How to cure the NHS: two aspirins and a large brandy

Whatever happened to the common cold? It would start with a few sniffles, when you were ‘sickening’. then you’d suffer a few days of full-blown coughing and sneezing, before making a full recovery within a week or so.

You’d stick your head over a washing-up bowl full of boiling water to inhale the steam, take an aspirin, rustle up a warming honey and lemon drink — ideally with a splash of scotch — and soldier on.

It was widely accepted that there was nothing much you could do other than let nature take its course. Which it did. What I don’t remember are colds which lasted months. these days they seem to go on for ever. Despite the panoply of modern medicines on offer, it’s easier to get rid of a computer virus than shake off a cold.

I’m not talking about myriad strains of exotic influenzas that are sent to try us. this year, it’s the turn of the aussies to infect the world with the dreaded lurgy. I’m surprised rolf harris hasn’t got the blame.

No, it’s the common or garden cold which lingers for ever, seemingly resistant to all that medical science, homeopathy and black magic can throw at it.

Long gone are the days when all you needed for a miracle recovery was a couple of squirts of vicks Sinex spray.

remember those tv adverts from the Seventies? a soppy teenage son is complaining to his mum that he can’t take his exams because he’s stuffed up with cold. She whips out the Sinex and proclaims: ‘Course you can, Malcolm.’

hey presto, within seconds he’s breathing like a cross-country alpine skier.

these days, Malcolm would be rushed off to hospital, where he’d spend seven hours cluttering up a&e while his mum is interviewed on one of the rolling news channels, blaming the ‘tory cuts’.

ANaStY cold isn’t just for Christmas any more, it’s a way of life. everyone’s convinced they’re suffering from some kind of deadly respiratory disease, which can only be eliminated by an expensive course of antibiotics and at least a month off work.

Yet again we are told the NhS is facing a ‘winter crisis’. But I wonder how many of the thousands of people crowding into casualty are really sick enough to justify going to hospital.

Most of them would probably be better off staying at home in front of the fire, mainlining Lemsip.

I’ve no idea why modern colds seem to last all winter. that’s best left to Dr Scurr in the Mail’s Good health section. What I do know is that lately mine seem to follow the same pattern, kicking off sometimes as early as November and hanging around in some shape or form until at least February.

I’ve had the flu jab for the past three or four years, with mixed success. It didn’t stop me doing my annual accordion impersonation.

the doc prescribed an assortment of medicines, including antibiotics, which made little difference other than to turn my tongue green. So this year, although I elected for the jab early because of the aussie flu scare, I decided to tough it out. Naturally, the lurgy turned up in time for Christmas, but I shunned pharmaceuticals in favour of vitamin C, hot lemon and lashings of a rather good brandy.

None of it stopped me succumbing to the usual misery but, fingers crossed, I’m on the mend — and without the grisly side-effects of medication or, more importantly, the need to trouble the NhS.

all sorts of explanations for the ‘winter health crisis’ have been offered, most of them politically motivated. the NhS has become just another stick to beat the tories. Despite all the tiresome squeals about underfunding, there will never be enough money to meet all the demands placed on the health service.

Leave aside the millions of immigrants who have arrived in Britain in the past few years. Leave aside, too, the cynical health tourists who fly in to exploit our hospitality and then fly out again, landing us with unpaid individual bills of half a million quid.

Yes, Labour screwed up the NhS when it decided to pay GPs more money for less work, putting an end to out-of-hours services and dumping the resulting chaos on already hard-pressed hospitals.

Yes, the NhS is a lumbering bureaucracy with a hand- tomouth procurement and provision policy which could have been deliberately designed to collapse the moment demand for hospital beds and emergency treatment rises — as it does every winter.

But the real problem is one of expectation, the widespread notion that we are entitled to have all our ailments treated and all our elective medical procedures met on demand, for nothing.

For instance, it was revealed at the weekend that the NhS has decided to refuse to allow men over 55 to donate sperm for IvF treatment. this is being presented as a major scandal.

But why the hell should middleaged men who want to get younger women pregnant expect the NhS to accommodate them — especially when each cycle costs taxpayers five grand a pop, with no guarantee of success?

If they want to get a much younger ( probably second or third) wife or girlfriend up the duff, they can pay for it themselves. Yet the NhS decision is painted in some quarters as more evidence of the Government’s heartlessness.

It’s a wonder andrew Marr didn’t question Mother theresa about it on his tv programme on Sunday.

after all, he effectively accused her of pursuing policies responsible for killing people — personalising it by claiming that if he’d had his stroke this winter, under this Government, he’d be dead.

It was a cheap shot, unworthy of a fine journalist like Marr and arguably a clear breach of the BBC’s impartiality rules. I hope he’s thoroughly ashamed of himself.

But it was part and parcel of the kind of hysterical propaganda which also saw the Laboursupporting Daily Mirror feature on its front page a picture of a seriously- ill baby alongside a photo of a laughing Mrs May.

OK,

So the baby’s operation had been postponed because of the ‘ winter crisis’ in the NhS, but to suggest that a devout Christian such as theresa May finds dying children hilarious is monstrous. this is where relying on the State to provide healthcare from cradle to grave has led us.

In what other sane country, anywhere on the world, would the Prime Minister, or President, be held personally accountable for every single interaction between hospital and patient?

Meanwhile, the news channels interview grieving relatives, sanctimonious junior doctors, health union shop stewards and opportunist politicians, all of whom accuse the Conservatives of wanting to murder people by starving the NhS of money.

throw in the sociopaths on social media and no government, especially a tory government, stands a chance of getting to grips with the NhS.

You could spend the entire gross domestic product on the NhS, and put Jenny agutter from Call the Midwife in charge, and they still wouldn’t be satisfied.

the fact is the NhS, like pretty much everything else the State touches in Britain these days, is ungovernable. all we get is pious sloganeering and gesture politics.

No one in a position to do anything about it will admit that the ancient, unsustainable NhS model is on its last legs and in need of major surgery. So, for the foreseeable future, every time the NhS sneezes we will all continue to catch a nasty cold.