A sick nation.

A few posts ago I reported that I was right in the middle of a nasty respiratory (chest) based illness ,in fact both of us were at the same kind of state. What I heard, through the girlfriend grapevine of the NHS was firstly that there was a lot of ‘nasty stuff’ going around and one opinion was that it might be RSV (Respiratory cyncittial virus) because that tends to peak in December. In my case it was never proven because, aside from my partner doing a Covid test it was never investigated and it never got (quite) to the point of needing hospital treatment – I do think I was in a state of near sepsis one night. Anyway, it’s now fading and all I am left with is a poor exercise tolerance which has been the norm for me since vaccination for Covid and now a decreased ability to control my body temperature.

Several years back I functioned as the medical moderator for a preparedness website and I mostly gave up because of the sheer fuckwittery that I regularly had to deal with as in “no you don’t have the skills to build a home ventilator” following on the heels of the Ebola outbreak and “no you don’t have the skills,knowledge and manpower to build a level 4 isolation unit”. I think I was ‘that guy’ who regularly threw buckets of cold water over the worst of the survivalist enthusiasms.

 At about the same time as the Covid 19 pandemic I regularly called attention to the other great pandemic of ill health in the west – the pandemic of ‘diseases of the modern age’ which includes obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, Nafld, heart disease and stroke, which have all increased hugely in the time that I was an active nurse.  The one common factor as written up by Robert Lustig was the huge increase in the use of dietary sugar and the second was the similar increase in the use of vegetable oils – the pair, when combined in many ‘industrially created’ food-like substances is probably at the center of many other modern diseases. For me it was hypertension and early arthritis which both resolved naturally when I reduced my sugar intake and stopped using vegetable oil based spreads.

Most readers will know that I worked in the NHS for most of my adult life, most of that time was at the hardcore end in ICU and the last couple of years my final career job was as a specialist nurse for acute pain. I actually spent a good proportion of the last few years in a part time job working as a Healthcare assistant in an endoscopy unit and it was only at the end that I temporarily re-registered and worked as a trained nurse once more. Right at the end I was trying to adapt to a knee replacement, eventually I had to give up and that is when I had my best year ever as a sailor. The year after that (2020) is when Covid 19 happened so I did well to have retired and walked (sailed) away except that I rejoined the register as voluntary cannon fodder although I was never called up.

In the last year of working I spent most of my time working in the department’s recovery unit or on the phones making patient calls to perform procedural pre-assessments……I have to say that it was usually deeply frustrating. In our department we would see on average 60 new patients a day and each one had to have a telephone pre-assessment call which meant that 2 nurses had to complete around 15 calls in a session. That call would include the obvious questions but would also include taking a potted medical history and medicines history. The medical history and medicines history were the most frustrating parts when the question “what operations or significant illnesses have you had”?….the answer often being none and none. When we got to the medicines history though we would often get half a page full of medicines that would indicate that the patient was being treated for multiple problems. Now, if you are on treatment for any form of Diabetes it matters because you will need to be in a fasted state at time of procedure and in the case of a colon procedure being on a very restricted diet for the 3 days leading up to the investigation.

What endoscopy showed me was how many people we dealt with had at least one ongoing disease that might be considered the diseases of modern life and often not only one but several.

As I write it is today that Andrew Bridgen MP led the debate on excess deaths in parliament and just recently that Dr John Campbell discussed the actual data and statistics in his video series. For those of you who dislike either person’s beliefs or stance then let me say that they were presenting the government’s own data and asking the question “why are there so many excess deaths, in a younger age group, after the Pandemic is long past”?. The strange and disturbing feature of the post pandemic excess deaths is that many of them have happened to a younger age group than would normally be expected – we could maybe accept that many of the elderly and vulnerable would die but the excess deaths have been happening in the ‘middle aged’ and younger adults. What we should have seen in the last 2 years is a slump in deaths post covid and not an approximate 6% increase in excess deaths.

I am as mystified as anyone else as to why apparently healthy people would be getting sick and in many cases dying – unless they aren’t healthy of course, the problem comes in when we hear that the diseases causing those deaths must have been taking hold for several years – things like ischaemic heart disease and cerebrovasular disease (leading respectively to heart attacks and stroke).

I can only posit for now that we have a generally less healthy population – we know for example that there has been an increase in many (unrelated) diseases since mass vaccination while at the same time there hasn’t been a concomitant increase in Covid ‘protection’. I can only conclude that vaccination for any but the elderly might have been a disaster for public health and the only other thing I can suggest is that the diseases are ultimately diet related and because on average the dietary habits of the UK public doesn’t seem to be changing then the rate of sickness and deaths might be increasing outside of anything related to Covid.

Postscript…..what can we do, you and I ?

It would be all too easy to do what that political ideologue (Owen Jones) did in his favorite platform (The Guardian) and use the excess deaths as a stick to beat the government with : when it comes to the health record of all recent governments they should all get a thorough slapping – except in this case it isn’t really the fault of government. I would suggest instead that close-in everyday health is our individual problem and as with Covid the solutions and answers aren’t to be found in government mandated actions ; mandatory mask wearing, especially the wearing of soft cotton homemade ‘face coverings’ didn’t and cant stop the spread of airborne viral particles because the particle size is much smaller than the gaps between fibers. Neither did vaccination ‘protect’ in any way as we have seen with the people who had 5 or 6 vaccinations and still got infected with the virus.

Perhaps the only thing that the government is directly responsible for is the insane focus on Covid that took normal attention away from other essential services…..my department for example, which routinely deals with endoscopic screening for bowel cancer, was all but closed for 2 years although bowel cancer is normally a slow growing problem and the rise in the rate of late stage bowel cancer won’t appear for several years yet.

What did affect health, especially mental health, was the social isolation and fear mongering that mandated lockdowns created, in this village alone two young adult men both committed suicide and it is now generally known that the suicide rate among women is also rising – and that used to be a rare event. Anxiety and depression was always a common finding in a procedural pre-assessment and I suspect that the natural frequency is now a lot higher just from everyday observation.

I don’t think that I have a magic solution to the problem of excess deaths in a younger generation but I am also of that age group so I am working on the same problem myself. It’s winter in the UK now and thankfully it has gone from rain all the time to cold and dry so my daily routine, post illness, is to take a daily walk of about an hour around the crinkly scenery at least once a day. I also accept that my weight is too high and my vitamin D is likely too low, so every day I take a couple of squirts of a vitamin D spray…..my reasons for both is largely contained in the video below.

I think it’s a multi-factor problem – Vitamin D is clearly one factor as is excess weight on my part : what i’m doing about that is mostly based on another doctors work (Peter Attia) who suggests that an even basic increase in fitness causes a reduction in all cause mortality. I have had times in my life when I have been moderately fit although at the moment, post illness, I am working hard to manage a one hour a day walking programme and next week should see me on my face on the kitchen floor grunting out some press-ups.