Panama & Tribology: New Rx & Old Principles!

  

Panama Canal © 2008 Am Ang Zhang

Most people probably know about the French failure to build the Panama Canal. Many thought that this was due to yellow fever and malaria which were diseases thought to be due to some toxic fume from exposed soil.

In 1879, Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, with the success he had with the construction of the Suez Canal in Egypt just ten years earlier, proposed a sea level canal through Panama. He was no engineer but a career politician and he rejected outright what the chief engineer for the French Department of Bridges and Highways, Baron Godin de Lépinay proposed, a lock canal.

The engineer was no match for a career politician:

“There was no question that a sea level canal was the correct type of canal to build and no question at all that Panama was the best and only place to build it. Any problems – and, of course, there would be some - would resolve themselves, as they had at Suez.”

“The resolution passed with 74 in favor and 8 opposed. The ‘no’ votes included de Lépinay and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel. Thirty-eight Committee members were absent and 16, including Ammen and Menocal, abstained. The predominantly French ‘yea’ votes did not include any of the five delegates from the French Society of Engineers. Of the 74 voting in favor, only 19 were engineers and of those, only one, Pedro Sosa of Panama, had ever been in Central America.”

The French failed in a spectacular fashion.

Diseases like yellow fever and malaria played their part as a sea level canal involves a good deal more digging.

The discovery of yellow fever being carried by mosquito must be credited to one Cuban physician:Carlos J. Finlay.

For twenty years of his professional life, he stood at the center of a vigorously debated medical controversy: the etiology of yellow fever. Finlay believed that it was waterborne and carried by common mosquitoes: Stegomyia fasciata.

Finlay's advice and experiences proved invaluable to the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission. When the Commission decided to test the mosquito theory, Finlay provided the mosquitoes andWalter Reed of the Commission wrote triumphantly after the success of the experiments of inducing yellow fever by mosquito bites, ‘The case is a beautiful one, and will be seen by the Board of Havana Experts, to-day, all of whom, except Finlay, consider the theory a wild one!’ The US experiments vindicated Finlay's two-decade-long struggle.

Reed acknowledged that ‘it was Finlay's theory, & he deserves much for having suggested it.’

William Crawford Gorgas wrote of Finlay:

"His reasoning for selecting the Stegomyia as the bearer of yellow fever is the best piece of logical reasoning that can be found in medicine anywhere."

The discovery by Major Ronald Ross that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes (Anopheles)had tremendous impact on the Panama Canal. 

Crude oil was used on stagnant water to prevent the mosquito proliferation and nets were used to protect workers. Quinine was extensively used to treat malaria. A lock canal was eventually built by the Americans. 

Some say that a large part of the eventual success on the part of the United States in building a canal at Panama came from avoiding the mistakes of the French. Knowing the causes of diseases must have helped.

David McCullough in his book "The Path Between the Seas" wrote: "The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished………It is a work of civilization."

Links

Interesting Data
Smithsonian Institute
Web Cam

  

  

There are things in medicine that we knew nothing about and often we are surprised at how some very basic scientific principle is behind some apparently strange conditions.

Panama reminds me of my friends visit. I have not seen him for years as we went our separate ways as he children were growing up. He was a sporty person and played rugby to a professional level. Here is the blog:

Tribolgy: One Patient, One Disease.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

© Am Ang Zhang 2011

Did you enjoy your Cruise?

Sure!

So you can get away from blogging and from Medicine.

I got away from blogging but then it was only the slowness of the Internet that was prohibitive.

Then I realised that perhaps we doctors never could get away from medicine and in a sense I did not want to either.

Medicine has become a hobby.

Cruising is an interesting way to have a holiday, you do not have to pack everyday and you get to meet some really interesting people.

On our Cruise we had dinner with an eminent professor and his wife.

Tribology!!!

Yes, a world class Medical Engineer and all I might want to know about hip and knee replacements.

Wow!

A friend came to our tropical resort to play golf with me. 

He was walking a bit funny on the golf course.

“I used to hit 280 yds.”

“What happened”. He now hits 160 yds if he is lucky.

“Bilateral hip replacements.”

Good old rugby.

But that was not all. A year before he had bladder cancer that was diagnosed and luckily it was caught early.

“It was painful but the BCG treatment was good!”

So perhaps my professor was wrong: one patient one disease.

He obviously had hip problems from rugby and then bladder cancer.

So I asked my new found friend.

“There is a theoretical risk as the cobalt in the alloy in particular could be a problem. Check out the Swedish research.”

I told him about my friend and my professor.

“Interesting approach!”

“I know. But it concentrates the mind.”

Nationwide Study of Cancer Risk Among Hip Replacement Patients in Sweden

Lisa B. Signorello et al

In summary, overall cancer risk among hip implant patients was close to expectation. However, we observed these patients to have a statistically significant excess of melanoma and prostate cancer and, after a latency of 15 years or more, of multiple myeloma and bladder cancer.

In contrast, we noted a statistically significant deficit of stomach cancer and suggestive evidence for decreased colorectal cancer risk. The incidence of bone and connective tissue cancers was not statistically significantly higher than expected for either sex in any follow-up period.

Further evidence suggesting an antibiotic effect  comes from a study in Denmark (14),   where a lowered risk of stomach cancer was found among patients with osteoarthritis who underwent hip implant surgery (presumably exposed to both NSAIDs and antibiotics) but not among those who did not have surgery (presumably exposed only to NSAIDs).

However, because this investigation provided the first opportunity to adequately evaluate the long term cancer-related effects of hip implants, the associations that we observed with bladder cancer and multiple myeloma, while also potentially attributable to chance or bias, should be considered carefully and require further in-depth study.

 J Natl Cancer Inst 2001;93:1405–10


A year later my friend called me:

"But Cockroach Catcher, you wrote about it in July of last year! Some even had bladder cancer!"

I suppose Medicine is still of great interest to me and one should never accept what is known now as the whole truth. Medicine cannot stagnate nor should we forget basic principles. 

The Telegraph:

Hip replacement patients could face increased risk of cancer

One of the participants in the trial, David Jose, 51, from Clifton, near Bristol, had a hip "resurfacing" operation in 2007, a year before retiring as a police officer.

The father of two had been suffering hip pain from playing football and rugby.

In May last year he was told that the tests had found atypical cells which were not at this stage cancerous.

He saw Angus Maclean, an orthopaedic surgeon at Southmead Hospital involved in the study, who said that the trial had established three cases in which patients had developed bladder cancer, and 14 more including Mr Jose who had changes to their chromosomes.

The doctor told him researchers "could not believe" what had been found, describing the findings as "shocking".

Not as shocked as my friend.

To remember our eminent yet formidable Professor of Medicine, Professor MacFadzean: One Patient One Disease.
I would like to pay tribute to our eminent yet formidable Professor of Medicine, Professor MacFadzean, 'Old Mac' as he was 'affectionately' known by us. He taught us two important things right from the start:

First - One patient, one disease. It is useful to assume that a patient is suffering from a single disease, and that the different manifestations all spring from the same basic disease.

Second - Never say never. One must never be too definitive in matters of prognosis. What if one is wrong?

Mysterious Psychosis: One Patient One Disease

Teratoma: An Extract,

Tribolgy: One Patient, One Disease.

Mysterious Psychosis: One Patient One Disease

Teratoma: An Extract,

Review on Amazon

Readers' views.

The Cockroach Catcher on Amazon Kindle UK, Amazon Kindle US

Gold Standard: Clozapine & Finland

Autumn Gold and Gold Standard in Finland:

© 2012 Am Ang Zhang

There have been many challenges to Clozapine but to the Cockroach Catcher it will remain the Gold Standard for the treatment of Schizophrenia for a long long time.

An extract from The Cockroach Catcher:

……...Martina was already at the adolescent inpatient unit when I arrived. She was supposed to be schizophrenic. The family were refugees from Sudan. They were a small Sect of Catholics that were said to be persecuted.
Martina was not very communicative but her records and observations by her outpatient psychiatrist indicated that the diagnosis was robust enough. However, after over a year in hospital she was not improving and we had tried the newer antipsychotic without making much headway.
There was one thing left to do – to put her on Clozapine.
I was once at one of these big drug firm meetings when all the big boys on the newer antipsychotics were there.
Having filled my plate from the delicious buffet, I sat next to two nicely clad representatives.
“So you ladies are from Novartis?” I did my usual stunt.
“How did you work that one out?”
“Well, you two have the best designer outfits and I guessed you must be from the makers of Clozapine.”
They were there to see what the opposition might come up with but as far as I was concerned no other pharmaceutical would touch them for decades.
After today’s Lancet publication they might not need to worry at all!

The Lancet, Early Online Publication, 13 July 200911-year follow-up of mortality in patients with schizophrenia: a population-based cohort study (FIN11 study) Jari Tiihonen et al. 

According to Reuters:
…………An analysis of 10 years' records for 67,000 patients in Finland found that, compared to treatment with the first-generation drug perphenazine, the risk of early death for patients on clozapine was reduced by 26 percent.
By contrast, mortality risk was 41 percent higher for those on Seroquel, known chemically as quetiapine; 34 percent higher with Johnson & Johnson's Risperdal, or resperidone; and 13 percent higher with Eli Lilly's Zyprexa, or olanzapine.
"We know that clozapine has the highest efficacy of all the antipsychotics and it is now clear, after all, that it is not that risky or dangerous a treatment," study leader Jari Tiihonen of the University of Kuopio said in a telephone interview.
"We should consider whether clozapine should be used as a first-line treatment option."Tiihonen estimates clozapine is given to around one fifth of Finnish schizophrenia patients, but less than 5 percent in the United States.Clozapine's side effects include agranulocytosis, a potentially fatal decline in white blood cells, and current rules stipulate the drug can only be used after two unsuccessful trials with other antipsychotics.Tiihonen and colleagues wrote in the Lancet medical journal that these restrictions should be reassessed in the light of their findings, since not using the drug may have caused thousands of premature deaths worldwide.
According to AP:

James MacCabe, a consultant psychiatrist at the National Psychosis Unit at South London and Maudsley Hospital, called the research "striking and shocking." He was not linked to the study.
"There is now a case to be made for revising the guidelines to make clozapine available to a much larger proportion of patients," he said.
Tiihonen and colleagues found that even though the use of anti-psychotic medications has jumped in the last decade, people with schizophrenia in Finland still die about two decades earlier than other people.

Tiihonen said the pharmaceutical industry is partly to blame for why clozapine has often been overlooked. "Clozapine's patent expired long ago, so there's no big money to be made from marketing it," he said.

Clozapine Data: Finland, RCP, U.K., NEJM

Abstract:The Lancet.

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Alaska, Good Friday Earthquake and Zyprexa 
Alaska Zyprexa: Follow Up
Bipolar and ADHD: Boys and Breasts
Antipsychotics: Really?
Humber Mental Health Teaching NHS Trust: Learning From The Past.

Specialism & Neurology: Generalism & Integration!

After my recent visit to Vietnam a book I have been looking forward to became available, and what a read.

Ha Long Bay, Vietnam © 2016 Am Ang Zhang

The Neurologists-a history of a medical speciality in modern Britain, c. 1789-2000 Stephen T. Casper.

"......It was only in the late 1970s that the power of this integrative idol manifested. It was a period, historian Paul Forman has observed, that began embracing a culture that worshiped technology, multidisciplinarity, and entrepreneurialism. At precisely this moment of cultural conjuncture, at the moment when neuropharmacology, scanning technologies, and biomolecular science also began to give very real shape to neuroscience and neurobiology and began as well to vest neurology with wholly new understandings of the nerves in sickness and in health, neuroculture began to reframe human self-understanding. ‘The fundamental justification’, as authors of a report for the US National Academy of Sciences for Manpower in Basic Neurologic and Communicative Sciences put it, ‘is that basic insights into neuroscience constitute one of the major scientific achievements of contemporary civilization. Neurology’s long legacy of definitional ambiguity, the propensity of its practitioners for generality, their obvious interests in psychiatry and physiology, and their long history of engaging evolutionary theory had thus served up the feast of arguments, tropes, and rhetorical devices that would feed the appetites of the ‘cerebral subject’ and the Huxlian ‘neurochemical self ’.⁷⁴

In short, after the Second World War, people figuratively became their brains. They dreamed of and then manufactured extended minds. They used neuroscience to question personhood, behavioural economics, animal-hood, gender, diversity, and even to recast ‘man as machine metaphors’ into new forms. Mind became a digital product of matter; the brain became a computer; the nerves – picking up on an old refrain – became cyber-networks. Snails made manifest the mechanisms of memory. Florescent proteins embedded addiction into the reductive substance of the cell membrane. The brain became a cultural refrain. And many educated people believed it, and many uneducated and young people practised reiterating it. The brain was its own justification. It was civilisation.

Any number of figures in the history of science and medicine could be claimed to have constructed this neurologic metanarrative. Given its claims to historical transcendence, it is easy to imagine as well that any number of figures could be reconstructed in hindsight as the heroes who constructed this new cultural understanding. Yet it was the neurologists who made this world. Indeed, it was the Jacksonian ideal that would ultimately underpin the emergent logic of neuroculture. It was the neurologists, among the physicians, who were most ‘fully engaged in the philosophical status of man’.⁷⁵ And while that story was not solely a British one, it was nevertheless the British neurologists who resisted the inexorable trends of rational modernity, of progressive administration, and who held on to the promise of generality and catholicity, and defended a world of Newtons and Darwins and a tradition of Jacksons and Sherringtons against a world of normal science and its would-be tradition of scriveners.

What then was the ‘neuro’ in neurology as the British neurologists understood it? If it was a tradition of generalism and integration, and hero worship too, then it was also a powerful and transformative cultural discourse. It was one that borrowed heavily from artistic and literary currents even as it transformed those movements. It was a discourse that saw in the action of disease a new understanding of the living subject, being, and knowing. It drew heavily upon evolutionary theory. And it eventually reforged the essence of humanity into a story of gene regulation, neurotransmitters, membrane physiology, nerve impulses and synaptic transmission. Accordingly sleep, pleasure, pain, memory, language, even fighting and fleeing, became the stuff of central nervous system organisation and limbic systems. It was, in other words, a particular strand of British neurology that provided neuroculture with its essential shape, integrative social structure, and, alas, also laid the foundations for the now-emergent hegemony of the brain and nerves......"                  Stephen T. Casper

© 2016 Am Ang Zhang

Museum of Science, Boston.

Da Vinci: The Genius

"....While Leonardo da Vinci is best known as an artist, his work as a scientist and an inventor make him a true Renaissance man. He serves as a role model applying the scientific method to every aspect of life, including art and music. Although he is best known for his dramatic and expressive artwork, Leonardo also conducted dozens of carefully thought out experiments and created futuristic inventions that were groundbreaking for the time.

His keen eye and quick mind led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas. He was a vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons. He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings...."

Nobel Laureate: Eric Kandel’s recent book The Age of Insight.

"....In many respects, The Age of Insight imitates those famous Viennese salons, in which artists, scientists and doctors exchanged ideas and gave birth to a new way of thinking about the mind."  Wired

The current Dean of my Medical School is a Conductor as well:

"....As an educator, his pedagogical philosophy of a renaissance education for all young people, with music as a medium to develop intellectual, social and emotional qualities have won praises from students and parents alike."


I have no doubt in my mind that doctors and scientists should embrace art to become better doctors and scientists.

Autumn Sale: NHS Hospitals!!!

Autumn is here and time may be running out for our NHS Hospitals!

© 2011 Am Ang Zhang

Looks as though the following might be surplus to requirements by the new NHS, as it was decreed that clients or service users do not really need hospitals.

The Background:

Historically, London Medical Schools were established in the hospitals in the poorer areas in order that medical students could have enough cases to practice on and in return the poor patients had the advantages of free treatment. There is nothing like volume for medical training.

For a very long time, doctors trained in London were one of the most valued. A Senior Registrar (yes, in those days) can easily get a Consultant job anywhere else in the Commonwealth and often a Professorship (British styled ones). In other words London trained doctors are a highly exportable commodity.

“The shape of the London hospital system has also been affected by developments in medical science and medical education. In many ways it has been the activities of doctors which have determined the pattern of the hospitals. The increasing ability to treat disease and improved standards of care shortened the time patients spent in hospital, raised the demand for services and led to an escalation of cost. The development of specialisation led first to the development of the special hospitals and later to special departments within the general hospitals. Advances in bacteriology, biochemistry, physiology and radiology cre­ated the need for laboratory accommodation and service departments, so that hospitals no longer consisted merely of an operating theatre and a series of wards. Sub-specialisation ultimately meant that services had to be organised on a regional basis and the very reputation of the capital’s doctors affected the number of patients to be seen. The hospitals of central London have long served a population much larger than their local residents.

It is against this complex background of population movement, poor social conditions, disease, wealth and poverty, professional expertise, critical comment and publicity that the London hospitals developed. A complex institutional pattern emerged. Voluntary hospitals grew up beside the ancient royal and endowed hospitals. A local government service providing institutional care for sick paupers developed alongside the hospitals. A network of fever hospitals, scientifically planned from the outset, was established. Physically near to each other, staffed by doctors who had trained in the same hospitals, and often serving the same people, the different objectives and status of the institutions led them to work in virtual isolation from each other. Each hospital had its own traditions and nobody standing in the middle of a ward could have doubted for a moment the type of hospital he was in. Countless details gave each an atmosphere of its own, and the different methods of administration and levels of staffing set them apart.”                  Geoffrey Rivett

Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital

Most of my Medical School Orthopaedic Surgeons were trained here.

The hospital treats almost 10,000 patients a year.

Although most patients would not consider travelling too far for a routine hip replacement, which can probably be done as well in their local district general hospital, the specialist clinics at the Royal National Orthopaedic may provide a reason to make the journey.

Specialist clinics deal with bone tumours, scoliosis (curvature of the spine), rheumatology, spinal injuries, specialist hand and shoulder conditions and sports injuries.

One word of warning – the RNOH's trust did not do well in the Healthcare Commission annual health check.

Strange that. So it may be the next to go.

National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery

The Cockroach Catcher was there.

So was the MP, as a patient.

If you have a head injury, stroke or condition affecting the brain, such as Alzheimer's, epilepsy or multiple sclerosis, this is the place to go. Along with the nearby Institute of Neurology, it is major international centre for treatment, research and training. The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery has 200 beds at its central London site near Euston station, and treated more than 4,500 in-patients and 54,000 outpatients last year.

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Good

Perhaps not for sale so soon. Or saving it for the needy MPs?

Neurologists wear bow ties in my days.

Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust

The largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK, the Royal Brompton and Harefield acquired its reputation through the work of Sir Magdi Yacoub, the internationally renowned surgeon who pioneered heart transplants in theUK the 1980s.

The trust attracts staff and patients from across the country and around the globe, and is a centre for research with between 500 and 600 papers published in scientific journals each year. Its 10 research programmes each received the highest rating in 2006.

Each year, surgeons perform 2,400 coronary angioplasties (where a balloon is threaded through an incision in the groin to the heart and expanded to widen a blocked artery), 1,200 coronary bypasses and 2,000 treatments for respiratory failure – so they do not lack for experience.

Other specialist heart units with strong reputations are Papworth Hospital, Huntingdon, where Britain's first successful heart transplant was carried out in 1979; and the Cardiothoracic Centre, Liverpool, formed in 1991.

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Good

It could not be anything else.

The Royal Marsden NHS Trust

The first dedicated cancer hospital in the world, founded in 1851, is still the best. With the Institute of Cancer Research, the Royal Marsden is the largest comprehensive cancer centre in Europe, seeing more than 40,000 patients from the UK and abroad each year.

It has the highest income from private patients of any hospital in Britain, testifying to its international reputation.

Very ready for Medical Tourism!!!

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Excellent

Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital

The country's largest ear, nose and throat hospital is also Europe's centre for audiological research, with an international reputation for its expertise and range of specialties, all on one site on London's Gray's Inn Road.

Its services range from minor procedures such as inserting grommets (tiny valves placed in the eardrum of a child to drain fluid from the middle ear) to major head and neck surgery. A quarter of its 60,000 patients were referred from other parts of the UK and abroad last year. The hospital has a cochlear implant programme, a snoring and sleep disorder clinic, and a voice clinic, the oldest and largest in the UK. One in 25 people develops voice problems such as hoarseness, but it rises to one in five among, for example, teachers, actors and barristers.

A measure of the Royal National's success is the fact that one third of patients referred from other clinics or hospitals with voice problems has their diagnosis changed on investigation there. Although there are many other centres where throat, nose and ear problems can be treated, none are pre-eminent enough to be included in this guide.

Wow!

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Good

St Marks Hospital, Harrow

Britain's leading national and international referral centre for diseases of the bowel is the only hospital in the UK and one of only 14 worldwide to be recognised as a centre of excellence by the World Organisation of Digestive Endoscopy.

It is a chosen site for the NHS bowel-cancer screening programme being rolled out across the country, which seeks to detect and treat changes in the bowel before cancer develops. Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer in the UK but often goes undetected because sufferers can fail to report important symptoms, such as blood in the faeces, often out of embarrassment.

Bowel cancer can be treated via colonoscopy, to find and remove polyps – growths on the wall of the bowel. The hospital's education programme attracts clinicians from across the UK and overseas with the aim of spreading good practice elsewhere.

The hospital is part of the North West London Hospitals Trust.

King's College hospital NHS Trust

The liver unit at King's is the largest in the world. It is one of 31 specialist liver units in the UK, but none can match it for expertise, facilities or state of the art equipment. It offers investigation and treatment for all types of acute and chronic liver disease, which is increasing in the UK.

The unit performs 200 liver transplants a year, and more than 200 patients with liver failure are admitted to its intensive care unit each year.

King's carried out the first successful transplantation of islet cells – part of the pancreas involved in producing insulin – in a Type 1 diabetic, greatly reducing his need for injected insulin. Last month, the Department of Health announced plans to establish six new islet transplantation centres round the country, based on the research at King's.

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Excellent

No bargain price, I am afraid.

The Maudsley Hospital

The Cockroach Catcher was there too.

One of Britain's oldest hospitals, the Maudsley's contribution to mental-health care stretches back at least 760 years.

Today it is a centre of excellence for the delivery mental-health care. Its addictions centre offers new treatments for drug abuse, alcoholism, eating disorders and smoking, it provides innovative care for disturbed children and adolescents and is the largest mental-health training institute in the country.

It has pioneered new approaches to the treatment of heroin addiction and its specialists have raised concerns over the link between cannabis and schizophrenia which have led the Government to review changes to the law.

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Good

Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Trust

Ignore the bad press, GMC can no longer investigate its CEO as she has de-registered herself.

If you have a child with a rare or complicated disorder, this is the place to come.

And they do and many are from the Middle East.

So the bad press would not matter, good for the Medical Tourist trade.

It is the largest centre for research into childhood illness outside the US, the largest centre for children's cancer in Europe and delivers the widest range of specialist care of any children's hospital in the UK.

Great Ormond Street won't treat just any patient, though: it only accepts specialist referrals from other hospitals and community services – in order to ensure it receives the rare and complex cases and not the routine.

I have done that: see Teratoma: An Extract

Paediatrics is one of the most rewarding areas of medicine for doctors because it has seen some of the most spectacular advances over the past 30 years, especially in cancer, where survival has improved dramatically.

Many of those cared for at GOSH still have life-threatening conditions but they are promised the best care both because of the expertise of its medical staff and because of the trust's extraordinary success in attracting charitable donations, which have made it among the best-funded medical institutions in the country.

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Excellent.

Baby P or no Baby P.

Moorfields Eye Hospital

My eyes still well up when Moorfields is mentioned. Honest.

The largest specialist eye hospital in the country and one of the largest in the world, Moorfields was founded in 1805. It treats more patients than any other eye hospital or clinic in the UK and more than half the ophthalmologists practising in the UK have received specialist training at Moorfields.

However, in recent years the hospital has relied too heavily on its reputation and grown complacent. Though standards of academic excellence are still high, it has neglected the services it offers to patients, which were rated weak on quality by the Healthcare Commission in its annual health check last year.

The hospital carried out 23,000 ophthalmic operations last year, providing surgeons with extensive experience on which to hone their skills. The reputation of the trust is such that it has started to run clinics in distant hospitals, capitalising on its brand. The hospital employs 1,300 staff who work on 13 sites.

Perhaps it is not so good to be following on commercial branding. Stick to medicine!!!

Despite its recent problems, Moorfields remains Britain's most highly-regarded eye treatment centre. No alternative hospitals have a comparable reputation.

Healthcare Commission quality of services rating: Weak

For bargain hunters then.

Material drawn from The Independent.

So do you really think that hospitals are not necessary, or not necessary for the average citizen of England. Soon they will be sold and it will be costly to buy them back.

What about medical training? If these hospitals are sold, who pays?

And watch out, someone, your parent, your spouse, your child and even your MP may need a Hospital Consultant one day. 

Say something now.

Cassius:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves."

Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)