Would you pay up to an extra £500 a year to help save the NHS?
Jonathan Cohen
Founder of FunctionalDX | Functional Medicine Advocate | Speaker & Educator
If you’ve been reading some of the headlines recently, you may be thinking like me that the health service here in the UK is beyond repair.?
People are unable to see GPs , ambulance response times are off the scale, staff are reported to be in tears at the waiting times in some A&E departments … A recent article in Metro (complete with photograph) about an 85-year-old man who having fallen and broken his hip had to wait seven hours in the rain for an ambulance, despite living across the road from his local hospital. The image of that man lying covered with a tarpaulin and an umbrella to protect him from the rain, quite literally brought me to tears.??
Little wonder then that one GP recently declared: “The health system isn’t failing, it has failed.” ?
Now, I’m not close enough to the NHS to be able to pretend that I know the inner workings, but I can certainly understand and agree when Care England chief executive Martin Green says we long longer have a health service but a ‘sick service ’.??
My family history proudly has an NHS stamp running through it like a stick of rock with members being GPs, consultants and surgery staff. Back in 2012, I remember Danny Boyle’s London Olympics opening show: hospital beds being wheeled around a packed London stadium to illustrate the country’s pride in the NHS. And I fast forward 10 years and I’m left wondering where did that pride in the NHS, and by extension, my country go???
I’m not digging out the NHS itself, nor the doctors, nurses and other staff there – it’s clear they do an immense job under the kind of work pressure many of us will never experience and all against a background of what feels like never ending cuts in funding.??
Successive governments have preached a mantra of ‘prevention is better than cure’, but that is clearly not working. Diagnosed cases of all cancers , diabetes and dementia are on the increase, while deaths from liver disease have also risen. Even the shining light of the number of cardiovascular disease deaths decreasing is put into context of it remaining the number one killer in the country.?
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In the past, many of these diseases were seen to reflect an ageing population. But even as I type this, news has just hit my inbox that cases of type 2 diabetes – a largely preventable condition – have quadrupled in the young since 1990, highlighting the country’s soaring obesity rates.??
The cost of treating such diseases and conditions when they have taken hold is nothing short of astronomical. Cardiovascular disease treatment costs £9 billion a year (and the cost to the economy is estimated to be £19 billion), 10% of the NHS budget (£10 billion a year) is spent on diabetes , and the total cost of care for people with dementia in the UK is £34.7billion. The biggest tragedy in all this is that so many of these conditions could be prevented with the earliest possible diagnosis.??
Those of you who know me will know that I’m such a passionate fan of blood testing that I not only made it my business, but I made sure the technology we use at FunctionalDX is at the very cutting edge so we can provide the absolute best reporting and interpretation service out there.
Why can I confidently make such a bold claim? Because I see the journey of clients in my clinic and in the clinics of other professionals who use us. At FDX we don’t stick to conventional reference ranges which see dysfunction as an on/off switch. Instead, we look at the grey areas around the margins that allow us to better predict the trend of a client’s health. And we investigate the interplay between different bodily systems and how they interact to give us a whole health picture from blood testing.?I say it over and again because it’s true: ‘blood doesn’t lie”.?
Such tests work brilliantly with pre-existing conditions, illustrating the nutritional inputs and lifestyle changes that may provide a more comprehensive, holistic treatment plan for a client or patient. But for me, they work even better as a preventative tool. Because of the way we interpret the results, we can spot dysfunction way ahead of conventional blood testing. This means any necessary interventions are cheaper, there’s much less distress for clients and the drain on NHS resources further down the line is much lower.??
So here is my question to you. You go on a skiing holiday and you take out specialist insurance. If something goes wrong, you are covered and that gives you peace of mind allowing you to enjoy your holiday. So, if you can afford it, would you be willing to invest in an ‘insurance’ amount for an annual blood test like the spectacular ones we do – a full health MOT if you like? Before you answer, let me remind you: trends towards health dysfunction and even life-threatening conditions can often be spotted early, treatment and measures to correct conditions could take place earlier, the burden on the NHS could be massively decreased over the cost of your lifetime.??
Let me know in the comments, I’d be interested to hear. Equally, if I’m way off the mark, let me know too… These are the kind of conversations we need to have if we want our health service to be one that truly promotes health, as well as looking after the sick.?
Business Development Director| 12 years for centrifuges | MKE LAB
6 个月That's where our blood centrifuge comes in. ??