Remedy loss drives up A&E figures
‘Inhaling the steam brought immediate and blessed relief ’
There is little doubt that people nowadays have a lower threshold for seeking medical advice than in the past. Since my time as a casualty officer back in the Eighties, the number of visits to the A&E department has more than doubled to 20.5million a year, two million of which, it was claimed last week, were for “conditions that could have been treated at home”.
This could well be an underestimate, as the outcome of seven million of those visits is classified as “discharged, without follow-up”, which would certainly suggest the reason for attending hospital was neither an accident nor an emergency.
This unsustainable increase in workload is almost an inevitable consequence of the decision by family doctors 15 years ago that they would no longer be responsible for their patients’ welfare out of hours, at night time and weekends. But there has also been a cultural shift, the loss of that corpus of common (and commonsensical) knowledge of simple remedies that served previous generations so well.
In a particularly really striking instance of this, a woman recalls how when she was periodically troubled by croup as a child, her father would place her in the bathroom, turn on the hot taps, whereby “inhaling the steam brought immediate and blessed relief ”.
So recently when, staying with her son, her three-year-old granddaughter woke in the middle of the night coughing and crying, she naturally advised the “steamy bathroom” remedy. He opted instead to consult the NHS website, which maintained there was “no evidence” that steam inhalation was of value and instead she required steroids – “scarcely an option at three in the morning and miles from the nearest hospital”. Her son eventually relented, and the improvement in her granddaughter’s breathing was “quite as dramatic as I remembered from my childhood”.
Local complaints
The Met Office’s plans to use regional idiomatic terms in their local broadcasts to “make them more useful”, as reported in this paper last week, prompted some entertaining letters in the correspondence column. So, depending on where you live, rain can be “lashing down” in Manchester, “bucketing down” in the Black Country, “chucking it down” in the North East, “pelting down” in Glasgow, “tipping down” in Bristol and “tamping down” in South Wales.
More useful still is the Glossary of Yorkshire Medical Terms, compiled by Doncaster Health Authority to assist doctors from Europe and further afield (and, indeed, from the south of England) to elucidate the nature and source of their patients’ complaints.
Gripes (abdominal pain) and boggles (nasal discharge) are fairly easy to translate, but what to make of “Barnsley’s at home”, “on my Honda” and “I’ve got a visitor” – just three of the eight Yorkshire terms for menstruation?
“My husband is good to me” certainly requires clarification (he does not expect sex), as does “sixpence” and “sparrow”, for the male and female sexual organs respectively.
“This glossary is essential,” commented David Wong, a trainee in Accident and Emergency Medicine at Doncaster’s Royal Infirmary.
Electro sensitivity
The gentleman who has become sensitive to electromagnetic fields since a haemorrhagic stroke, with pain and pins and needles on the affected side when in proximity to the television and Wi-fi networks has elicited several further instances.
“I have become increasingly sensitive to the television,” writes a woman, who finds that after watching for any length of time, she develops a burning sensation in her right breast, treated with radiotherapy several years ago. Another has given up watching as it adversely affects her heart rhythm, and a third reports that proximity to Wi-fi causes a “pricking sensation all over” and nausea.
Electro Sensitivity UK has an information leaflet on its website (es-uk.info): for those who wish to investigate the matter further, a 64-page pamphlet summarises the findings of 800 scientific studies into the phenomenon.