Letter published in Evening Post from one of our members:On the same day you published my letter on the anomaly of unregulated fluoride dosing through our water supply, being proposed by Dr Hugh Annett, our local Director of Public Health, I received a document inviting me to take part in a GP Patient Survey.
It requests me, via a box-ticking exercise, to give my views on a number of issues of common interest in personal health care. Starting with ease of access to surgeries and health centres, appointments procedures and choice of practitioner, it asks about my experience of confidentiality, standard of care received and even really pointed questions of confidence and trust.
Then there are questions about my satisfaction (or otherwise) of plans for the management of personal health problems, including a list of actual or potential serious health conditions. Also included are terms like ‘discussion’ and ‘agreement’; and more about home care and access to it.
It is a classic feedback exercise to which I am pleased to have been invited to contribute, but which stands quite apart from the one aspect of remedial health for which patient feedback is not being sought, encouraged, or even permitted. That is the claimed benefit of better dental health via us all, without exception, having an additional fluorine compound in the most basic of life’s necessities, our tap water.
Irrespective of whether or not there is any health advantage in us having it, the principle of mass medication via a no-alternative, no-choice route of treatment, especially where no individual need exists or is diagnosed, runs contrary to all the care and concern elements of health maintenance professed to be the target of this apparently honestly conceived patient survey.
In the regrettable absence of any facility for personal comment, I would nonetheless feel inclined to write:
No medication without individual consultation, thank you!
This hitherto universal right enjoyed by patients is under threat from the Government for reasons which it clearly has intended to keep under wraps.
Better dental care for children is a smokescreen for something else, revealed by international evidence which is being systematically ignored. No other country in Europe fluoridates its water supplies. Why are we still promoting it?
Bernard J Seward
