An open letter to the NHS

Socialised medicine is a wonderful thing. I’m sure all of you guys working in the NHS agree with that, or you wouldn’t be there. If you break your leg or come down with the lurgy, there’s nothing more wonderful than being able to turn up at the ER or your GP’s surgery, and know you have a good chance of getting fixed … for free.

I live in a country where socialised medicine works exactly like that. That country is not the UK. If I had a broken leg or the lurgy in the UK, I’d be hard-pressed to get anything better than third-world service, because you’re so busy dealing with fat people.

But I have nothing much to say to fat people. This letter is about you.

You now spend a quarter of your budget dealing with the consequences of bad diet. That’s thirty billion pounds, roughly £1000 for every taxpayer in the country.

I’m sure you realise that there are about thirty countries where the per-capita GNI doesn’t even reach £1000, so it’s lucky they don’t have the UK’s problems, isn’t it?

Except … oh, they do. We’ll come back to that another day.

So. That thirty billion pounds that you’re spending on diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and all the associated complications. It’s a bit of a waste of money, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll agree that most people don’t want to be fat, diabetic, or on a waiting-list for a CABG, would you not? So it seems to me there are only two possible reasons that this situation exists:

• The NHS has lost sight of its mission to keep the country healthy, and you are quite content to waste vast amounts of tax revenue on (a) making lots of people ill and (b) pretending to fix them once you’ve done so. In other words, you are bad people.
• You don’t actually know what’s causing this epidemic, despite mountains of research suggesting that the terrible diet that you promote is playing a primary role. In other words, you are incompetent.

It’s not much of a choice, is it? Perhaps you’d like to add a third option? I really can’t think of one.

I’m not going to dissect your disastrous advice here – the other blog posts will do that, in bite-sized pieces – but I’m going to point out something which doesn’t seem to bother you:

You are telling people to eat a diet which no human has ever voluntarily eaten in our entire evolutionary history, except under conditions of extreme poverty. You are telling people to eat things which are guaranteed to cause obesity, and which we can infer (from basic biology) may cause diabetes. And you know full well, being medically-qualified people, that this is the case.

See those people with eating disorders – bingeing on chocolate and icecream all day and then berating themselves for their lack of self-control? You did that. But you blame them, because they’re just lazy gluttons, aren’t they?

See those people on the kidney-transplant list, victims of heart-surgery “complications” or chronic glucose toxicity as a result of uncontrolled diabetes? You did that. And you know you did it. That’s your advice in action.

See those people waddling around the supermarket filling up their trolleys with healthy pasta and low-fat spreads, who go home to count their calories and rejoice because they’ve lost half a kilo this week? You did that. They’re following your advice to the letter.

They’re all eating the Healthy Diet. Isn’t it odd how eating a Healthy Diet can make you ill? But of course you know full well, being medically-qualified people, that it isn’t healthy at all.

Of course, if one develops heart disease, then statins are the answer. How lucky we are, to be living in an era when such things are available to all! Clinical trials show these drugs have little or no real effect on heart disease, but they do reduce cholesterol very effectively. And because cholesterol causes heart disease, the NHS has done the best that it can.

There may be some slight flaw in the logic in that previous paragraph, but this doesn’t seem to bother you.

If one develops Diabetes Type 2 – then metformin is the answer. Metformin doesn’t cure diabetes, and in the context of a high-carbohydrate diet it will cause pancreatic failure, but in that eventuality the NHS has limitless supplies of insulin, and it’s free! The patient will become massively fat and develop heart disease. But heart disease is caused by high cholesterol, and obesity is caused by too much dietary fat, so the patient will be given statins, and told to eat a Healthy Diet, and all will be well.

That last sentence is complete, unmitigated nonsense, but that doesn’t bother you either.

I could go on like this all day. But if I hold up this mirror too long, you may turn away, and you need to hear the rest.

You could stop all this, if you want to. You could stop it tomorrow. When people stop eating a Healthy Diet, these apparently intractable chronic diseases rapidly disappear – sometimes within a matter of days. You can stop creating this needless make-work for yourselves, patching up those poor broken bodies that you destroyed in the first place.

All you have to do is this: stop telling people to eat bad food. When they come to you ill and desperate, you can stop browbeating them into continuing with their Healthy Diet. You can stop giving them pills that simply cover your mistakes; instead, you can stop making the mistakes in the first place.

You can stop telling them scare stories about getting fat if they eat too many calories. They’re already fat, and they’ve been following your low-fat, calorie-controlled diet since forever, so they know you’re telling lies.

You can stop telling them scare stories about getting heart disease if they eat too much saturated fat. They’ve been eating lots of “complex carbs” and polyunsaturated vegetable oils since forever, and they’ve still got heart disease. So they know you’re telling lies.

You only get away with all this because people trust their doctors implicitly. Even when a doctor tells lies, he is believed. The cognitive hoops the average human brain has to jump through to make this work doesn’t bear thinking about.

But I suppose you can’t stop, can you? Because you know what will happen.

Lawyers.

For 30 years or so, you have been harming people. You’ve been doing it in full knowledge of the underlying biology. And you – as individuals – have profited mightily. Heart surgeons and diabetic specialists would be thin on the ground if you had not willfully, gratuitously spread illness and death among the population are are charged to protect.

To admit you’re wrong would be unthinkable, because the legal consequences would be disastrous. Thousands would lose their jobs, or at least their reputations. Entire industries based on your low-fat, low-calorie religion would crumble. A few might even go to jail, although I doubt it.

And the lawyers will all be buying new BMWs.

I’m afraid I don’t have any easy solution for you. You put yourselves into this position, and you’re going to have to extricate yourselves as best you can. You may have to throw some of your number under the bus.

Or you could keep telling lies and harming people. It’s totally up to you.