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Friday 18 July 2008

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It helps if the doctor actually looks at the X-ray

James Hughes-Onslow

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

James Hughes-Onslow reports on the wretchedness of breaking an ankle and then having to persuade the man in A&E that his agony was caused by more than a sprain

It’s six years since I wrote in The Spectator about my broken right ankle, humiliatingly sustained when I slipped while arguing with a swimming-pool attendant in a French ski resort. The joke among British patients in the hospital in Grenoble, all of them with much worse injuries than mine, was that it was better to stay where we were, where staff knew about broken bones and where there was a comfortable hostel for patients’ relatives, rather than return to the bosom of the NHS where we might catch MRSA.

Well, now I’ve broken my left ankle and this time I had no choice. My motor scooter skidded on slippery cobbles outside the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton and crushed my foot. No one else was involved. Indeed, passers-by were extremely helpful. One man picked me up, while another put the bike back on its stand and they each offered to call an ambulance, or to accompany me to hospital. I eventually persuaded them I was perfectly all right by hopping back on the bike, still shaking a bit, and going home, where it was my wife who said I really did need hospital treatment and took me to King’s College Hospital in Camberwell.

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Joanne

January 17th, 2008 8:35pm

This is another horror story about Britain's NHS to add to my stock of anecdotes. As I read it, I felt my own glasses beginning to steam up. But I have to remind you that, in the non-national health system here in the USA, horror stories also abound. We hear or experience incidences of sloppy, uncaring doctors spending about 5 minutes with their patients (after a two-hour wait), or of people not getting the coverage they needed at all, even when they're insured. Believe me, a totally private system is not the answer. I think that it's Canada's system that most Americans envy.

Lydia P Troyer

January 18th, 2008 11:47pm

Only the return of the ferocity of 19th Cent Penal laws and Parish Poor House rules will return this country to anything better than Hobbes' "short, brutish & dull" lifestyle. Those who will have no respect for the law must be be made to fear the law; otherwise we have a 3rd world economy with revolving juntas at the top, as people fend for themselves and who you know is more useful than what you know. A return of the right to bear arms would be useful, too. An armed society is necessarily a polite society, except where bad governments interfere and grant monopolies to favoured groups, like law enforcement & criminals, while leaving the populace empty-handed. I remember thinking in the 70's that we're going to regret the retirement of all those rudely fierce & starched ward sisters from the war years.

Imagine the terror of the Chinese officials

David Tang

David Tang reflects on his visits to Beijing in the run-up to the Games, where Western expertise has been harnessed to the ruthless efficiency of China’s government machine

Nudge, nudge: meet the Cameroons’ new guru

James Forsyth

The economist Richard Thaler — a favourite of the Cameron and Obama camps — talks to James Forsyth about the power of ‘nudging’: small transformative acts of persuasion

The cross-party consensus on welfare reform echoes the Gingrich–Clinton revolution

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson on the coming political week

The Falun Gong show that meek can be provocative

Lloyd Evans

Lloyd Evans joins the dissident movement in a ritual exercise near the Chinese Embassy. He is unsettled to find himself understanding why China’s rulers get so paranoid about them

Big Brother versus YouTube: let the Beijing Games commence

Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard, Britain’s pre-eminent analyst of modern China, says the Olympic genie is out of the bottle. The prospect of global scrutiny has actually increased repression as the authorities try to stamp out dissent. But digital technology is impossible to police

Very discreetly, Cameron is writing his first Queen’s Speech

Fraser Nelson

In spite of their commanding poll lead, the Tories are terrified of seeming complacent. But, as Fraser Nelson discloses, work is well advanced on a first-term plan for government in which education reform and a welfare revolution will be the centrepieces

An innocent at Home

James Forsyth

Dominic Grieve, the new shadow home secretary, tells James Forsyth that he won’t ‘resort to soundbites’. But is this a sensible approach for a modern-day politician?

‘Touch wood,’ Karzai said to me. You hear it all the time

Fraser Nelson

From the President downwards, all Afghans know that the peace in Helmand is precarious.Fraser Nelson reports from a shattered land of corruption and murky power where warlords wait to see if the West has what it takes to stay the course and thwart a horrific new conflict

A century from now, we will be appalled that we allowed abortions at all

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says the Commons vote securing the 24-week limit is no more than a craven politician’s fudge, designed to postpone the day when the law of the land finally catches up with the indisputable findings of science