Growing wise to corruption

This post is the result of my last post Tobacco Control in action - harming the people 

It is about my illumination into the world of corruption. It is about my illumination into the world of manipulation of the people by those who have money and power. It is my illumination that ordinary people, even in our democratic systems worldwide, have absolutely no way to change anything because democracy has been soiled by the world of corruption. 

I have blogged often that the trouble for vapers is caused by the way the many tobacco control industries have purposefully engineered society to hate smokers. There are not words enough to describe the fracturing of society that has followed. In the UK here, one simple example of unfortunate outcomes, are the demise of Pubs due to the smoking ban and now the fact that there are thousands of older people who need  costly "loneliness caring" where once they would have been socially nurtured by going down to the Pub.

As I write this, I am listening to the TV on how the culture in the UK "needs to be changed" in its attitude to drinking. Drinking is costing too much. Prevention is better than cure, they say. I point out street drinking might have got worse since the smoking ban since people are out in the streets.

When do we stop winging about the money it costs when we do things to ourselves? Do we ban sports? Do we tell future knee/hip replacement applicants that they did it to themselves by running too much? Do we ban bell ringing, dancing, headphones, motorbikes, bicycles, gardening, DIY? Or any other activity that produces injuries we did to ourselves that cost?

COST. Money. Money. It makes the world go around. I don't have the solution, but it truly is an evil thing. I am no righteous person. I see how it affects one aspect of my own life. I do social networking for tourism to the village I live in. It used to be a paid job. I did it well. But a few years ago, the funding ran dry. I still do the same job (actually the work load has increased because I also work on the website too) but because there is absolutely no reward and I am already a busy person, I do the job very badly - when my guilty conscience makes me uncomfortable! I have grown to hate it. 

So that gets me to Clive Bates Doctors, Smoking and Money.

I have slept on the illumination that, in the UK, doctors who work for the National Health Service (NHS) are PAID to prescribe to their patients. I have looked up how very beneficial my husband has been to our local surgery in earning them money. Overnight several ideas have come to me.

The first is that this system is open to profound corruption.

What a doctor may prescribe is tightly controlled by NICE

How incorruptible is NICE?

NHS doctors are paid to promote treatment.

Illness is a doctor's best friend - every referral/drug prescription gains more cash.

Collecting points is financially beneficial to surgeries, yet might not be in the interests of patients.

How many referrals for further treatment/diagnosis are unnecessary? 

Is data gathered from points registration by surgeries  a true reflection of national health?

Points for the surgeries might feed points for specialists, hospitals, and other services   a sort of points "layer cake"  - everyone conforms at an enormous cost, for simply doing their jobs which are already salaried.

I think the points system is a  perfectly understandable effort to make doctors tow the line and provide proper healthcare to the people. But the discovery of it for me, has been like exposing the Wizard in OZ

So doctors in the UK that work for the NHS, are paid extra if they do their jobs as prescribed. I am sure that being a conforming doctor is worth the effort, and might be done better through it. I know not being paid for all the effort of social networking I do, not for me, but for something else,  has made me a sloppy worker who couldn't give a damn!

But the biggest danger in the practise of paying doctors to conform, reach targets etc is that it makes doctors into robots of the prevailing political system.

Yesterday I wrote Quote - The system of bribing paying doctors to induce fear into people who smoke is evil and it is the way society has been molded into a fearful, compliant, hypochondriac mass. It soils the government, the medical profession, any science that might be extrapolated from data collected from this "points" system, the drug companies and all the many tobacco control industries promoting antismoking that are complicit. It is an immoral use of power. This is politics at it's worst.

Even if doctors were paid to promote vaping. I would object on moral grounds. Paying the medical profession to promote anything - anything at all - is a scandal.End quote

Today, that seems a bit over the top. Yet, yet....something inside of me, my moral compass, is greatly uncomfortable. Corruption is so EASY with money and power.

All that ordinary people, like me, have to fight it with, are words.