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Doctors To Breathalyse Smokers Before Allowing Them NHS Surgery (bbc.com)
Smokers in Hertfordshire, a county in southern England, are to be breathalysed to ensure they have kicked the habit before they are referred for non-urgent surgery. From a report, shared by several readers: Smokers will be breath-tested before they are considered for non-urgent surgery, two clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have decided. Patients in Hertfordshire must stop smoking at least eight weeks before surgery or it may be delayed. Obese patients have also been told they must lose weight in order to have non-urgent surgery. The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) said the plan seemed to be "against the principles of the NHS (the publicly funded national healthcare system for England)." A joint committee of the Hertfordshire Valleys and the East and North Hertfordshire CCGs, which made the decisions, said they had to "make best use of the money and resources available." Patients with a body mass index (BMI) of over 40 must lose 15% of their weight and those with a BMI of over 30 must lose 10%, or reduce it to under a 40 BMI or a 30 BMI - whichever is the greater amount. The lifestyle changes to reduce weight must take place over nine months.
Um, but isn't this exactly society forcing you to?
Nothing new. Old people are denied kidney transplants, cancer treatments etc all the time in England.
To clarify, they are denied them everywhere for medical reasons, in England they are denied them for financial ones.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, I totally want our thoroughly corrupt government deciding who lives or dies. That's clearly better than a profit-motive based implementation where an increased demand for surgeries prompts new facilities and more doctors to fulfill the need. Whereas the government would likely ration care and wait-list patients that can't survive that long, with taxpayer funded bonuses to the heartless bastards responsible.
Walking is great for improving your health in general, but for the sole purpose of losing weight, it's way less effective than just putting less into that pie hole.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
In the UK? Yes, we have private-funded healthcare as an option - go take out any one of the dozens of private healthcare plans and check yourself into a Spire hospital for whatever you want cut off, adjusted, added or fondled.
The NHS isn't the only option in the UK.
But be warned - if you arrest on the private hospitals operating table, they are 100% going to be calling an NHS ambulance to deal with it.
The CSRs have already been found to be in violation of the law by a Federal Court. They were only allowed to continue because the ruling has been under appeal since it was made last year.
Appropriations for the CSR was never part of the ACA and by law, and yes the constitution, only the legislative branch can appropriate the money to pay for them and thus far they have declined (both Dems and Reps). Obama used his 'pen and phone' powers (I can't seem to find those defined in the constitution but apparently you have a different copy) to use a completely different fund to make the payments, Trump is simply putting an end to that practice.
At any time Congress can actually pass real legislation to appropriate money for the CSR payments and then they would be perfectly legal. There has been some movement in that direction, but as of today, as they have been since most of the time the AHA has been active, they are a complete fabrication of the Executive branch and have no legal standing.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Once again, the government was not involved in this case - it was the hospital against the parents.
There is an overriding "right" beyond the "right to live", and that is "the right to not suffer at the hands of others", and that was the right being protected here.
The child was already brain dead - he had been since January 2017. He had no prospect of recovery, no prospect of any quality of life and yet the parents wanted to keep him alive artificially and subject him to unproven, untested treatments (which is illegal in the UK) by a doctor with a significant financial interest who hadn't actually taken any *medical* interest in the child.
It's elective surgery, not car crash surgery.
The reasoning is sound. The cost of the procedure goes way up if you're overweight, and since surgery is one of the most stressful things yor body will ever experience, you're more liskely t push an overwight body to failure when you're under the knife.
https://health.usnews.com/heal...
What art of "costs more, and is more likely to kill the pateint" don't you understand?
Smoking increases risk of complication, but not as extreme as weight.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It's not society's job to do it for you
Unless you have socialized medicine, then it is. At the same time, if "society" is footing the bill for your medical care, you shouldn't be surprised when "society" puts constraints on your behaviors.
Makes sense to me. Now tell us how you feel about drug tests for recipients of public assistance.
The idea behind drug testing for for recipients of public assistance is for States to save money by booting out drug users. It has been implemented in 7 U.S states and not only did they find that drug rates usage among recipients on all states was below estimated usage among the population at large (in most of them significantly below), all the states ending up loosing money to the testing programs due to the cost and low rates of drug usage. Not only do all of these States continue this ineffective program, it has been proposed in several more states as the true driver behind it is Conservative ideology that the poor are mostly lazy addicts. Something which ironically their own data disputes
I am not a surgeon, but I am a doctor who recently finished residency. Testing for recent smoking is a very good policy, and it will save lives and reduce complications, as smoking interferes with recovery from surgery like you wouldn't believe. Even if a patient can't stop smoking long term, they need to at least stop for a few weeks (preferably for at least a few weeks before and a few weeks after surgery).
Cigarettes are a vasoconstrictor, meaning they cause blood vessels to clamp down, reducing blood flow. It contains carbon monoxide, which reduces oxygen carrying capacity. It suppresses the immune system -- all this interferes with wound healing, and the post-surgical period is often a race between wound-healing and breakdown/infection. Patients literally can have poorly healing surgical sites split wide open or bits of themselves turn black and necrotic, because they couldn't stop smoking at least temporarily.
Smoking is pro-coagulant, increasing tendency of blood to clot -- this is not a good thing, as it tends to do so in all the wrong places at the wrong times, and a major potential complication with bed-bound patients and patients recovering from surgery can be abnormal blood clots in the veins and lungs. It paralyzes the respiratory cilia that clean your airways, and it reduces lung function, at a time when a patient is at elevated risk for pneumonia.
You want to keep smoking after you're all done healing up? Fine, we'll tut-tut at you about the long-term risks when you're following-up in the outpatient office later, but stopping around the time of surgery can literally be a matter of life or death.