Rain, rain, don’t go away

I know Spain needs rain as much as we do here in England (and New South Wales needs even more) but watering the allotment twice a day plays havoc with my elbows (no hoses, only watering cans filled from a tank).  So we are hoping for a thunderstorm or two.  The weather forecast has predicted several.  None has yet materialised.

But of course the forecast is only that, and the chance of rain is given as a probability.  So if there’s an 80% chance of rain, there is a 20% chance of no rain.

James Stagg changed the date of the D-Day landings in 1944 because his forecast was believed over that of the American advisers.  Michael Fish said there wouldn’t be a hurricane in 1987.  OK, it wasn’t a hurricane by the strict definition of the term, but it was a pretty powerful storm.  We slept through it, actually, but the damage around us the following morning was horrendous.

It all puts me in mind of the old Lake District forecast: if you can see Ireland from the top of Scafell Pike it’s going to rain.  If you can’t, it’s raining already.

But the finest “forecast” was promoted by “Private Eye”, which produced a floppy EP record distributed inside one issue, with a series of John Bird’s Idi Amin confections.  I suppose nowadays it is politically incorrect, or culturally appropriative, but it doesn’t stop it being funny.  Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zlMO4z2T74 for the full effect…

The skies are grey.  It’s humid as anything.  But still no bloody rain.

PS.  Half an hour after I posted this the rain began!  Magic in the Internet?

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HS2: the gravy train

The fron page of today’s “The Times” carries the news that large numbers of employees of the HS2 rail project are on large salaries of over £100,000 per annum.  The thing hasn’t even started building yet and the release of these figures undoubtedly plays into the hands of the naysayers who wish the whole thing would go away, and be replaced by the currently mothballed plans to upgrade the east-west routes in the north of England.  It would be cheaper and of more benefit to the economy, they say, citing “evidence” that the speed of HS2 will not result in any change in passenger numbers or convenience, It would also relieve the pressure on those whose estates are in the way of HS2 who, it must be admitted, have been treated pretty shabbily by the compensation-wallahs.

It all sounds very reasonable.  But haven’t we been here before?  The furore over HS1 is all but forgotten; all the same arguments were raised – poor homeowners forced from their land, those left bordering the line subjected to unbearable noise, shortage of passengers making the whole thing unnecessary, high fares to cover costs will be scorned by travellers.  Well.  All I can say is that it has been an unmitigated success.  I declare an interest, as I use HS1 to get to London from Ashford, but the trains are full, the speed is amazing with a halving of the old journey time, and the only complaints I ever hear are when a train is cancelled or late.

But we have been here even before that.  If we return to 1865 we find that the tunnel on the railway from London Bridge to Chislehurst at Elmstead Woods is only there because the landowner refused permission for access, and refused to allow a cutting, forcing the railway to drive a tunnel which in places is only a metre or so below the surface.  There are numerous examples of major landowners seeking special treatment during railway mania; insisting on diversions or their own stations (or both) and making just as much of a NIMBY noise as today’s complainers.  And a hundred years or so before that exactly the same happened with the canals, and in both cases people were bought off, intimidated or otherwise persuaded to give ground (pun not intended).

That isn’t to say that I lack sympathy for those in the way of HS2.  There is a clear need, though for a reassessment of the comparative costs and benefits of HS2 and HS3.  Whether, given the government’s entrenched position, this will happen is doubtful, but there must come a time when a bold decision to cancel might be wise.  Think planes, and TSR2 (look it up).

 

Why back pain treatments don’t work

A recent study suggested that many treatments for back pain do not appear to be effective.  I am unsurprised.  The first reason is that the wrong diagnosis has been made.  The second is that the treatment is, actually, ineffective.

Back pain has several causes; pain can come from a number of different structures.  It’s no good treating a disc prolapse with a muscle injection.  If the pain does not arise from a facet joint then injecting that joint will do nothing.  If the issue is a pulled back muscle then manipulation may actually make things worse.  And surgery to remove a bulging disc won’t help if the disc is not the problem.  MRI scans may help, but you can be sure if a disc bulge is on the left, and all the symptoms are on the right, then that disc bulge is irrelevant.  It is difficult, though, to persuade patients that an “abnormality” does not signify.

Thus the first key is – be sure which structure is the source of the pain.  I have an algorithm that helps, but is not infallible.  I failed to diagnose my own disc prolapse for a couple of weeks because the algorithm pointed me the wrong way.  But it’s a start.

The second key is patience.  How do you treat a bruise?  You treat the affected area with a bit of respect (not a lot) and wait for it to get better on its own.  So should you with back pain.  95% get better in four to six weeks – even disc prolapses resolve themselves quite often.  Mine did.  However there are some symptoms that should prompt the seeking of help; severe pain at night, nerve symptoms (loss of sensation or power in the leg); and especially any disturbance of bladder and bowel control.  The worrying causes of back pain are cancer or osteoporosis.  The former produces unremitting pain, the latter may have a sudden onset as a bone collapses.  The history is vital.

Treating cancer in bones is possible.  Treating pain from an osteoporotic fracture is possible, but trying to treat the osteoporosis itself will make no difference.  Time will heal the fracture and the pain will go off; anti-inflammatory drugs will help with the pain meanwhile.

I have had dramatic results from injecting anaesthetic and steroids around facet joints.  Such success may be gratifying not because it works but because it confirms the diagnosis of facet origin pain.  Spinal manipulation is positively dangerous in some circumstances.  I saw a patient who had had his neck manipulated when the cause of the pain was a large cancer deposit in one of the vertebrae which had made it vanish on X-ray; he was lucky that the manipulation did not dislocate the spine and transect the spinal cord.  I have also seen patients whose disc prolapse has been worsened by a quick tweak.  I have also seen a patient who had been diagnosed with polymyalgia (multiple central muscle pains now thought to be due to blood vessel inflammation) whose exacerbations of pain were treated with large increases in their steroid dose.  But the cause of the pain was not polymyalgia, but recurrent osteoporotic crush fractures – which the bursts of steroids were helping to create.  Folk are ever so keen to have an osteopath or chiropractor manipulate them, but there’s an awful lot of them who go back time after time for repeat treatments because they don’t last (or work).

So the first step is to make sure you have the right diagnosis, and the second is to administer the right treatment for it – or none at all.  Nothing can be a treatment.  But it’s not easy to persuade someone that nothing is better than something.  My rule was – if it’s that painful, rest it, but when it starts to improve get moving ASAP.  Bedrest can not only prolong recovery but also lead to chronic problems.  Keeping up muscle strength is vital.

There is a story of an old villager in France who had an astounding reputation for correctly identifying wines.  He could pick types, origins, even years.  Eventually during a tasting competition one of the judges slipped in a glass of water.  The old boy nosed the glass, took a sip, swilled it round and spat.  He looked puzzled.  He had a piece of bread and repeated the process, and then a third time.  Eventually he turned to the judges.  “I have never been wrong, or beaten by something” he said “but I confess that this has defeated me.  I don’t know what it is.  But I do know one thing.  It won’t sell.”

 

Sugar and spice and all things horrible

I may be boring but I have never smoked, eaten or taken cannabis in any form.  It has been around should I have wanted it but I was thoroughly put off by my father, who told terrible tales of street scenes in Bombay (now Mumbai) in his youth in the 1920s.  Men (and it was usually men) were addicted, and sat around in a zombie-like state, and he was convinced that chronic use led to serious mental illness.

Back in the 1960s, when I was a medical student, my friends pooh-poohed his lurid accounts.  “Go on! Try it!” they said.  We were in time of free love, Woodstock, California dreaming and all that.  Everybody did it.  But I never did.

Well.  Hasn’t the worm turned. The appearance of new, highly potent preparations has led to – zombie-like states, chronic addiction and the unmasking, or generation, of serious mental illness such as schizophrenia.  We have been treated to graphic scenes of drug abuse in prisons (BBC – Prison from the inside) showing not only the distressing state of users but the violence surrounding the supply of drugs.  And Spice is the big problem.  For years people have denied that cannabis and its derivatives are harmful.  I cannot believe that any denier could watch these prison scenes and persist in their denial.  Some of the users are clearly vulnerable adults and no-one is looking after them.  Perhaps no-one can.  There’s a lot of money involved so there is no incentive for suppliers to desist.

My father died forty years ago next week, but I bet he is sitting on his cloud wagging his finger and saying “I told you so”  At least it makes a change from me saying it!

 

What’s in a title?

The Times Literary Supplement this week contains a letter from Lydia Davis detailing the struggle she had in translating the title of Proust’s “Du Côté de Chez Swann”.  I had enough trouble with the English title of my book about the origins of modern facial surgery.  No-one has yet suggested it should be translated into French, and I did not, to be truthful, have that as a consideration.

For nearly 15 years its working title was “The Queen’s Hospital and all the King’s Men”, referring of course to the nursery rhyme, which seemed apposite:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Except, of course, that the surgeons did manage to put their 5000 Humpties together pretty well.

But it seemed a bit long.  So I switched to “Faces of War”.  A quick Google revealed several such titles, as did “The Face of War”, which anyway left out 4999 from the equation.  Oh dear.  Then I came up with “Faces from the Front”.  This had no overlaps; if you look now you will find a few sites indicating how to draw faces from the front.  It was short and alliterative.  It resonated both with my diligent editor and daughter, and my publisher.

So “Faces from the Front” it became, although for clarity it had appended a rather long subtitle.  But the book cover makes this suitably sub.  So you can see for yourself and purchase from any number of bookselling sites worldwide.

“Faces from the Front: Harold Gillies, the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the origins of modern plastic surgery” is published by Helion Press (2017).

Perpetual rediscovery

It was with wry amusement that I read a letter to “The Times” by James Harrison and published in 2003 relating to a “new discovery” about the health of Adolf Hitler, and noting that the conclusion was well-known and previously published. He termed this “perpetual rediscovery”.

During the last week – the first week of 2018 – there have been two responses to an article in the same paper which quoted England’s chief nurse as saying that missed outpatient appointments were a plague, and were costing the National Health Service perhaps as much as £1bn annually.  The subsequent correspondence pointed out that the problem of missed appointments could be resolved very simply – by overbooking.  Thus all slots would be filled, and in the rare event that everyone turned up it would just be rather a busy clinic. In any event, as the NHS did not charge if patients failed to attend, I don’t believe that any money would be lost at all; in fact, because no investigations would be generated, missed appointments might actually save money.

It was a system I used myself.  When managers questioned it, I responded that what was good enough for airlines was good enough for me.  Total rigidity was mad.  Wearing my rehab hat I used to book 45 minute slots for new patients in the multi-disciplinary clinic, because there was always a vast amount of stuff to deal with, including all the physiotherapy, occupational therapy, social work and psychology aspects of long-term severe disability.  A no-show left us all sitting doing not a lot for a long period.  Crazy – not least as for these patients the major cause of a no-show was a transport failure.

I write to “The Times” a lot.  I had four letters published in 2017, taking my total to around 70 which I reckon is a hit rate of about one in eight.  I keep a copy out of vanity.  Thus is was that I was able to recall a previous article about missed appointments, in which it had been suggested that “no-show” patients should effectively be fined (the idea was that a refundable deposit would be forfeited for a non-attendance).  In my response I said:

“…about half of missed appointments are missed because of administrative error – the appointment is sent to the wrong address, for instance… Overbooking ensures the doctor works at full efficiency.”

I annotate all my scanned letters by date, and was thus able to see that I had written this 28 years ago.

Perpetual rediscovery is, in part, a failure of institutional memory.  There is another “perpetual” in the arcane art of outpatient booking – a curious issue which I call the endless loop syndrome. Let’s suppose a patient cancels and the clinic doesn’t know. What happens next is as follows:

• Let’s say the patient rings to cancel the day before the appointment (January 30^th), and is re-booked by central appointments for 5^th March
• The patient doesn’t appear in clinic, so the clinician, not knowing of the cancellation, completes a “did not attend” (DNA) form, which generates another appointment booking through the local clinic desk. However this takes a day to process, so this re-book is for 12^th March as the 5^th is full
• Patient receives the letter confirming their own rebooking for 5^th March
• Two days later they receive a second letter generated through the DNA, for 12^th March. The letter says “Due to unforeseen circumstances your appointment with Dr Bamji has been changed to the 12^th March”
• The patient thinks this change refers to the appointment they made for the 5^th, but this of course remains on the system
• On 5^th March the patient doesn’t appear in clinic, so the clinician completes a DNA form, which generates another appointment booking. However this takes a day to process, and is for 27^th April
• The letter confirming this is received by the patient on the 11^th March, and they assume it refers to the appointment the following day, so they don’t turn up
• On 12th March the patient doesn’t appear in clinic, so the clinician completes a DNA form, which generates another appointment booking. However this takes a day to process, and is for 9^th May

And so on ad infinitum, potentially.  Actually it usually stopped after three our four iterations, because the irate patient would ring my secretary to ask what the hell was going on, and she would untangle the mess.

I monitored my DNA rate over several years.  It remained quite steady at between 10 to 15% of new appointments, and slightly less for follow-ups.  If I enquired of one of my “regulars” why they had missed, there was a reasonable excuse 90% of the time; they were ill, a relative was ill, transport had failed to collect them, snow had confined them to the house etc.  Just 10% forgot.  Text message reminders are all very well but, if generated the day before, leave no time for an empty slot to be re-filled.  And occasionally the patient had died so they were unlikely to respond – or their relatives were so devastated, and busy with arrangements, that cancelling an outpatient appointment, if indeed they knew of it, was the last thing on their mind.

So I was amused to read someone else’s solution of overbooking.  Twice.  I wonder if either of them had attended any of my trainee lectures on how to run outpatients – or indeed read my letter from 1989.  I doubt it.  Nihil novi sub sole (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Time heals – slowly

When I retired from the NHS having worked at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup for 28 years it was with some bitterness.  During the last two years the hospital had been threatened with a merger and the likelihood of losing its A&E and maternity departments.  I was quite sure that the merger would not solve the financial problems it was supposed to, and said so in fairly forthright terms, but was ignored.  Thereafter I was threatened with disciplinary action for speaking out, and had to deal with several mischievous attempts to interfere with my clinical practice and make my working life difficult.  Despite having workload figures far in excess of any of my colleagues in the merged Trust I was told, under the counter, that I was about to be investigated for cutting sessions.  Being 60 enough was enough. In one way life was great, but I could not help feeling that my retirement was engineered.  Within six months of mt leaving my rehabilitation unit had been closed, and my sessions in the rheumatology department remained covered by locums for over three years.  So much for any legacy.

As I had predicted the new merged Trust fell to pieces – for exactly the reasons I had stated.  So schadenfreude was the order of the day,, but I failed to get the General Medical Council to deal with one medical manager whose conduct I felt had breached professional guidelines.  I also expected Queen Mary’s, now bereft of acute services, to curl up and die.

My pessimism was misplaced.  Although the hospital is managed by one Trust and has clinical services from another two, in bits, there has been what appears to be a successful and remarkable transformation.  My previous experience of acute hospitals losing their acute services was dire, with almost inevitable closure.  But somehow Queen Mary’s has reinvented itself – admittedly with the help of £30m in investment, but it now possesses a large renal dialysis unit, and spanking new and completely up to date Cancer Centre, new outpatient facilities, a splendidly redesigned front entrance, and it looks set for a long future.  More to the point the staff that I left demoralised appear to have been re-energised, and when I returned for the celebrations to re-dedicate the hospital, and also its 100 years of existence, I came home feeling that my negative attitude was now quite unnecessary; the hospital had moved on, and so would I.  It was a great pleasure to meet up with the various dinosaurs of my era and agree that everything looked pretty good.

That’s not to say that one should forget the past; there are lessons to be learned, not least in how to do things so as not to upset and irritate people, as I have described in previous essays.  It has perhaps also helped that after 25 years of trying my book “Faces from the Front” has finally come to fruition!  You can find details at http://blog.helion.co.uk/tag/faces-from-the-front/. (A great gift for anyone with an interest in plastic surgery, the First World War, facial injury etc).

So time has passed and healing has occurred.  Nonetheless I am reminded of a poem I wrote that relates to experience:

When appointed consultants, we all seemed quite young –

Looked up to our elders and betters;

But time passes by, and we cease to give tongue

Or write all those Young Turk-like letters.

And then we all find that the new ones around

Are the ones now creating the fuss –

For they carry the torch of the bright and the bold

And the elders and betters are us.