Tens of thousands of back pain sufferers had been receiving cortisone injections which relieve the excruciating agony; but now the governmental authority charged with health care rationing has announced that it will no longer pay for those injections, unless the doctor can provide an exact reason for the pain, dooming those patients to to pain. Ladies and Gentlemen, read on and discover the future of America, if President Obama gets his way:
Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections
Tens of thousands with chronic back pain will be forced to live in agony after a decision to slash the number of painkilling injections issued on the NHS, doctors have warned.
By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent
The Government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.
Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.
Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.
The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.
But the British Pain Society, which represents specialists in the field, has written to NICE calling for the guidelines to be withdrawn after its members warned that they would lead to many patients having to undergo unnecessary and high-risk spinal surgery.
Dr Christopher Wells, a leading specialist in pain relief medicine and the founder of the NHS' first specialist pain clinic, said it was "entirely unacceptable" that conventional treatments used by thousands of patients would be stopped.
"I don't mind whether some people want to try acupuncture, or osteopathy. What concerns me is that to pay for these treatments, specialist clinics which offer vital services are going to be forced to close, leaving patients in significant pain, with nowhere to go,"
The NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, including those it recommended. Where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group. But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use.
Dr Jonathan Richardson, a consultant pain specialist from Bradford Hospitals Trust, is among more than 50 medics who have written to NICE urging the body to reconsider its decision, which was taken in May.
He said: "The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients. It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate."
One in three people are estimated to suffer from lower back pain every year, while one in 15 consult their GP about it. Specialists say therapeutic injections using steroids to reduce inflammation and other injections which can deaden nerve endings, can provide months or even years of respite from pain.
Experts said that if funding was stopped for the injections, many clinics would also struggle to offer other vital services, such as pain management programmes and psychotherapy which is used to manage chronic pain.
Anger among medics has reached such levels that Dr Paul Watson, a physiotherapist who helped draft the guidelines, was last week forced to resign as President of the British Pain Society.
Doctors said he had failed to represent their views when the guidelines were drawn up and refused to support the letter by more than 50 of the group's members which called for the guidelines to be withdrawn.
In response, NICE chairman Professor Sir Michael Rawlins expressed outrage over the vote that forced Dr Watson from his position, describing the actions of the society as "shameful". He accused pain specialists of refusing to accept that there was insufficient scientific evidence to support their practices.
A spokesman for NICE said its guidance did not recommend that injections were stopped for all patients, but only for those who had been in pain for less than a year, where the cause was not known.
Iris Watkins, 80 from Appleton, in Cheshire said her life had been "transformed" by the use of therapeutic injections every two years. The pensioner began to suffer back pain in her 70s. Four years ago, despite physiotherapy treatment and the use of medication, she had reached a stage where she could barely walk.
"It was horrendous, I was spending hours lying on the sofa, or in bed, I couldn't spend a whole evening out. I was referred to a specialist, who decided to give me a set of injections. The difference was tremendous",
Within days, she was able to return to her old life, gardening, caring for her husband Herbert, and enjoying social occasions.
"I just felt fabulous – almost immediately, there was not a twinge. I only had an injection every two years, but it really has transformed my life; if I couldn't have them I would be in despair".
3 comments:
I think you should refrain from commenting on a situation that you obviously know nothing about.
Ivan, I do--may I suggest you take that advice
For months now since Health care reform suddenly become the main issue on the national agenda. We have been bombarded with the incessant accusation that the English/British form of the single-payer system is about unequivocal--RATIONING? YES! This is the truth now, but it wasn't always that way. It wasn't until the Globalist plan to take over the originally named Common Market, that health care in England started to suffer. In Jan. 1, 1973, original known to Brits as the Common Market. The “One Market” that was created in 1993 states that people, money, services, and trade can move freely within the European Union. Currently over 450 million EU citizens are provided with these special options.
The indigenous British people's lives had already been disrupted by the importation of cheap labor from Commonwealth countries to drive the buses and run British Railway. Then family unification started and illegal immigration and the beginning of spiraling crime. RATIONING AND REDUCED HEALTH CARE CAME TO ENGLAND WITH AN OVERLOAD OF LEGAL AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, SUDDENLY THE UNITED KINGDOM FOUND THEMSELVES IN A TERRIBLE QUANDARY OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSAND OF REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS. ALL PAID FOR BY THE BRITISH/ENGLISH TAXPAYER.
In spite of the restrictive immigration policies which have been in place since the 1970s in most Member States Of The European Union, large numbers of legal and illegal migrants have continued to come to the EU together with asylum-seekers and illegal labor. Taking advantage of individuals seeking an improved life, smuggling and skin trafficking networks have taken hold across the EU. The inception of these relative dates in when one of the greatest Universal Health care system, came to a grinding halt of quality.
The system was simple? You paid your insurance stamps and the employer paid his? End of story. The years I worked in the Mother country, I received three minor surgeries, teeth and dentistry, and eye care. WITH NO PREMIUMS, NO-PAYS, NO DEDUCTIONS AND CERTAINLY NO PRE EXISTING CONDITIONS? ONCE I SPENT THREE MONTHS IN EAST GRINSTEAD HOSPITAL WITH A BACK PROBLEM. MY COST--NOTHING! WE CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT SUPPORT THE MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL ALIENS AND FAMILIES WITH TRILLION DOLLAR HEALTH CARE. IT WILL LEAD TO RATIONING ON A GRAND SCALE! AS ALWAYS THE TAXPAYER WILL FOOT THE BILL FOR BUSINESS WELFARE.
CALL YOUR POLITICIAN IN WASHINGTON 202-224-3121 I Want a health care system--even government run. BUT IT"S SURE TO FAIL, IF TAXES ARE BEING EXTORTED TO PAY FOR FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS? Support for the bi-partisan E-VERIFY PART OF THE SAVE Act, which will expand E-Verify and protect American Workers! We must focus on the behemoth problem in terminating illegal immigrants-and the jobs that attract illegal aliens. WE WILL ALWAYS BE PAYING FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS, UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING NOW? Many GOP members are against a Path to citizenship for lawbreakers, so we mostly need the phones ringing in the ears of Democrats, who see the millions of illegal aliens as a positive voting block.
WE MUST STOP IT NOW OF SUFFER FROM IRREVERSIBLE POPULATION GROWTH.
DEMAND NO AMNESTY! NO FAMILY UNIFICATION KNOWN AS CHAIN MIGRATION! BUILD THE ORIGINAL FENCE! NO MORE HEALTH CARE OR ANY OTHER KIND OF BENEFITS FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. CLOSE THE BORDER AND STATION THE NATIONAL GUARD. $2.5 TRILLION DOLLARS, JUST IN RETIREMENT BENEFITS? Learn uncorrupted facts at NUMBERSUSA.
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