Apologies, I am still alive

I apologise for my lack of posting recently, it has been for a mixture of reasons. Firstly I have been pretty busy having just moved jobs, secondly I have been generally disillusioned with politics and health care for the past few weeks and thirdly I sometimes just get a bit lazy. Maybe Dr Crippen's absence is part of the reason too, everyone in the medical blogosphere must miss his excellent writing and razor sharp insight into all matters health related.

I was having a quiet pint last night in a very pleasant pub and there was a certain book by 'Dr' Gilliam McKeith on a shelf there. A few of us began to browse through the aforesaid Dr's book and became rather obvious that it was full of complete and utter bullsh*t. It was very well produced from a publishing point of view, very shiny and well presented, enough to convince the ignorant reader that there may be some 'science' and 'truth' within. However when one skated beneath the surface it was clear that there was very little in there that was not based on the meanderings of a stupid fool.

So why am I rambling on about Gillian McKeith you ask? Well, it has motivated me to start making the effort to do a bit of writing again, I am fed up with the low quality rubbish that gets fed to us in the media a lot of the time, especially concerning science, medicine and politics. There are just so many uneducated quacks out there in so many different forms peddling useless rubbish to unsuspecting members of the public, and this culture is propagated by a lot of rather low quality journalism covering all matters scientific.

Anyway that's about it from me for today, I will try hard to cover a few health related matters with a decent amount of cynicism in the forthcoming weeks, there have just been so many health related issues in the news of late that it's been hard to know where to start. The government's ridiculously stupid white paper has been a big story, while the mismanagement of medical training and the EWTD has been another big one, the failure of 'minor injuries units' is also a story that I intend to cover in the not too distant future.

One massive contradiction in recent days has been the massive cuts that are taking place in the NHS throughout the UK in recent weeks, but at the same time the government is ring fencing the NHS' budget. Something quite clearly does not add up. Is this because various NHS Trusts have been saddled with massive bills for PFI deals and they also know that the new crackpot government reforms are going to see more and more money kept away from secondary care, then poured into the coffers of various government friendly private health care corporations? That would be my cynical explanation, billions are being ring fenced to pay for the stupid new rearrangement of the bureaucrats' deckchairs, while more cash will be squeezed away from the front line. New government, same old reforms taking us backwards, no change really.