I have now signed up with another GP surgery, smaller, but much quicker/easier to get to, and they only have the one surgery, so their appointments aren't scattered all over the county.
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Statins
- Thread starter Harry Bloomfield
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I am afraid I am a huge cynic when it comes to taking routine drugs. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but all these "thresholds" that have appeared above/below which you are recommended to take various drugs I am sure have been influenced to some extent by vested interests. If no-one took any routine drugs, the drug companies would not have enough revenue to survive on the specialist drugs only.
My own attitude is to resist everything unless it is a short term treatment for something specific. All drugs have side effects, so there is always a risk/benefit to be considered. Currently at 66 I take nothing at all...
My own attitude is to resist everything unless it is a short term treatment for something specific. All drugs have side effects, so there is always a risk/benefit to be considered. Currently at 66 I take nothing at all...
Yep at my so called MOT a couple of years back as she reads out the result she said on each and every one oh you dont want to be any higher .
,I said so what you are saying is they are all below your guide lines
umm well yeah .
Other than the odd ibuprofen i take nothing never have the flu jab and had zero covid jabs .
When i go to the chemist to pick up my mothers monthly prescription which is about 20 items it never fails to amaze me the size of some of the bags of drugs on the shelves waiting to go out
,I said so what you are saying is they are all below your guide lines
umm well yeah .
Other than the odd ibuprofen i take nothing never have the flu jab and had zero covid jabs .
When i go to the chemist to pick up my mothers monthly prescription which is about 20 items it never fails to amaze me the size of some of the bags of drugs on the shelves waiting to go out
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Deleted member 317777
It does seem like there’s a massive push to get people in Statins!
My cholesterol was 5.1 I think, I said I’ll change my diet. I’m back in 3 months for another test.
I won’t be taking statins if it isn’t lower
My cholesterol was 5.1 I think, I said I’ll change my diet. I’m back in 3 months for another test.
I won’t be taking statins if it isn’t lower
I handed in the registration form yesterday, along with the A4 printed copy of my recent statin caused side effects, and asked if things could be rushed through so I could get an appointment, I was told I would be able to ring, and sort an appointment out at 8am today...
I rang at 8am, a few minutes ago, number 16 in the queue, but the 16 went down very rapidly, so I only waited 7 minutes to get through, versus the 45 minutes I had become used to at the other surgery. Rather than the third degree, trying to get any sort of appointment, at my old surgery, I just gave a brief explanation and was given an appointment for this afternoon. What a massive difference.
This ring at 8 am requirement (and often get stuck in a long queue) is treating the public with contempt. Alternatively wait outside the practice at 8 am till the doors open, no fun if you're ill, old or frail, and it's winter! You then usually get a same-day appointment, to meet some government target I believe, when as often as not you're not bothered about that and would be happy with one in the next few days.
At my practice a bit of common sense has broken through, and you can go in any time they're open. I wouldn't try ringing, it's easier to bike there.
Anyway, I hope you manage to get your problems dealt with
Those were my precise words to my partner, this morning. It's a disgusting way to treat people who are ill, and needing help. You can get help for an injured animal, much more easily and quicker.
I can understand services, and appointments being limited, but why force the least able, possible elderly, and quite infirm, to get up early, just to take part in a race to see who has the most stamina, and patience waiting for a reply on the phone? The other way, was to log into systmon, and try to grab an appointment there, if you were quick enough, before they all went - but strictly limited to certain appointment type, no nurse appointments - why? Why does an urgent appointment have to be the same day, I would have been happy with just a fairly urgent appointment, within two or three days?
More patient friendly, would be to gradually release appointments throughout the day, say 8am, 12, 4pm.
There was a period of years when they dropped the early morning scramble. I am lucky to hardly ever need the doctor. I was used to the system where everybody had to ring at 8.30 in the morning and you had to accept an appointment within the next 48 hours. And then the next time I rang at 8.30, I got straight through, and the receptionist said they no longer had that system and you could choose a couple of weeks ahead. I think it was after Tony Blair was embarrassed on Question Time in 2005 - article below. But now it seems, from the regular GP users on here, that the early morning scramble has been brought back.
An Old Clip Of The Public Complaining About NHS Appointments Has Resurfaced – And It's Unbelievable
If you don't laugh, you'll cry.
Exactly, it would be good to discuss urgency with the receptionist, more flexibility for everybody.
A few years ago I saw a doctor and he said come and see me again in 3 weeks. I tried to book that but the receptionist said we only make appointments up to a week in advance. So I went back after 2 weeks and was told there were none available! Catch-22.
Well that, at least was quite slick....
I was expecting to have to request with my new GP surgery, to have to ask them to give me online access to my records, via something like Systmonline. All I did yesterday, was fill a long detailed form in yesterday, to register with them. The new one must use Systmonline, and my old access, remains in place, just transferred to the new surgery.
Thanks for that, I must have missed it at the time. I feel a complaint to my MP coming on.. Thanks for the ammunition!
I was expecting to have to request with my new GP surgery, to have to ask them to give me online access to my records, via something like Systmonline. All I did yesterday, was fill a long detailed form in yesterday, to register with them. The new one must use Systmonline, and my old access, remains in place, just transferred to the new surgery.
There was a period of years when they dropped the early morning scramble. I am lucky to hardly ever need the doctor. I was used to the system where everybody had to ring at 8.30 in the morning and you had to accept an appointment within the next 48 hours. And then the next time I rang at 8.30, I got straight through, and the receptionist said they no longer had that system and you could choose a couple of weeks ahead. I think it was after Tony Blair was embarrassed on Question Time in 2005 - article below. But now it seems, from the regular GP users on here, that the early morning scramble has been brought back.
An Old Clip Of The Public Complaining About NHS Appointments Has Resurfaced – And It's Unbelievable
If you don't laugh, you'll cry.uk.news.yahoo.com
Thanks for that, I must have missed it at the time. I feel a complaint to my MP coming on.. Thanks for the ammunition!
Have you had an ECG done recently?
My wife has heart arrhythmia, caused we think by thyroid problem.
She has had this thing where she wakes suddenly, we think it was the heart stopping.
Since being on a small beta blocker she has been fine.
She was diagnosed by having a 24hr monitor which records the number of ectopic beats.
Not saying it’s your problem, just something to rule out as a possible
The new GP has requested that for next week, but they did intensive heart tests a couple of months ago, as part of a research program and all well.
They did that on me a few years ago, with nothing found..
Most (all?) Statins are out of patent, which means they're really really cheap. Like £1 a month cheap. There's not much profit to be made on them.
Some of the more intense or newer ones can cost more but you only get those if you have tried the cheaper ones first or have serious issues.
There's a process to review who should get prescribed medication and work out at what point prescribing more would be worse (when the side effects are worse than the amount of issues they solve) or bad value for money (when the treatment helps but it doesn't help enough to justify the price).
Statins are so cheap and make enough difference they're a fantastic medication for the NHS. They are great value for money compared to other medication, so the main question is at what point over prescription would cause more harm than good due to side effects suffered by people who wouldn't get much benefit.
Right now we're probably under prescribing them. Which isn't to say you should ignore any side effects or some people shouldn't have them despite meeting most of the criteria, but they cut heart attacks by 25%. That's huge.
Have a watch of Tony Jeffries on you tube. Search for his vid about statins/cholesterol. Its off topic for him but worth finding and watching. My quacks use a funny system for cholesterol risk. Some percentage thing. I got given x percent due to age and was half a percent over in total. They were desperate to put me on statins when I didn't need them. I don't use any prescription meds and intend to stay that way as long as possible.
This is an interesting view point.
In the 1970s if you 70 years old you were born around or just before the dawn of the 20th century.
The average life span then was 45-50 years, but that was due to what we'd now consider hideously high child mortality, and a couple of world wars didn't help. So the average person born in the 1880s was significantly less healthy than the average person born in the 1950s by their 70th birthday. Because the average 1880s person was dead before their 70th birthday. But we're only interested in these that were still alive by then I suppose.
The Modal age of death in the 1970s, which is another way of saying of all the people who died in that year what the most common age was, was around 75 for men. The Modal is a good measure for this question because it allows us to ignore the crappy childcare available at the time.
For people now in their 70s, born in the 1950s, they had a life expectancy of roughly 70-75 years because by that point we'd discovered sanitation and antibiotics. The current modal age of death is around 87 for men. So if you're male and in your 70s now you're looking at in the region of an additional 11 years of life compared to someone your age in the 1970s.
The metric we'd really want is something like HALE, Healthy Life Expectancy, but that's a fairly new metric and I don't think we have good numbers on it for that period.
Or in short: Modern medicine is fantastic. Stop taking it for granted.
