Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

@Michael Hewett - I got Perlite a few years ago online, although not Amazon as I try to avoid that. You can often set a safe place for delivery, so if you have a porch or a shed/greenhouse etc, you can ask for it to be put there. It isn't always successful of course - as some delivery companies are better than others, as many of us will be aware.

I often ask for things to be left by the back door steps, which isn't very visible unless you see someone entering, but I doubt anyone would want to nick anything I order!

 

I live in France. When you go to your GP you pay him 26€50 and the gov reimburses you 70% into your bank account if you are in the French NHS system. My doctor does appointments for between 10 and 20 minutes for each patient. If you are on a very low income it's free. Like that the doctor is paid for each patient he actually sees, not for the number of patients on his list.

Most French people have a top up insurance to supplement what the French system allows. I pay around 50€ a month which is for hospital treatment. My son is a dentist so I'm not covered for that. You pay a board and lodging charge when you go to hospital, reasonable price, covered by the top up insurance. That means that the French NHS gets a small contribution from patients and it's not expensive either for the patients.

The waiting lists are much shorter. From the little I've seen it seems to work pretty well, except that there aren't enough GPs in country areas and there is a big shortage of dentists.

 

Similar system in Belgium @Busy-Lizzie altho more GPs and dentists available when we lived there.

Whilst there I had excellent treatment for slipped lumbar (infiltration) and cervical disks (cage) with no waiting plus having both feet re-organised - metatarsals shortened, toues re-attached and bunions removed with surgeons of my choosing and at times that suited me. Here I've had two new knees which I hadn't expected to need but, again, surgeon and times of my choosing.

My GP retired, his replacement was sacked for having a prurient and inappropriate interest in young ladies' boobs and no-one else around here was willing to take on their list. I am now signed on with one 50km away but haven't yet needed to see her. OH's GP has also retired but in an orderly fashion so he can get repeat prescriptions for his gout pills from a local service without having a GP tho he'll need to find one if he has to provide a health certificate for our dance classes next year

 

On radio 2 Jeremy Vine is on about the knackered state of A&E. Lots of callers chipping in. One, a very expert sounding chap is making the point that hospitals are full partly because a lot of patients should be at home, but they can't because there is no support for them in the community.

I get that. But I think it goes deeper. I think the broken NHS situation is just another symptom of the complete neglect of the education system over the past many decades. Here's why. I'm not talking about the lack of doctors, nurses etc. sure that's a problem that needs to be addressed. But nobody ever seems to ask how we can take pressure off the health service in the first place.

Imagine if all school kids were routinely taught things like first aid, nutrition, fitness,not necessarily sports, specifically fitness, in terms of how the body works and how to keep it working efficiently. I'm not talking about making all kids into doctors. Some might go on to study medicine, most won't. But if everyone knew how to look after themselves and eachother, I bet there'd be a lot less pressure on the NHS.

 

I ticked "agree" @Clueless 1 v2 but it's with reservations. I think it really should be parents who teach their children by example what a healthy diet and lifestyle is, with schools covering a wider base, tied into science, citizenship etc. Sadly I think we're too far down the line for that - probably two generations too far.

 

If you want to change what people eat, you have to change what is easily available. When good intentions run up endlessly against the need for extreme willpower, they get derailed.

I am wholly in favour of self-responsibility, but it needs gov to rein in big business extremes to help people cope in a world where excess is continuously on offer.

 

How can parents possibly stand a chance of teaching kids about nutrition?

Let's start with my grandparents generation. Having lived through war, they were super frugal with food. Nothing wasted, but that did mean a lot of saturated fats from the fatty cuts of meat, bone marrow etc.

Later we were told that this was bad. Those saturated fats will kill us. We should switch to low fat diets, and if we must have fat, we should have the newfangled hydrogenated vegetable oils instead of animal fat. Oh, and eggs are terrible, they're full of fat and cholesterol and carry ecoli and salmonella.

Fast forward a bit more, we're upto the late 1980s, early 1990s now. The bulk of our diet should be complex carbohydrates with their sustained release energy. Oh, and their lack of protein or fat soluble vitamins.

Fast forward a bit more, remember eggs are bad? Well now they're a super food, almost perfectly nutritionally balanced. And not disease ridden at all. Oh and those hydrogenate vegetable oils that were better than animal fats, well they'll clog your arteries way faster than any slice of beef dripping on bread ever could. But it's ok, because you don't need animal fat or hydrogenated veg oils, you can have the ultra processed synthetic proteins instead that give a similar texture to fat, but have no fat, just a tonne of sugar and molecules we didn't evolve to eat.

Now we're at present day, and from what I can gather, saturated fats are now thought to not be the harmful artery cloggers they were thought to be, and those healthy low fat products will give you all sorts of issues, possibly, depending on which study you read.

Now we should all eat the Mediterranean diet apparently. That's fresh fish and salad. Except I've been to the Mediterranean parts of the world several times, and have concluded that the Mediterranean diet pushed by the NHS and other organisations is not actually anything like what the people of the region eat regularly.

My conclusion, having taken a layman's interest in nutrition, is that my grandparents were right all along. They ate whatever meat they could get, which wasn't much so they made the most of it, including using the skin and gristle and fat, along with veg. But am I right? Who knows. I could be miles off. The official guidance keeps changing and backtracking. I have an interest in nutrition so I think I have a slim chance of not getting everything wrong. But for the majority that aren't as interested, they have no chance. Hence why I think it should be taught in school. If they can find time for religious studies and English literature, then surely they can find time for important matters of health.

 

It quite amazing all the things people want schools to teach these days, parents rarely seem to want to take responsibility.
From potty training to breakfast to mental health to sexual relationships etc.
No wonder half of them cant add up or read proper English.

 

I agree 100% with @JennyJB .Surely it's up to the parents not the teachers to 'bring' the kids up....Family life seems to have gone arigh ,such a shame.
There is a pretty good selection of easily available healthier food on offer ...loads of cheap veg and even meat products can work out a lot cheaper than Macdonalds....I don't expect the Government to make folk see sense..If folk used their noddle big businesses would soon change their ideas .

 

I'm not sure it's the parents pushing for that. It might be, but certainly I'm not, nor are any of the other parents I know personally.

If I was in charge, the school curriculum would be fairly simple. After basic reading and writing, it would maths, science, basic engineering principles, first aid, nutrition, fitness principles. That's about it. I mean let's face it, school has never really been any good. It's purpose is to make workers. People just about educated enough to do as they're told but not enough to think for themselves. That'll never change as long as it's a state 'service', but they could at least manufacture workers that have a fair chance of not taking too much time off sick.

 

That's the whole point @Clueless 1 v2....the Responsible parents are a totally different kettle of fish to the Irresponsible parents...what can be done about them ?.

 

That's why we can't rely on 'the parents' to fix everything. School is supposed to give a standardised education. If we believe it's about equality and fairness just for a second, then surely it is there to take away the variability of what is taught to the upcoming generations. The best parents might give their kids really great education. That's awesome. But where does that leave the kids of parents that are not well educated, or dare I say it, don't care? When people say it's up to the parents to educate their kids, what they are really saying, whether they intend it this way or not, is that it's ok to condemn kids to the same fate as their parents, if a kids parents are not well educated or simply don't care, it's ok that their kids should be put at a disadvantage right from the very start.

 

I think the biggest problem is that schools are not producing workers anymore.

I'm all for people reaching their full potential but all schools seem steer pupils to university whether its the right course for the individual or not.

Very few seem to get away from the academic thing.

Consequently we have to import half our work force because nobody with a university degree in history, (example), is going to take a menial job.

 

I totally agree. Something happened just after university stopped being free to the students. I have a massive beef with this because I see bright young people and their parents being farmed like sheep. They are brainwashed to believe that they can't build a career without a degree. Like they'll be doomed to a fate worse than death if they fail to accumulate a mortgage sized debt for the sake of a piece of paper.

I think what happened was someone realised you can still churn out workers, but if you keep them for a few more years you can have workers that are already up to their eyes in debt.