A review into GP prescriptions has found that one tenth of all prescribed medicines are unnecessary and that this is routinely harming patients. The study found that one fifth of elderly hospital admissions is due to the adverse effects of wrongly prescribed drugs.
The routine over-prescribing of medicines has pushed the NHS drugs bill past £9 billion a year. According to The Telegraph:
The Government-ordered review identifies “very significant” waste across the system, saying that too often patients felt unable to question medics who did not look up from their keyboards.
It found that an average of 20 prescriptions are now issued per head of population annually, a doubling in two decades. And 15 per cent of patients were found to be taking five or more medicines every day.
The review, led by Dr Keith Ridge, NHS chief pharmacist, said patients should be offered alternatives to drugs, including exercise, talking therapies and social activities.
Ridge and his team found that people are left on medicines for years and in some cases decades, when it was no longer appropriate. He said that there needs to be routine checks on what patients are taking and why.
Doctors have become drug dealers. My family GP rarely prescribed antibiotics. You’d have more chance extracting blood from a stone than getting a scrip out of her. She was a GP in great standing.
These days consultations with a GP are limited to ten minutes. The patients who told the review that their doctors rarely looked up from their keyboards were right. I have experienced this, as has my partner.
You go in and sit down. The GP asks you what’s wrong. The receptionist has already informed him/her of your complaint. While you are talking, he/she is updating your file and writing the prescription. They don’t give a damn about you. You are a means to an end.
That’s not practicing medicine. That’s fraud. That’s drug dealing and in many cases, that’s murder.
