of NHS-ConMed drugs has been found wanting so often that it should never be called 'scientific' medicine. Medical science, as a guarantee of drug effectiveness and safety, has been a long-running, and unmitigated disaster. NHS-ConMed's relationship with 'science' has been the one of the greatest confidence tricks of the 20th century (adding further justification for the term 'ConMed' to describe it). The almost constant and continual claims of 'medical breakthroughs'have never materialised. They have had more to do with skilful marketing than delivering health. Each new 'breakthrough' has been found wanting, whilst disease is growing in epidemic proportions. Most of the 'magic pills' of NHS-ConMed have been banned, withdrawn, or been brought into serious question - as they have been found to be ineffective, or dangerous, or both! Medical TestingNHS-ConMed has also developed a plethora of diagnostic medical testing. Blood, urine, and virtually any other human tissue can now be tested, and X-rays and various forms of scanning techniques can diagnose what appears to be going wrong within the body. These tests are based on NHS-ConMed's unique need to know the pathology of disease. Medical testing enables it to search for clues about what it is going wrong, or what is 'abnormal' within the body, before seeking to 'correct' it. So whilst some, but certainly not all testing is relatively harmless (certainly in comparison to the dangers of drug treatment), often the primary purpose, and usually the outcome of testing, leads to the prescription of ConMed drugs. Moreover, whilst medical testing can often offer interesting insights into what is happening within the body, it has introduced an ever-increasing complexity to the way illness is understood and diagnosed. It has led to a 'mechanistic' rather than a 'dynamic' view of human health. It finds that the body is 'out of balance' - but rarely asks the reason 'why?' It just observes, and then intervenes, usually with drugs whose purpose is to 'force' it back into 'balance' - usually with disastrous consequences. Surgical OperationsWhilst medical testing usually comes before drug treatment, NHS-ConMed's other main weapon usually follows it. Surgery becomes the main option when drugs have failed, or indeed, when they have made the patient considerably sicker than before. The achievements of surgery have increased enormously over the last century. Indeed NHS-ConMed's reputation has been gained largely through the brilliant skills displayed in modern surgical interventions. It can rebuild the body after major accidents and injuries. It can remove diseased and cancerous tissue, and do so in comparative safety. It can replace diseased organs and limbs. Indeed, even surgery as complex as this is now often described as 'routine'. Yet rarely does surgery make us completely better, or better for very long. As with drugs, surgery rarely deals with the root cause of illness - it manipulates and trims the body so that it works better, usually after it has become badly diseased or damaged, and ConMed drug treatment has failed, or created a worse situation than it began with. The outcome of surgery is certainly to make us less whole, less complete, less viable. Surgery, like drugs and medical testing, demonstrates the same lack of an holistic understanding of what makes the human body healthy, and keeps it so. It views the body as a machine, a mechanism, and sets out to repair its working parts. However necessary surgery might become, it fails to ask more dynamic and fundamental questions:
Surgery is NHS-ConMed's last resort, used after the failure of drug treatment. Indeed, it is often required to overcome the damaging impact of ConMed drugs. The Language of WarAll three branches of NHS-ConMed display a spectacular degree of knowledge and insight into how the body works, and how it functions when it is 'normal'. Their modus operandi is to discover what has become 'abnormal' within the body, and then to 'attack' it, to declare war on it, in order to get it working properly again. Indeed, the language of NHS-ConMed is the language of warfare. It seeks to make the body conform to what it considers to be 'normal'; it tries to force the body into 'conformity'; its drugs, both in their purpose and name, set out to oppose ('anti'), 'suppress', 'block', and 'inhibit' the normal functioning of the body. For instance,
NHS-ConMed intervention can often appear to succeed - if only for a short time. But this 'mechanistic' view of health and the human body, and the way it seeks to oppose the way it functions, only suppresses illness for a short time. Eventually, an illness that has been suppressed in this way returns, often in a more virulent and extreme form. And it will continue to do so unless and until the underlying cause of the illness is treated. All traditional therapies do this by assisting rather than opposing the body's own natural healing processes. ConMed, alone amongst medical therapies, persistently and intentionally fails to do so (Chapter 4). The apparent successes of NHS-ConMed have been based on an extraordinary confidence trick, perpetrated by a hugely successful propaganda campaign waged by the giant multi-national pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) throughout the 20th Century. Alternatively, traditional medical therapies tell us (each in their own way) that ConMed's approach to health is wrong, that it is harmful, that medical therapy only works if it seeks to support and assist the body’s own natural healing mechanisms (Chapter 4). Indeed, perhaps the most important defining characteristic of NHS-ConMed is that despite its knowledge of the body's self-healing capacity it fails totally to utilise it! This, alongside its arrogance in thinking that it can 'out-think' and 'out-guess' the human organism in forcing in back to normality, is the central reason for its past, present, and future failure. 4. Redefining NHS Failure - the ConMed MonopolyThe NHS-ConMed MonopolySuccessive UK governments have nurtured and financed the growth and power of the NHS-ConMed establishment, and this partnership has produced a monopoly market in the UK for medical care - a monopoly market that has some interesting and unique characteristics.
And as with all monopolies, lack of competition ensures that Big Pharma companies can charge virtually what they like for their drugs and services. This means that NHS-ConMed costs much more than it should do. The government uses our money to pay for our treatment on our behalf - and with a monopolistic disregard for cost-efficiency. InformationThis NHS-ConMed monopoly is not just about medical services. It also determines the information patients are given about their health, and the treatment available to them. The NHS-ConMed Establishment diagnoses patients, and informs them about how they can be treated. Invariably patients are offered ConMed - and enticed into accepting it by offering it - after all, it is entirely free of any charge! But giving patients information about the dangers of ConMed treatment is more problematical. Patients are told about some of the dangers, the ones that are known and accepted at the time. But the history of ConMed treatment is that it takes many years before the real dangers become known; and several more years before it is accepted that they are as dangerous as the ultimately prove to be. The NHS does not inform patients about other medical therapies, about how, and in what way, they can be helpful. And any patient who knows enough to ask about them are invariably told that they will not work, that they are not effective, and that only NHS-ConMed treatment has been 'scientifically proven'. The NHS-ConMed establishment is now so powerful that it dominates the opinions and policies of political parties, governments, the NHS, and many of the health charities and patient support groups. It is even able to dominate the information that patients get through the media. Therefore, what most people know about health matters is what the NHS-ConMed establishment wants us to know. The Failure of NHS-ConMedThe fathers of the NHS never intended to provide one form of medical treatment with a monopoly, but the NHS has done just this. Since its inception the NHS rapidly sold out to ConMed, devoting its resources almost totally to it until the two are now virtually indistinguishable. The last 6o years have witnessed a never-ending cycle of political, financial and medical demands for more and more spending on just one form of medicine - ConMed. NHS failure is the result of investing its resources on a medical system that has always failed, and continues to do so. Given its performance, over centuries, this has perhaps been the ultimate triumph of optimism over experience! In what other sphere of human experience, and certainly in business practice, would we be happy to spend more and more without any clear indication of gaining any benefit? Moreover, if we are hoping for future 'miracles' from NHS-ConMed we will wait in vain. ConMed will never work - for the simple reason that it is based on principles that are fundamentally wrong. It is a medical system that is expensive, largely ineffective, and certainly dangerous. It is a medicine that will not work regardless of the resources that have been, or might in future be thrown at it! (This argument is developed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4). Yet the situation is actually worse than this. It is not just that NHS-ConMed is ineffective. The more we spend on ConMed the sicker we become. We will see that 'side-effects' are not side-effects at all - they are DIEs - or Disease Inducing Effects. In other words, not only do ConMed drugs fail to treat disease successfully, they induce new disease, and usually more serious disease. This is why, during the last 60 years, there has been a never-ending cycle of political, financial and medical demands for increased NHS spending. All this enormous public spending has succeeded only in delivering increased ill-health, and therefore the need for increased spending. The NHS-ConMed partnership is failing - disastrously, ignominiously, and at enormous national expense. Unfortunately the medical establishment is now based on commercial interests that have grown so powerful they have convinced us of its efficacy, and managed to pervert the 'science' upon which it is supposedly based (Chapter 6). Questioning the ability of NHS-ConMed to cope adequately with illness is not a new insight - just a minority one. Voices have been raised about the dangers and ineffectiveness of ConMed throughout the centuries, although during the 20th century they have obtained little publicity. Certainly, when compared to NHS-ConMed’s extravagant claims about 'major breakthroughs' in the treatment of illness, about 'revolutionary new drug treatments', and spectacular new surgical methods, these dissident voices have been little heard, always misunderstood, and usually ridiculed. It is not science that is on trial here. It is the false and spurious application of science to medicine, and in particular, the drug culture that has developed, particularly during the last 100 years. The 'science' of NHS-ConMed is 'chequebook' science, a science bought and controlled by the big the Big Pharma companies, more interested in profits and shareholder dividends than the health of the nation (Chapter 6). Science has to be independent, open and objective in the way it looks at issues. And medical science should seek the answers to three fundamental questions:
It has made massive advances in our understanding about what is happening, and why it has happened. But NHS-ConMed has failed to find satisfactory treatment for disease that are either safe or effective. Throughout the 20th century ConMed has claimed that drugs can be used to 'fight' illness, and 'force' the body back to health. The public has been bombarded with claims about the power and efficacy of drug treatment. NHS-ConMed announces new 'breakthroughs' on an almost daily basis, new 'miracle' drugs that will change our experience of one disease or another! We have believed the propaganda, and have insisted that the NHS spends an ever-increasing proportion of national wealth to purchase them. Yet there is little empirical evidence to support such claims. NHS-ConMed has never worked. New drugs have never transformed our health, and 'medical breakthroughs' have never materialised. Each new 'magic bullet' has been found wanting, and often ended up being banned or withdrawn as they were found to be either ineffective, or dangerous, and often lethal! (Chapter 7). The failure to utilise the insights of Traditional MedicineYet there is still another tragedy. The NHS has ignored, sidelined 'traditional' medicine, in all its many forms. It has discounted the millennia of experience that homeopathy, acupuncture, osteopathy, herbalism, et al, have to offer. Unlike ConMed these therapies work alongside the body rather than in opposition to it, and so they are generally safe, effective and inexpensive. Traditional medical therapies are based on ancient, millennia-old understandings of how the sick human body can be treated, based on principles of health that actually work, and have provided effective treatment for illness and disease over the centuries. (Chapter 4) NHS-ConMed blindly dismisses this experience of traditional medicine. Individual stories of recovery from ill-health are dismissed as 'anecdotal', 'unscientific', or 'unproven'. The roots of NHS-ConMed failure can be explained by this blindness. Conversely, looking at the insights that traditional therapies provide can explain the underlying reason for NHS-ConMed failure - that it has based itself on principles of treatment that simply do not work. It is a failure that can be traced back to when medical science abandoned the Natural Laws upon which the treatment of illness and disease have to be based, and hitherto had always been based (Chapter 2). Traditional medical therapies have survived, quietly and unobtrusively, despite the uninhibited, free-for-all festival of drugs, medical testing and surgery that the NHS has funded. An increasing number of people have re-discovered them in recent years, attracted not only by the ongoing failure of NHS-ConMed, but for their inherent safety and effectiveness. This is why it is time to take a closer look at the performance of NHS-ConMed. We need to get behind the massive publicity of the NHS-ConMed establishment, and if the evidence suggests that it is wanting we should begin to examine how health resources can be diverted to other, safer, more successful and less expensive medical therapies.
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