| Pages: | 1 | 2 | |
| Fight Socialism in America |
| ||
|
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2126379/Sentenced-death-old-The-NHS-denies-life-saving-treatment-elderly-mans-chilling-story-reveals.html#ixzz1rQ8EfDUj When Kenneth Warden was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, his hospital consultant sent him home to die, ruling that at 78 he was too old to treat. Even the palliative surgery or chemotherapy that could have eased his distressing symptoms were declared off-limits because of his age. His distraught daughter Michele Halligan accepted the sad prognosis but was determined her father would spend his last months in comfort. So she paid for him to seen privately by a second doctor to discover what could be done to ease his symptoms. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2126379/Sentenced-death-old-The-NHS-denies-life-saving-treatment-elderly-mans-chilling-story-reveals.html#ixzz1rwGg5JGW Thanks to her tenacity, Kenneth got the drugs and surgery he needed — and as a result his cancer was actually cured. Four years on, he is a sprightly 82-year-old who works out at the gym, drives a sports car and competes in a rowing team. ‘You could call his recovery amazing,’ says Michele, 51. ‘It is certainly a gift. But the fact is that he was written off because of his age. He was left to suffer so much, and so unnecessarily.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2126379/Sentenced-death-old-The-NHS-denies-life-saving-treatment-elderly-mans-chilling-story-reveals.html#ixzz1rwGhcPge Sadly, Kenneth’s story is symptomatic of a dreadful truth. According to shocking new research by Macmillan Cancer Support, every year many thousands of older people are routinely denied life-saving NHS treatments because their doctors write them off as too old to treat. It is often left to close family members to fight for their rights. But although it is now British law that patients must never be discriminated against on the basis of age, such battles often prove futile. Michele’s fight began in September 2008, when her father noticed blood in his urine. His GP sent him to a consultant urologist at a hospital in the north-west of England and a large tumour was found in his bladder. An MRI scan showed that the tumour was advanced and went through his bladder wall and muscle. A minor operation enabled Kenneth to pass urine, but left him needing to do so every 20 minutes, day and night. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2126379/Sentenced-death-old-The-NHS-denies-life-saving-treatment-elderly-mans-chilling-story-reveals.html#ixzz1rwGljA7j ‘He was exhausted by lack of sleep,’ says Michele. ‘It was making him more ill than the tumour was. The pain was like having permanent cystitis. ‘But when I asked for Dad to be given help for this, the consultant said there was no treatment available.’ Michele, who lives in Chester and is married with two children, was not satisfied. As a former midwife, she was more confident than most about attempting her own medical research on the internet. She read on one site that radiotherapy could shrink the tumour and give her father relief from his terrible symptoms. Further surgery on the bladder might help even more. ‘I was not looking for a cure, just a way to give my father some quality of life for the time he had remaining,’ she says. ‘We went back to the urologist and asked about radiotherapy. I also wanted to know why my father could not have an operation to relieve his urinary symptoms. ‘The doctor said that as my father was 78, these treatments would not be appropriate because he was “too old”. ‘But my father was very fit and muscular. He regularly went running and worked out at the gym. He was also a lifelong rower who held competition records. But all the consultant would say was: “You have to accept that your father is dying.” ‘I had no issue with the hospital — it is a very good hospital — but I could not believe the surgeon. ‘We went back to our GP, but they believed the consultant. I got the impression that I was considered an “interfering woman”.’ In desperation, the family found nearly £3,000 to pay for private tests and a second opinion from a consultant in Birmingham. ‘The private consultant agreed with me that Dad should be given chemotherapy to shrink the tumour prior to a radical cystectomy.’ After being told there was nothing anyone can do Kenneth Warden was sent to The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham and is now cancer free Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2126379/Sentenced-death-old-The-NHS-denies-life-saving-treatment-elderly-mans-chilling-story-reveals.html#ixzz1rwGpHAkD |
| Fight Socialism in America |
| ||
|
sorry about the links |
| X-Runner |
| ||
|
So at a certain age you can look for a private means of saving your life where the public funds will not help. Good fall back for those with means. |
| seeing the future |
| ||
|
= Obamacare. The ironic thing is poor people are denied treatment and rich people will be the only ones to afford cancer treatments. Future headline: "Obamacare Let's Poor People Die" |
| Apple Pie |
| ||
|
I don't understand what the big deal is. Its just a bunch of old white people. |
| Azaleas |
| ||
|
It seems like the doctor in this case made the decision, not the NHS. Is this just the Daily Mail being terrible as usual? I know doctors sometimes won't perform surgery on old people if they think there's a good chance the patient will die in surgery. |
| random a hole |
| ||
|
I have never heard of an insurance company denying any sort of treatment options. They are not concerned w/ profitability, just the welfare of their customers. |
| seeing the future |
| ||
Or maybe he consulted a panel of experts who have statistically determined the cost/benefit of keeping a 78 year old alive isn't cost effective for the state. Thumbs up for death panels! |
| Omniscient |
| ||
|
At this very moment, my 79 year ls grandmother is underoing treatment for Colonic cancer thanks to the NHS in Scotland. Obviouly she wasnt too old for treatment. Like anywhere, the NHS is not one monolith and the Primary Care Trust have been fairly autonomous up until now, leading to the much complained about "postcode lotteries", all of which are set to get worse with the reforms bringing in private sector health providers with no desire to treat such hopeless cases at their cost. The current pr-market reforms are what is making the NHS worse, longer waiting lists and less treatment. So aside your poor resort to anecdotal evidence it is also highly ironic that you are criticising the NHS for having the market too involved in it. |
| Precious Roy |
| ||
Or maybe he consulted a panel of experts who have statistically determined the cost/benefit of keeping a 78 year old alive isn't cost effective for the state. Thumbs up for death panels![/quote] No, it is a problem with elder oncology that is not unique to the UK. This is a doctor problem, not a health system problem. There is little data on the efficacy of cancer treatment on the elderly. Studies are always focused on younger patients. Thus, doctors make bad assumptions about whether the treatment will be effective and whether the elderly patient can survive the treatment. Doctors wrongly conclude that the treatment will be worse than the disease and refuse to provide. |
| kinda but not really not smart |
| ||
Or maybe he consulted a panel of experts who have statistically determined the cost/benefit of keeping a 78 year old alive isn't cost effective for the state. Thumbs up for death panels![/quote] QFT Lines /are/ drawn, and whoever says they aren't is naive. A $3 million experimental treatment is not worth it to a 100-year old person, which has several other complications which will cause her or him to die within two years anyway. Sure, it /could/ be done to add potential years to her life (let's also say it has a 3% chance of success), but thankfully my health insurance doesn't cover those procedures. |
| X-Runner |
| ||
Describe a system that would be better than Obamacare in this situation. Do you have a system in mind where poor people get treated as well as rich people? |
| JonPeeters |
| ||
|
Does the OP want every ancient person treated forever and ever? Who is to pay for that? Sir, you are actually promoting socialism. Medicare is already excessively expensive and will bankrupt us before long. Obamacara is an outrage, but it is a very minor outrage compared to Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare is the biggest socialized health care program in the world. It needs to be more limited in its scope. People will need to purchase private insurance if they want chemotherapy at 100 years. |
| Azaleas |
| ||
|
Why are you saying "QFT" as if what you were quoting were actually true? It isn't. There are no death panels. This is a case of a doctor deciding the treatment was unlikely to save his patient's life, though it's hard to tell what really happened because the Daily Mail is so awful. |
| pr100 |
| ||
You'll be right 95% of the time if you assume that the Mail has the facts wrong. Assuming it even reports any facts rather than a series of ill thought out opinions. |
| asdsafds@afdsads.com |
| ||
|
Between the NHS and the Daily Mail, you know it is going to be screw up. How come we never hear the complaints about the French, German, Norweigian, or even the cubans systems? It is pretty much always the NHS (or the 1 canadian province that all the other make fun of for being incompetent).
|
| Fight Socialism in America |
| ||
People should be responsible for paying for their own medical treatment throughout their lives. Only laissez-faire capitalism can make healthcare affordable to average people. The more government intervenes, the worse things are going to get. |
| Lyndon Larouche |
| ||
NL? |
| Fight Stupidity in America |
| ||
Yeah, just like in every other developed nation, pretty much all of whom have universal health care, where costs have run wildly out of control. Not to mention the tragically shorter life expectancies and dramatically higher rates of consumer dissatisfaction in these other nations. |
| Thomas Hobbes |
| ||
|
Obamacare does not in any way instate the so-called "death panels". You might want to read over the legislation rather than watch Fox News for a change. It's a wonder that people are allowed to vote considering how ill-informed they are. |
| Pages: | 1 | 2 | |