“Chronically sick and disabled” is not the same as “disabled”…

MP Jeremy Corbyn has tabled an Early Day Motion, which puts forward the idea that what disabled people need to enable them to work is loads of support, not the current threats and coercion.

Now I’m not functioning too well today – hard to see/concentrate, even harder to breathe, but it seems to me that Mr. Corbyn is missing a rather important point, which is that many chronically sick and disabled people (a rather more complex condition** than just “disabled”), are unable to work at all, not even for themselves, no matter what. I include myself in their number.

**Being disabled through illness, as I am, is a world away from being disabled through, say,

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The cost of Atos, dismantling the health service, and other gripes…

You might have spotted that today’s papers are dominated by the release of a veritable torrent of data detailing (just a part of), government expenditure. In the spreadsheet for the DWP**, it’s revealed than in the 5 months since the election, Atos has been paid  £3,489,137.81. Sorry, ignore that, it’s not as simple as it appeared, as Atos is spread over several spreadsheets. As you were – I’ve scoured all the DWP data and can find only that one entry for Atos Medical Services. There are also sums of £330,585.05, £23,300.35, minus £13,152.00, £129.09, £356.03, £366.89, £59.49, £733.78 and £848.43   for Atos Origin IT Services UK Ltd. Same company?

The cost in human misery caused by Atos, though, is incalculable.

**Downloaded from here.

In a recent post the veracity of my claim

Be careful with antibiotics – finish the course…

Another selection from my search engine list:-  “Can I take one day’s worth of antibiotics?” to which the only sensible answer is not if you have the brains god gave a gopher. I mean, why the hell would you?

One day’s worth of antibiotics will do absolutely nothing for you. It won’t even harm you, unfortunately (unless you’re allergic), as such idiocy surely deserves payback. The only exception to this

Something up his sleeve…

A crackpot idea from the land of wooden shoes…

Dr Jacque Lenders, professor of medicine at the Radboud University in the Netherlands, said, after tests on 133 patients, that it is possible to get an accurate blood pressure reading through a layer of clothing, including thick fleece.

‘These data strongly suggest that

Will yogurt cure your ulcer?

Oh god – more “good news” based on poor research.

You may have read about the wonderful new yoghurt that’s going to magically heal your ulcer? Well, forget it, it’s not. Not any time soon, anyway.

The Japanese research presupposes that ulcers are caused by the bacterium H. Pylori, but not all are. Mine, for example are caused by chronic hyper-acidity and the action of drugs which cause gastric bleeding as a side-effect.

In addition

Another “cure” for ME/CFS – oh, joy…

My attention was drawn, recently, to the “Gupta Amygdala Retraining^TM ” programme.

This, apparently, “is a brand new powerful treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, ME, Fibromyalgia, and associated conditions.”

So, leaving aside the question of what associated conditions, let’s a have a look at it.

Ashok Gupta draws upon his own theories in “Unconscious Amygdalar Fear Conditioning in a Subset of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Patients,” a paper published in 2002, not in a medical journal, like the BMJ, or The Lancet, or, perhaps,

The disabled population of Britain…

Another dip into my search engine heap yielded this question:-

How much of Britain is disabled?

Well, some years ago, a TV programme aimed at the disabled community put the figure at 1 in 4, which I always felt was on the high side but, since becoming increasingly disabled myself, I’ve come to realise that it only feels high because a lot of disabled people are simply invisible. And a lot are housebound, the group in which, increasingly, I find myself. (And 1 in 4, by the way, is the ratio of people severely disabled by ME/CFS in Britain.) Oops – just re-read that and it’s not too clear. What I meant was 1 in 4 people with ME/CFS are severely disabled by it.

The closest I could get to the percentage of the population that’s disabled, is that 1 in 6 suffer from a “Limiting Long-term Illness” that affects what they are able to do on a daily basis. That’s government-speak for “disabled” (the word seems to be deliberately avoided for some reason).

Many disabled people are gainfully employed but 34% men and 41% women have never worked or are long-term unemployed – and quite possibly unemployable, a fact that James Purnell is too dumb to understand.

So, considering the figure is 1 in 6 now (or, at least when the stats were compiled, based on data from the 2001 census), it seems reasonable that it was actually once 1 in 4. Either way, that represents a hell of a lot of people – 1 in 6 is, in fact, 10.3 million, but that was 8 years ago and, if we’re to believe the claimed growth in the numbers said to be claiming disability benefits, then it seems that the population polled for the 2001 census is getting sicker. Or, if you believe that  tosser David Freud, a lying bunch of frauds but, then, we in the disabled community know full well who the real liar is.

Where is the effective pain control for UK sufferers?

“Thousands ‘left in pain’ due to shortage of specialist clinics,” says an article in today’s Observer, and Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, the author, is perfectly correct in his assertions. Just a shame he had to drag in Jade Goody. He could have made his point – that provision for people with severe, intransigent, pain is hopelessly inadequate in this country – without jumping on the populist Goody bandwagon. But hey, many thousands of us who are

Putting the boot in, Part 2…

As I said in part 1 (though I didn’t know it was part 1 at the time!), Berghaus have made their Explorer V boot into a jumped-up trainer (but with added discomfort!), as I discovered when I replaced my worn-out pair with what should have been the identical boot, but wasn’t. They quite literally

Lose weight? Not this way…

According to researchers, compared to a low-calcium intake a high calcium intake increases the excretion of fat in the faeces. This means the more dairy calcium you include in your diet the less fat will be absorbed by the digestive system, and