Patients four times more likely to die in UK than in the US

I was lying in bed at about 5:15 British Summer Time listening to the news on the BBC's Radio 4.  "... a report shows that patients in the UK are four times more likely to die after an emergency operation in the UK than in the US".  Unfortunately it got me thinking.  So I tried to find this "report" on the internet.  Eventually I found it by locating an article posted about 4 hours ago on the BBC News web site entitled "Emergency surgery patients lives at risk, say surgeons" by Dominic Hughes.  The report by The Royal College of Surgeons of England and the department of Health to which this news article refers is available on the RCS website at http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/publications/docs/higher-risk-surgical-patient/.  Specifically it says "... one study reported that risk-adjusted mortality rates were as much as four times higher in the UK than in the US."  So it is a tenuous, if not false claim, by the BBC, that the RCS claims that this is true.  But the essence of the message is clearly true.  Lack of correct care results in more deaths.

So what do I care about this?  Well I am getting really fed up living on this planet with what appears to be a moronic life form.  Yes HUMANS!  I was brought up with the view that our culture is somehow at the leading edge of all things good that humanity has achieved... but it has never quite felt like that.  I live in someone else's attic.  My father's as it happens.  I am supposed to be grateful.  But the real reason I live there in squalor is 'lack of care'.  I call it a lack of love.  It is care in the sense that they don't care.  I am not looking for some 'care' that I expect someone to provide as if it costs them time energy and money;  As if there is some service they are supposed to be providing but are failing to do so.  No!  What I mean is they "don't care";  They think they do, but they are mixing things up.  And they are mixing things up in a way that I think is so destructive it is fit to be called evil.  It is a kind of ignorance and an ignorance based on fear.  These people are so screwed up by a judgemental, punitive, upbringing that they have lost the ability to be 'human' and to think for themselves.  What happens is, they are compulsively defending themselves from any accusation that they are 'unkind', cruel', nasty, 'rude', lazy', 'inconsiderate' or any number of ridiculous negative constructs by moralistic judgemental adults in authority.  They are so afraid that they might be 'blamed' and punished that they are emotionally compelled to 'act' in a way that can't be blamed.  They are transfixed on themselves and what they experience as their own survival.  They are not living their own life they are living up to a set of external values projected at them in their early years.  They are 'conforming' and 'doing the right thing' according to their perceived cultural environment.

What this report from the RCS is saying is that when patients are cared for as individuals and respected as unique with their own set of conditions and responded to appropriately they have a better survival rate.  What the report seems to fail to do is identify what the root cause of the problem is.  In fact it goes one stage further and makes the mistake of recommending procedures which would (in theory alone) improve the well being of patients.  But the procedures they recommend would be implemented in a paranoid environment and simply make the people carrying out the procedure MORE worried that they might not be getting it right.

The reason it bothers me particularly is because my health is declining seriously and I put it down to my the abusive upbringing.  Given that I was emotionally tenderised like a piece of steak in my childhood I was then unduly vulnerable to the vagaries of an abusive culture.  By a set of unfortunate circumstances I have ended up destitute and from there the situation gets worse.  The consequences to my health are quite real and measurable.  There are so many studies which show the relationship between anxiety and poor health that it beggars belief that the majority of health professionals don't get it.  But the reason they don't get it is because they are desperate conformists.

To put it simply;  People who care and do research because they are interested and concerned can see clearly that there is a problem and in many cases can identify actual physical correlates.  I don't need to research this subject and list reams of studies, books (like The Biology of Love which I highly recommend) and research papers to illustrate my point;  It is clear in the general culture that psychology, counselling, biology, neuroscience and all the leading edge research conclude that our emotional condition is "REAL" and has a direct bearing on our physical health.  But people who are concerned to hold down a local respectable job like a doctor who earns a rather sickening salary for their 40 odd hours and who is far more concerned with what they look like than what they achieve, they cannot see the relationship because it is a risk to their security.  They can't 'prove' it.  What they are concerned to do is to 'prove' that they did the tests, they carried out the right procedure by the book, that they didn't do anything wrong.  They are incapable of seeing what is staring them in the face;  They need to actually care about their patients.  They really do.  Failing that they are just inhuman artefacts carrying out the bidding of a psychopathic and parasitic institution called the National Health Service for their own pathetic survival.

It should be made illegal to abuse children.  What?  "It is!" I hear you say?  No, unfortunately it is not illegal .  Extreme physical or sexual abuse which is not hidden well enough is illegal but the law is not working well on that account.  But common or garden abuse like humiliating children in the classroom, blaming your own children for your own failings, labelling them as morally bad and destroying their lives if they don't conform to the standards you are terrified to counter are all serious abuse and are leading to the collapse of the human race.

It saddens me to hear this sort of report on the radio because from my perspective it sounds as if people care.  It sounds as if some people out there realise that abusive, careless behaviour has real undesirable consequences.  It sounds as if things might change.  But I am fifty something and it feels as if they just get worse.  But then I am living in a very hostile environment and in a cultural abyss somewhere in the backwaters of in Britain.  So maybe somewhere out there it is getting better.