In "Another call to another bloody Mosque" Tom Reynolds speaks frankly about multi-racial medicine

"Oh blimey", I thought, "another call to another bloody mosque".The woman had apparently collapsed, people do a lot of collapsing in churches and the like, and with the proliferation of mosques in my area it's only natural that some of them collapse a well. We were met by lots of women in the full covering Niqab, eyes staring accusingly out at us. They managed to find someone who spoke English (a miracle in itself) who told us that we weren't allowed to enter the mosque while wearing our boots. There was a bit of a Mexican stand-off when they realised the I was refusing to take them off. Finally they decided to let me in, but I didn't need to speak Bengali to realise that they weren't happy about this, and the muttering continued. (Random Acts of Reality)

I have finally found out why Dr Rant is so angry. It seems that, throughout his medical training, he never got laid. Poor man.

When I went to university, I was attending hundreds of lectures and studying on the wards. My friends were smoking dope and getting laid. (Dr Rant)

The Ferret Fancier is polishing poo

The motives behind the government's reforms are becoming crystal clear. New Labour's ideological framework of poo has been assembled to service themselves and the party's backers, the agenda of all out privatisation in all areas of the public sector continues apace. In the NHS we have seen the damage inflicted by the patient pseudo-choice agenda, as Darzi's private polyclinics are trotted out like a bad case of the runs.
(The Ferret)

The Witch Doctor looks at the Tooke report and fudging the role of the doctor

The Tooke Report is not really about MMC. Not really. In fact MMC metamorphosed into something that was not MMC. Everything that is going on in healthcare just now is tightly intertwingled. Like a ball of wool that has unraveled and reassembled itself into a hopeless knotty mess. (The Witch Doctor)

Improbable Science meets the Lord High Executioner

This afternoon I went to the Coliseum to see a revival of Jonathan Miller’s 1986 production of the Mikado. It was beautifully staged. The well-known patter song of Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner of Japan, begged for a version that deals with anti-science (original here). The serious post will come later. Meanwhile here’s some late night rhyming. (DC’s improbable science)

A medical student is furious at her family’s obsession with weight loss

I mean, what on earth? If this is what educated young women are teaching their thirteen-year-old daughters, then no wonder society is so screwed. No wonder pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia groups are flourishing on the Internet, no wonder girls grow up with such distorted body images and such low self-esteem. (Cal)

A hospital administrator gains insight

I am beginning to think that our welfare state, whether we are users of it or employees within it is creating a culture of dependency. Life seems to be about what can be done for you, what your rights are, who you can blame for things. There is very little of the ‘I can do that’ attitude, very little ‘let me know what I can do’, very little ‘I take responsibility’. (Life in the NHS)

If you want to get into medical school, you need a good personal statement. Writing personal statement for UCAS forms is a nightmare. How would you rate this one:

"From an early age I have been fascinated by the workings of life. The human body is a remarkable machine with many diverse systems producing an organism that could never be artificially reproduced. My love of science is just one of my reasons for choosing medicine. I enjoy a challenge particularly towards a rewarding objective and although medicine is a tough career it can be enormously gratifying, highlighted by the doctors I have spoken to during my experience and on a personal level....." (continued)

A wider selection of wannabe medical student personal statements here

Medical journalists often lose sight of the truth

Now this story nicely illustrates one of the problem I have with health correspondents - given half a chance of a decent headline they’re all to prone to editorialise an interesting story to death to the point where it ceases to contain anything that remote resembles either accurate or meaningful content. (Ministry of Truth)

Health Care Assistants

HCA-bashing is turning into the new nurse-bashing (not that the old nurse-bashing has gone anywhere). So, I’m going to put in a bit of balance by saying a few words in their defence. Here’s a homage to the Poor Bloody Infantry of the NHS: underpaid, understaffed and under a big pile of poo…the healthcare assistants. (In defence)

An elderly, distressed Greek gentlemen is struggling to get into an English NHS hospital

Social workers insist that a man with learning difficulties has the right to be abused...

Billy and Johnny are partners. Both have a learning difficulty, to one degree or another. Johnny also has Down's syndrome. They share a council house in one of the town's less salubrious areas, the kind of place where you find both drunks and needles strewn in alleyways and even the dogs go round in pairs... (Mousethinks)

Maeve’s parents fight back...

THE parents of Maeve Sheppard, the baby girl who died in the care of her childminder, have hit out at the ‘distasteful’ campaign to free the woman convicted of the killing".Rita is on the warpath again

Who said...?

“What strikes me so much about this is not the discovery of evidence of the 'G-spot', but of the fact that so much of female anatomy still remains a mystery – to science, men, and, most sadly, women themselves.”

Its TGWAOTM again

Lord Mancroft was right...

Lord Mancroft is right when he describes those who cared for him in hospital as 'dirty, drunken, and promiscuous'. I'm sure they were dirty and I'm sure they did talk over him about inappropriate topics: this is standard in much of the NHS today. (The Rant Foundation)

Who have more sexual partners? Men or women:

Hogamous, higamous; Men are polygamous.
Higamous, Hogamous; Women monogamous.

(Mental Nurse)

Who are ‘the underclass’?

Any frontline copper knows them by sight, but you can’t judge people by appearance, sadly. We need a definition. Here’s mine.

The underclass are people who could work, but don’t. Instead, they take what the State gives them without gratitude – and often with hostility – and their shifty eyes are always looking for more. There’s other stuff – about multiple kids by multiple partners, oversized tellies, screaming matches, gallons of Stella, big dogs, Burberry caps, sovereign rings and fridges in gardens – but basically it’s down to paying your way. (The Copper’s Blog)

He won’t go to school, doctor. So what do you do?

Pass a simple law that says any child found truanting should be arrested along with their parents and made to spend a whole day from 8 until 6 in a blank room with no windows, doing the most boring activities that the teacher (who swaps every hour) can come up with. Parents employers informed, £50 fine taken from wages or Benefits. Believe me they would never, ever do it again. Total cost- a couple of million in overtime for the teachers. (Mr Chalk)

The baby boomers are retiring

When Lloyd George introduced his Old Age Pension in 1908, it was means tested, and he set pension age at the traditional three score and ten. Yes, that's right - five years beyond the current 65. That was pretty cheap because at that time anyone who lived to 70 was exceptionally lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). In 1908, average life expectancy began with a 4.

Do you know what average life expectancy is now, and how much that is going to cost the pension providers? (Answers here)

Measles outbreaks continue, but there is hope now

The fact that those who shun MMR vaccine because of the MMR vaccine-autism hoax are high users of other vaccines, provides us with some confidence that the anti-vaccination movement in the UK is still a relatively small group of obsessive cranks. (Black Triangle)

What does this mean?

GPs COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET

The Witch Doctor

1984 again

It has been revealed that the government is wasting our money trying to rewrite the story surrounding their damaging and antidemocratic NHS reforms, by amending Wikipedia entries (The FF)

Can you believe it is nearly a year since the MTAS debacle? Are things any better:

It is now a year since many a disenchanted doctor had to endure the disaster that was MTAS 2007. One year on I hardly think trainee doctors in the NHS feel much brighter and more positive, then again I hardly think that senior doctors are bursting with enthusiasm for the current state of affair. (The Ferret)