THE PSYCHOLOGIST : ‘Starving, extreme pain’: Young mum’s ‘inhumane’ treatment at Queensland hospital laid bare

‘Starving, extreme pain’: Young mum’s ‘inhumane’ treatment at Queensland hospital laid bare

The joys of government healthcare. I once had a similar painful problem: kidney stones. I took a taxi to my usual private hospital and was on the operating table within hours. The woman below could have got similar treatment if Queensland Health fired some of its many bureaucrats and redirected the funds into employing more doctors and nurses

A young mother awaiting a “simple” one-hour operation was left starving and in pain for four days, forcing her GP to take the extraordinary step of writing to health bosses to intervene.

Frustrated Townsville GP Alan Wallace claimed the mother-of-four, who he referred to as Jessica, was suffering badly but had not undergone the surgery she needed because she kept getting bumped down the list by emergency cases.

In the open letter sent to the Townsville Hospital on Friday addressed to the Premier and Health Minister, Dr Wallace wrote Jessica had a gallstone stuck in her common bile duct – an “extremely painful” condition known as choledocholithiasis.

Dr Wallace said Jessica had been at the hospital since Sunday and was on high doses of morphine-like drugs for her pain and antibiotics to ward off potentially deadly infection.

She had not been allowed to eat since Monday when the operation was first scheduled, only to be repeatedly cancelled, Dr Wallace said.

“She is starving now,” he wrote in the letter on Friday morning.

“She has been on highly-addictive pain killing drugs for nearly a week. Premier, Minister, you must agree that what is happening to Jessica is inhuman.

“It is not what this young woman deserves. “It is not what Queenslanders expect.

“She is but a single example of a phenomenon which happens many times in hospitals all over Queensland every week of every year.”

Dr Wallace said the woman had made it to the operating theatre on Thursday but her proposed theatre was taken by an emergency case.

“The theatre staff apologised and promised that her operation would be done straight after,” he wrote.

Dr Wallace said Jessica had four young children at home, and her partner was struggling to cope. Her family lived in Tasmania.

“She texted me in her anguish. She wanted to discharge herself,” he said.

“This is not the fault of the staff of Townsville Hospital, or indeed of anyone who lives within a thousand kilometres of Townsville.

“The reason for Jessica’s plight is not clinical incompetence, it is lack of political will.

“Premier, Minister, I beg of you. Adjust your priorities. Adequately resource our health system.”

Dr Wallace said Jessica finally had the surgery on Friday morning, only hours after he sent a copy of the letter to Townsville Hospital and the media.

He told The Courier-Mail he believed she would still be waiting for the operation had he not written the letter, and her plight was “symptomatic of a sick health system”

“Something has to be done for the other poor buggers who don’t have anyone to stand up for them,” he said.

“Townsville Hospital doesn’t have enough operating theatres and they’re run on skeleton staff.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/starving-extreme-pain-young-mums-inhumane-treatment-at-queensland-hospital-laid-bare/news-story/241d298f019b31d89c8afa625e7e0d8b

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

‘Starving, extreme pain’: Young mum’s ‘inhumane’ treatment at Queensland hospital laid bare

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