Most readers will be aware of the massive treatment backlog in the NHS. It is a matter of grave concern to all doctors, even recently retired ones like myself. So, imagine my excitement to discover that the Royal College of Physicians has found the time to produce a ‘Green Physician Toolkit’. I’m sure this important initiative will go a long way to solving the many problems in our beloved NHS. Interested readers can download the advice here.
Sadly, I must report that this brochure has not been uniformly well received by my colleagues. One contributor to a GP website went so far as to ask whether the document was a parody. On the upside it does indeed contain many amusing sections.
Knowing how popular remote consultations are with the general public, readers will be delighted to hear that the Royal College advises doctors to conduct as much interaction with patients as possible by virtual means, and goes on to advocate that doctors work from home whenever feasible to reduce carbon emissions from travelling. How very convenient – for the profession, if not for patients.
There are useful pointers in how to go about communicating concerns about climate change and health. The Royal College says doctors are “uniquely placed as a trusted member of the community to discuss public health threats with patients”. I’m not entirely sure how one might raise the subject in the consultation room. “Good morning, Mrs. Smith. I wonder, have you ever considered the impact of climate change on your breast cancer/diabetes/rheumatoid arthritis?” I imagine Mrs. Smith would shortly be seeking a second opinion.
To help with the tricky matter of introducing climate change into a medical consultation, 10 top tips are provided from the WHO including “Talk about the health benefits of climate action”, “Keep your message simple and repeat it often”, “Talk about climate change during extreme weather events” and above all “Don’t debate the science”. God forbid!
Readers may be interested to follow the link to the WHO website and download the WHO ‘Green Health Toolkit’, which I suspect is where this advice originated – though the WHO’s guidance is an even more egregious misuse of medical professionalism, containing advice on how to use a position of trust to incite patients to climate activism and lobby journalists to spread green propaganda. I strongly encourage readers to examine this WHO handbook for themselves – the principles are directly derived from “information operations” specifically designed to influence behaviour in populations by inculcating false beliefs.
According to the Royal College: “The U.K. will not be immune from the direct effects of extreme heat and flooding events, or the inevitable arrival of climate refugees.”
There then follows a helpful link to the Royal College of Psychiatrists webpage regarding “eco-anxiety” – a diagnosable condition prevalent amongst young people caused by alarmist nonsense about the “climate emergency”. This exhibits a simply stunning lack of awareness given that the type of hyperbole in the Green Physicians Toolkit is directly responsible for causing “eco-anxiety”.
Most doctors will simply ignore this nonsense and get on with their jobs, but there are serious risks lurking behind this relentless institutional propaganda.
Firstly, it demonstrates yet another professional body has been captured by climate alarmism – and no doubt the rest of the ‘woke’ agenda. The majority of doctors may ignore the Green Physician Toolkit, but I would bet money on a mandatory ‘Eco training’ module being introduced into annual appraisal assessments before long. Annual appraisal and mandatory training in medicine has expanded hugely over the last decade and now includes a compulsory module on Diversity and Inclusion. It can only be a matter of time before the medical training industry spots a lucrative opportunity to add to its portfolio of time consuming and pointless ‘e-learning’ products.
Secondly, tucked away in the corner of one page, the Green Physician Toolkit notes that the General Medical Council has included advice to doctors relating to the importance of considering environmental matters in day-to-day practice. How long will it be I wonder before registered physicians are banned from expressing views “orthogonal to the orthodoxy” in public fora like social media? (Hat tip Sunetra Gupta.) In the revised edit on “Good medical practice” issued in January this year, the GMC explicitly warned doctors that comments on any form of social media now come under its jurisdiction. The mere threat of being investigated by the GMC is sufficient to silence most sceptical doctors.
I doubt it will stop there. The Royal College highlights several virtuous projects already underway in our ever more perfect NHS. Some doctors will see this as an opportunity to move into full time climate activism funded by the taxpayer. A chance to escape the tedium and hard grind at the clinical coalface by masquerading as an ‘eco lead’ or ‘climate change champion’ within their NHS organisation – for which they will be remunerated at the same rate of pay as their colleagues toiling away on the wards. To achieve sustainability in such posts, more output will be required, so one can expect multiple green initiatives to sprout up all over the sacred NHS – zero impact on the climate, but substantially increased friction in the working lives of coal face clinicians. The ratchet will tighten a couple of notches, making the real practice of medicine slightly less appealing.
In my recent reading I came across an appropriate quote from an 18th Century writer:
All religious sects, however they may differ in other points, agree in one, which is the pursuit of power, and this by the same progressive steps. Firstly, by imploring toleration, next claiming equality and then struggling for superiority over the rest.
Soame Jenyns, Disquisitions on certain subjects
Green Power does not just refer to Ed Miliband’s plan to cover Britain in windfarms. It’s also coming to your GP surgery.
Thank God I’ve retired.
The author, the Daily Sceptic’s in-house doctor, is a former NHS consultant, now retired.
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Two things worry me about Covid responses around the world:
1). How can there be so many different ones, for a single ‘real’ disease?
2). Doesn’t Covid-treatment and policy relativism really mean total epistemological anarchism in ALL science and medicine from now on?
In other words, anything goes. Science and medicine are hopelessly politicised and relativised. And that’s scary if YOU have an objectively real disease that needs curing.
Yup. If it’s taken too far it’s the death of science. Science will stop delivering benefits, bridges will collapse, aeroplanes will fall out of the sky. A second dark age.
You don’t think you’re making the word “science” do too much work in those sentences?
When was the golden age of science, in your view? 1600? The 1920s when scientific “research” first got organised in a big way (by DuPont the chemical company)? In 2019 just before the Covid lies took off? Or it’s still to come maybe, with the internet of things and artificial “intelligence” etc.?
Well the “science” died a while ago with the great global warming fraud.
Now just follow the money – that’s science.
When was the heyday of non-money science?
I don’t know enough about the history of science, but it seems much more politicized than it used to be in my living memory.
It’s fine to hold tongue-in-cheek epistemological anarchism like Feyerabend; in other words to believe that in medieval times, trepanning really did work (or why did they keep doing it?), or native American medicine really did cure cancer (perhaps God is a relativist and allowed past techniques to work – in the past?); but to do so in earnest today would surely be Wokery madness biting too close to the bone…
Or people believing covid vaccines work..
….and fairies live at the bottom of every garden!
The corrupt Globalist Billionaires and the Pharma Companies have killed objective science – politicians stood and watched.
“The Science” seems to adapt to how each populace can/has to be controlled. Give it a few weeks and this whole pack of cards is going to fall. Wall St are dumping Pharma stocks – they know the FDA hid clinical trial data.
Search for video’s with “Edward Dowd”, he’s been looking into Life Insurers 4Q reports.
A cynical person might conclude that there is a giant, worldwide experiment going on. But, of course, as I have been told numerous times, “do you really think that governments get together to discuss plans and decide policies?” . No, they just meet up every few months to swap family photos and talk about how the roses are getting on in the garden at home, and how well the grandkids are doing at school.
Only diseases that can make money for Pharma will be ‘cured’. How do we imagine they are going to reduce population by the crazy numbers they want to see? Gates talks of a 15 % reduction – that’s 1 billion just for starters.
( Leave out the Chinese because with an ageing population they want to se an increase in birthrate!)
Why do people still get tested in HK if it means 3 weeks of lockup in a hospital, despite probably having nothing wrong with their health, or, at worst, having a mild cold? Are many forced to get tested or what? Or are they naive, trusting of the authorities, and selfish? There’s got to be a reason.
It’s close to China. They probably can’t get away with farting without a fine.
A reason? Chinese heavy policing perhaps ?
If Hong Kong has a crisis, then it is because Hong kong wants a crisis. Utter madness.
Toby,
Please get on to the Canadian situation. It has gone beyond crazy.
The Canadian government says it’s considering sending even more soldiers to Latvia – to defend Ukraine’s “right” to have US NATO bases – but it can’t control the streets in Ottawa. All mouth and no trousers?
Custer’s Last Stand? Freedom’s last stand?
Comical. Explains why the pictures showed them on their trollies smothered in masks – obviously because there was very little wrong with them and they certainly weren’t struggling to breathe.
It’s not easy seeing the world gripped by insanity. We just haven’t been brought up to believe that most of the people around us could go mad.
They are trapped in the idea that they have to have zero covid cases and are incapable of seeing their lunacy.
I still don’t believe in this photo-op crisis. The orginal statement was that some hospitals were operating at more than 100% capacity. Technically, that’s nonsense as nothing can operate at more than 100% capacity. Hence, it really means some hospitals are treating more patients than someone believed they would ever treat. Note the some here. This means less than all and also, less than most and one could presumably replace it with
a few.
I’m no expert but I think this is the first piece I’ve read that seems totally genuine, not quite what I was expecting. Reading between the lines, this person is acknowledging that they (not the individual) have been duped but are too proud to admit it. I believe we can all understand that, which is an unfortunate character trait of those in power. It would take a brave person to admit being taken in by this farce. The only saving grace would be, being the first nation to publicly announce that the spell has finally been broken and the covid-19 farce demolished. Read between the lines.
There is a sickness……and it’s not “Covid”.
It’s not the vaccines that were administered to the vast majority of adults in the world; it’s those Stupid Pills someone slipped into the water supply … They apparently were “75 percent effective.”
See Canada and NZ for a particularly nasty and life damaging outbreak among the manic political class!
But…but.. I thought the far east countries were the clever ones, the ones who had learned from the experience of the first SARS, had learned the valuable lessons and so were the ones who were the example of how to manage the COVID crisis?
I’m literally wetting myself with laughter seeing how these zero covid idiots are going to get themselves out of the hole they’ve dug themselves into.
UK Column News showed a clip today of some sort of honey trap where some executive from the CDC was discussing rolling out the new Covid jabs for kids and admitting that the safety trials should be longer. He also mentioned that we’re not going to announce anything yet because we don’t want to get people too agitated. That sounds a bit like last summer in UK when vaccines minister said, ‘we have no intention of introducing vax passes, they’re not the British way, also hand job also said the jab it not going to be rolled out to children.
Is all of this stuff I read at the Daily Skeptic really happening?
Did the world ever really go through any kind of Enlightenment?
Absolutely nothing to do with China.
Everything to do with the chinks IMO
I’ve been in hospital in HKG. Old system. Brilliant efficient setup. Then the communists got their hands on it.
‘but test positive, you can look forward to an enforced stay in a hotel room …with no windows that open…’
I thought the advice was to fling the windows open, freezing half to death – or has that changed now? Is that only if granny is in the room?
In response to the previous article (asking the question about why hospitals are seeing so many cases), I commented that it was perhaps because a lot of them weren’t actually ill. Looks like I was right.
Yes and why do readers have to provide the obvious answer rather than the journalists constantly asking questions which have such obvious answers?
Medical Phoney War against the people of Hong Kong – part of the Globalist campaign to weaponise ‘health’ against the global population sponsored by Gates’ “World Health” agenda, the WHO the WEF and the UN.
Population control through making people sick, using that as an excuse to control and inject them to make them sicker and then and providing ung the ‘experimentl’ cure to the obedient. What an earner for Big Pharma!
It seems the planned ‘New World Order’ NHS is destined to play a big part in this policy!
Wait until the British public find out! The cynical would say you can’t beat them, so join them and buy Pharma shares!
It’s certainly not the wonderful, free-wheeling place I recall from living there in the early 1970s. More’s the pity. Wonder if it’s got anything to do with the new landlords?