When Docs Play Deities

Nov 30, 2023 by Jill

by George Weigel, First Things:

With the God of the Bible having largely disappeared from public consciousness in Great Britain, the closest thing to a replacement deity is the British National Health Service. Created after World War II, the NHS was the object of intense affection for decades and, as recently as this year, 72 percent of Britons polled said that the NHS was “crucial” to their society. This obsessive and often mawkish devotion to a false god has made a wholesale reform of the NHS—or, better, its replacement—virtually impossible. And the NHS is desperately in need of reform or replacement.

How desperately? A July 13 article in the New England Journal of Medicine told the sorry tale:

For much of December 2022 and January 2023, media reports featured ambulances lined up outside hospitals, unable to hand over their patients; patients lying at home with fractured hips, unattended by ambulances; emergency department waiting times exceeding 12 hours; and hospital corridors crowded with patients unable to be admitted. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated in December that 300 to 500 people were dying each week because of these delays. Ambulance workers and nurses held their first strikes in 30 years over pay and conditions. In mid-March, mid-April, and mid-June, junior doctors held 3- or 4-day strikes—and senior doctors have scheduled similar action. Hundreds of thousands of operations and appointments have been canceled.

In the background of this acute crisis, waiting lists for specialist consultation have been growing and now exceed 7 million patients (in a country of 66 million people) . . .

And as if that gross dysfunction were not enough, being the object of misplaced worship by the British public seems to have convinced NHS doctors that they are, in fact, God.

Indi Gregory was born on February 24 but soon experienced difficulties breathing; she then began to suffer prolonged seizures. The baby was born with a hole in her heart and required surgeries to drain fluid from her bowel and her skull. Two months later, a genetic test determined that the child suffered from a rare and degenerative mitochondrial disease, and she was given a breathing tube. Her parents stated that their daughter responded to them even under these severe conditions, and “on her good days, she is babbling, making noises, moving all her limbs.”

Read here

Read also: Why does the U.K. sentence some disabled babies to death? by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead