Scarlett McNally: Patient empowerment and retention of doctors is vital for the UK economy

As a medical student in the 1980s, I was told that the reason there were no initiatives to limit smoking was that lung cancer wasn’t treatable; smokers paid taxes all their lives and died younger, often without collecting their pensions. There was a financial disincentive for governments to take measures to limit smoking. I saw the damage to patients in hospitals first hand. Cynically, it appeared that measures to ban smoking came in only when expensive treatments for lung cancer became available.There are now over 1.5 million attendances for chemotherapy in the UK each year.1 Cancer is no longer a binary live or die option, but a long term condition. Nearly five years since my own myeloma diagnosis, I still attend for regular chemotherapy or immunotherapy—for a condition I would have died from if not for medical advances. But consider the years of prophylactic antibiotics, steroids, appointments, and investigations—all multiplied…
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