I have one criticism of your pieces, Dr McLachlan, they are too long - they could very easily be shorter. But that you involve yourself in cases such as Lucy's overwhelms my criticism. Lucy is but one of many, she is the headline case due to the nature of her alleged (supposed) crimes. Overturn her whole life sentence, nothing will have changed, the system will find many other victims to destroy. The uncaring, unfeeling, brutal system - populated by malign self interested human beings - will prevail.
On her inevitable release from prison Lucy's story will be the centre piece of all media, TV, newspapers, what have you. "Witch, bitch, heinous killer of babies, will be replaced with faux outrage at her conviction. There will be heavy leaders composed by serious journalists/editors denouncing all and sundry. Then these serious journos and editors will retire to the pub. Lucy Letby will in time enter the shadows, a broken and deeply distrusting young woman. She will be a better man than I if she is able to rebuild her life.
Thanks for this Scott - very interesting. Thanks for the detail. In Lucy's case it seems to me, a least, that any accused is innocent until proven to be guilty and in her case the "evidence" does not ''prove'' anything at all, least of all her guilt. If "evidence" this hopeless can secure a conviction then nobody is safe from pernicious accusation, corrupt police, venal lawyers, media hacks wanting to sell salacious headlines, idiot judges, lying witnesses, and word salad experts who like the sound of their own long and meaningless words. I would not advise our daughter to ever become a nurse. Far too dangerous. Years ago a person was blown up when walking past a cash machine that exploded and was rushed to hospital. Once he was feeling better he was accused of causing the explosion. I suppose it is human nature to want to blame somebody, anybody, rather than any blame attaching to you. The true villain of this sad story feels to me like that administrator fellow ( pure speculative hypothesis of course). I suspect jealousy, racial hatred and blame shifting might be the core motivations all aided and abetted by administrative buck passing and paid for from filling by bored place holders with nothing better to do. Nobody was murdered, the unit was incompetent, Lucy took the blame so the higher ups didn't.
I was just reading the NMC report into the nurse up north (Jessica Thorpe) who was accused by a former patient of being pregnant with his child. The chap was patently unwell (and died not long after) but the poor nurse has gone through years of hell. She was immediately stood down and constructively dismissed from her job - and because the patently unwell patient died, she was left in limbo for two years whilst authorities tried to at best pretend it wasnt happening, and at worst simply tried to draaw it out in hopes she'd shut up and go away. Then, the employment tribunal decided she was only entitled to a measly £23,500 compensation for being stood down by an NHS Trust that didn't bother to hear her side of the story, let alone investigate the claims of the patently mentally unwell patient. And as a result, that was all her three years of study and several years of experience and student loans were worth... £23,500. It wouldnt even cover the £27,000+ in student loans that our universities charge these girls to get trained. Five years later the official record finally shows that she was never pregnant with his baby and had never had a connection with him besides immediate contact on the open multi-patient ward when he was in-patient. Her nursing career is lost, nobody would ever employ her as a nurse again, and the NHS managers who caused the problem somehow still sleep at night. Shame on them.
What a story. And how many others are there? I would not advise that any young person become a nurse into today's ultra corrupt Kafkaesque medical nightmare. Any native English speaker easily make a living teaching in Asia or the Middle East with very little risk of this kind of madness and no more than a basic training course that costs little. I did. My healthy but batty old dad was put in a "care home" by my brainwashed four times boosted brother right in the middle of covid. I was on my boat out of touch at the time and foolishly trusted my brother. My father was immediately accused of "sexualized behavior''. I was not told. if this allegation was even true and I doubt it, Instead of immediately taking him our of that house of horrors, this was used as an excuse - you guessed it - to drug him. He never took a drug in his life. Hated drugs. Three hundred days;20 drugs, including drugs expressly prohibited for use on the elderly; 19 covid test, and God knows how many forms filled in about "Standards of care'' and code this and code that he died alone on 31/01/22. I was informed 72 hours before his death. I had no idea any of this had been going on. According to the death certificate, signed by a doctor who never attended, from covid. The only positive test 9 days before death was that final one. This is how corrupt our system is. A healthy vulnerable old man can be murdered in broad daylight and everybody seems to think this is "care". Our legal system is similarly corrupted where posturing fools decide guilt on nothing more than hunches and ignorant jurors are bullied into doing whatever the court instructs them to fearful of somehow being attacked themselves. I am sure that Lucy will ultimately be freed but how long? My advice to her - she is clearly bright - would be to use the time to study the law and the philosophy and practice of "medical science" and become an expert on her own case. She is world famous now and can use that to advocate for others abused in the way she has been. Thanks for your excellent work on showing how ridiculous and weak the evidence against her is. Doctors are so corrupt and drug pusher owned they have forgotten what "first do not harm'' means. Lawyers are so hopeless and corrupted they don't know what "innocent until proven guilty" means. Things are bad, no doubt, but there are good people who try to do what is right. You are one of them. Thanks.
I am sorry to hear about your father - what a mess. I honestly believe that one of he worst things that has happened in medicine is the loss of all care and compassion for the patient. Patients became "clients" - a business term that allows healthcare staff to get away with treating them more like a cost centre than someone with a life, emotions and an inate need for human empathy and contact.
In nursing I frequently lament the fact that in my day we did often months of weekly lectures and classes in labs in anatomy and physiology and, like the doctors, we had to learn microbiology and all sorts of internal medicine subjects. Today there are more subjects on what one of my midwifery research colleagues calls neopagan fairywanking - all the DEI and sensitivity training stuff, and it is almost impossible in some nursing schools to find the hard biological science, anatomy, physiology and pharmacology subjects. Medicines become something they simply tell you are used to treat condition x or condition y without the training I had to undergo on pharmicokinetics and pharmacodynamics. 30 years ago we taught nurses how drugs work and how to assess their function, interactions and clearance in the patient, now it's "you give this in this dose for a patient with that disease... then roll the drug trolley to the next patient."
And dont get me started on the complete lack of trial counsel competence of most barristers when it comes to a trial with an acute medical of computer/technical evidence base... sheesh
Thanks Scott. Please do get started on the the incompetence of barristers with respect to technical evidence - that is where the injustice is hiding - always interested in whatever you have to say. Lucy's case is a prime example of this. My wider take, for what it may be worth, is that mechanistic positivist science has hijacked medicine and made it into a branch of physics where drug x causes result y in each and every case and doctors and nurses have become robots who apply insurance company algorithms to symptom sets to push drugs without liability for the function of pecuniary profit. The medical world has become a machine. For me medicine is not a science and cannot ever be a science because it deals with the essential mystery of life. Life is not a machine. Medicine is and should be an art. Medical diagnoses are opinions. Faith, love, happiness, sympathy, hope, belief are all essential parts of "curing" the sick and more so than drugs. But there are not profits to be made pushing sympathy and faith. It is our health that cures us not drugs. Drugs just alleviate symptoms while natural health does the real work. Also the modern medical industrial scientific complex has turned tradition medicine upside down. Now instead of a doctor treating a sick person that was the traditional view of medicine, robot algorithms drug the healthy to "prevent'' ill health. Medicine is not "healthcare". Well my health needs no care, thankyou. It can take perfectly good care of itself. It is the wrong way about. Healthy people do not need doctors and certainly do not need drugs. Of course the drugs given create side effects which become the "sickness'' and so require more and more drugs. A vicious cycle of drug addiction and ill health. Only this can explain the billions spent and the chronic state of our health. The medical system is making healthy people sick. The only practical policy is to avoid doctors and hospitals, take no drugs at all. Vaccines are perhaps the very worst aspect of this medical scientific fraud. Mass poisoning for the supposed "public good'', for profit, without liability, paid for by its victims, together with the shunning and ignoring and denial of the walking wounded or dead.
Agree with most everything you say. I am seventy seven years of age and have always been anti-drug, be it the legal kind or the illegal kind bought from a guy on the street corner. And have become anti-vaccine ignoring all invites for covid booster jabs. Some months ago I relented on my anti-drug stance due to excessive urination during the night ruining my sleep. I went to my GP and he prescribed some drug or other which naturally acts on the kidneys. Twelve days after starting to take the medication (daily) I woke up one morning with violent pains in the kidney area. I then spent four days hospitalised with an acute kidney injury (AKI) - kidney stones and low kidney function. Coincidence? I leave you to decide. Having recovered and been discharged my kidney function was measured at 90%, that of a twenty one year old.
Glad you are feeling better. When I am on our boat I pee in a bottle and chuck it over the side when full. The other day I was peeing to much and had some discomfort - a burning feeling - when peeing and a need to pee when there was no pee to do. This lasted for a about five days or so. I noticed, looking at the pee in the bottle that the pee had changed its color to a sort of cloudy light orange color and not the usual clear almost brown color that it usually is. The bottle is a five liter water bottle and it takes about a week or more to fill. I noticed that the cloudy layer stayed at the bottom and was distinctly different from the usual color on the good pee on top. I used an AI engine to tell me about this and found that cloudy urine, urgency and discomfort are signs of some sort of infection. I took no drugs. Did not see any doctor. I cut down on drinking wine and coffee. Increased intake of clean water. peed as much as I could. increased sleep and decreased my work rate. Took a rest. The problem sorted itself out. It sounds to me as if you poisoned yourself with that drug. What was it? Our general policy ( and this is just for info and is not advice of any sort) is to take absolutely no drugs for any reason other than acute pain relief in the immediate short term. Our mantra is " the best drug is no drug". We never take any long term drug. Check any drug on line for side effects before you consider taking it. Take no new drug ever and only old tried and tested drugs. At the same time protect good health with healthy living, good diet, regular exercise, good sleep, harmonious family relations, literature, history, writing, music, practical hard work like gardening, getting out of breath each day for 10 minutes or more, avoidance of stress. Simple stuff. Good health is the only doctor the wild animals living on our mountain need and they are doing fine.
A firm belief in karma sometimes seems like the only comfort when I hear about all these cases like the ones you describe. That one with the awful 'complainant' in particular. I would imagine a fair few types would infer a great deal from your inclusion of the word 'kosher' there. I'm not going to comment in that regard. But I recognise that sort of callous character - my own mother has similarities with regards to the abusive treatment of her mother, involving something called 'power of attorney', which grants permission for all manner of sins...
Thanks Scott, a very useful perspective coming from what must be a unique area of expertise .
Wonder if they will publish? i am sure health journals wouldn't publish a similarly challenging paper which probably says a lot about the health industry and what is wrong with it.
Sadly, this whole case eminates from health service failures.
I have one criticism of your pieces, Dr McLachlan, they are too long - they could very easily be shorter. But that you involve yourself in cases such as Lucy's overwhelms my criticism. Lucy is but one of many, she is the headline case due to the nature of her alleged (supposed) crimes. Overturn her whole life sentence, nothing will have changed, the system will find many other victims to destroy. The uncaring, unfeeling, brutal system - populated by malign self interested human beings - will prevail.
On her inevitable release from prison Lucy's story will be the centre piece of all media, TV, newspapers, what have you. "Witch, bitch, heinous killer of babies, will be replaced with faux outrage at her conviction. There will be heavy leaders composed by serious journalists/editors denouncing all and sundry. Then these serious journos and editors will retire to the pub. Lucy Letby will in time enter the shadows, a broken and deeply distrusting young woman. She will be a better man than I if she is able to rebuild her life.
The same 'serious journos and editors' who previously had happily joined in with the 'baby killer' narrative, no doubt...
Thanks for this Scott - very interesting. Thanks for the detail. In Lucy's case it seems to me, a least, that any accused is innocent until proven to be guilty and in her case the "evidence" does not ''prove'' anything at all, least of all her guilt. If "evidence" this hopeless can secure a conviction then nobody is safe from pernicious accusation, corrupt police, venal lawyers, media hacks wanting to sell salacious headlines, idiot judges, lying witnesses, and word salad experts who like the sound of their own long and meaningless words. I would not advise our daughter to ever become a nurse. Far too dangerous. Years ago a person was blown up when walking past a cash machine that exploded and was rushed to hospital. Once he was feeling better he was accused of causing the explosion. I suppose it is human nature to want to blame somebody, anybody, rather than any blame attaching to you. The true villain of this sad story feels to me like that administrator fellow ( pure speculative hypothesis of course). I suspect jealousy, racial hatred and blame shifting might be the core motivations all aided and abetted by administrative buck passing and paid for from filling by bored place holders with nothing better to do. Nobody was murdered, the unit was incompetent, Lucy took the blame so the higher ups didn't.
I was just reading the NMC report into the nurse up north (Jessica Thorpe) who was accused by a former patient of being pregnant with his child. The chap was patently unwell (and died not long after) but the poor nurse has gone through years of hell. She was immediately stood down and constructively dismissed from her job - and because the patently unwell patient died, she was left in limbo for two years whilst authorities tried to at best pretend it wasnt happening, and at worst simply tried to draaw it out in hopes she'd shut up and go away. Then, the employment tribunal decided she was only entitled to a measly £23,500 compensation for being stood down by an NHS Trust that didn't bother to hear her side of the story, let alone investigate the claims of the patently mentally unwell patient. And as a result, that was all her three years of study and several years of experience and student loans were worth... £23,500. It wouldnt even cover the £27,000+ in student loans that our universities charge these girls to get trained. Five years later the official record finally shows that she was never pregnant with his baby and had never had a connection with him besides immediate contact on the open multi-patient ward when he was in-patient. Her nursing career is lost, nobody would ever employ her as a nurse again, and the NHS managers who caused the problem somehow still sleep at night. Shame on them.
What a story. And how many others are there? I would not advise that any young person become a nurse into today's ultra corrupt Kafkaesque medical nightmare. Any native English speaker easily make a living teaching in Asia or the Middle East with very little risk of this kind of madness and no more than a basic training course that costs little. I did. My healthy but batty old dad was put in a "care home" by my brainwashed four times boosted brother right in the middle of covid. I was on my boat out of touch at the time and foolishly trusted my brother. My father was immediately accused of "sexualized behavior''. I was not told. if this allegation was even true and I doubt it, Instead of immediately taking him our of that house of horrors, this was used as an excuse - you guessed it - to drug him. He never took a drug in his life. Hated drugs. Three hundred days;20 drugs, including drugs expressly prohibited for use on the elderly; 19 covid test, and God knows how many forms filled in about "Standards of care'' and code this and code that he died alone on 31/01/22. I was informed 72 hours before his death. I had no idea any of this had been going on. According to the death certificate, signed by a doctor who never attended, from covid. The only positive test 9 days before death was that final one. This is how corrupt our system is. A healthy vulnerable old man can be murdered in broad daylight and everybody seems to think this is "care". Our legal system is similarly corrupted where posturing fools decide guilt on nothing more than hunches and ignorant jurors are bullied into doing whatever the court instructs them to fearful of somehow being attacked themselves. I am sure that Lucy will ultimately be freed but how long? My advice to her - she is clearly bright - would be to use the time to study the law and the philosophy and practice of "medical science" and become an expert on her own case. She is world famous now and can use that to advocate for others abused in the way she has been. Thanks for your excellent work on showing how ridiculous and weak the evidence against her is. Doctors are so corrupt and drug pusher owned they have forgotten what "first do not harm'' means. Lawyers are so hopeless and corrupted they don't know what "innocent until proven guilty" means. Things are bad, no doubt, but there are good people who try to do what is right. You are one of them. Thanks.
I am sorry to hear about your father - what a mess. I honestly believe that one of he worst things that has happened in medicine is the loss of all care and compassion for the patient. Patients became "clients" - a business term that allows healthcare staff to get away with treating them more like a cost centre than someone with a life, emotions and an inate need for human empathy and contact.
In nursing I frequently lament the fact that in my day we did often months of weekly lectures and classes in labs in anatomy and physiology and, like the doctors, we had to learn microbiology and all sorts of internal medicine subjects. Today there are more subjects on what one of my midwifery research colleagues calls neopagan fairywanking - all the DEI and sensitivity training stuff, and it is almost impossible in some nursing schools to find the hard biological science, anatomy, physiology and pharmacology subjects. Medicines become something they simply tell you are used to treat condition x or condition y without the training I had to undergo on pharmicokinetics and pharmacodynamics. 30 years ago we taught nurses how drugs work and how to assess their function, interactions and clearance in the patient, now it's "you give this in this dose for a patient with that disease... then roll the drug trolley to the next patient."
And dont get me started on the complete lack of trial counsel competence of most barristers when it comes to a trial with an acute medical of computer/technical evidence base... sheesh
Thanks Scott. Please do get started on the the incompetence of barristers with respect to technical evidence - that is where the injustice is hiding - always interested in whatever you have to say. Lucy's case is a prime example of this. My wider take, for what it may be worth, is that mechanistic positivist science has hijacked medicine and made it into a branch of physics where drug x causes result y in each and every case and doctors and nurses have become robots who apply insurance company algorithms to symptom sets to push drugs without liability for the function of pecuniary profit. The medical world has become a machine. For me medicine is not a science and cannot ever be a science because it deals with the essential mystery of life. Life is not a machine. Medicine is and should be an art. Medical diagnoses are opinions. Faith, love, happiness, sympathy, hope, belief are all essential parts of "curing" the sick and more so than drugs. But there are not profits to be made pushing sympathy and faith. It is our health that cures us not drugs. Drugs just alleviate symptoms while natural health does the real work. Also the modern medical industrial scientific complex has turned tradition medicine upside down. Now instead of a doctor treating a sick person that was the traditional view of medicine, robot algorithms drug the healthy to "prevent'' ill health. Medicine is not "healthcare". Well my health needs no care, thankyou. It can take perfectly good care of itself. It is the wrong way about. Healthy people do not need doctors and certainly do not need drugs. Of course the drugs given create side effects which become the "sickness'' and so require more and more drugs. A vicious cycle of drug addiction and ill health. Only this can explain the billions spent and the chronic state of our health. The medical system is making healthy people sick. The only practical policy is to avoid doctors and hospitals, take no drugs at all. Vaccines are perhaps the very worst aspect of this medical scientific fraud. Mass poisoning for the supposed "public good'', for profit, without liability, paid for by its victims, together with the shunning and ignoring and denial of the walking wounded or dead.
Agree with most everything you say. I am seventy seven years of age and have always been anti-drug, be it the legal kind or the illegal kind bought from a guy on the street corner. And have become anti-vaccine ignoring all invites for covid booster jabs. Some months ago I relented on my anti-drug stance due to excessive urination during the night ruining my sleep. I went to my GP and he prescribed some drug or other which naturally acts on the kidneys. Twelve days after starting to take the medication (daily) I woke up one morning with violent pains in the kidney area. I then spent four days hospitalised with an acute kidney injury (AKI) - kidney stones and low kidney function. Coincidence? I leave you to decide. Having recovered and been discharged my kidney function was measured at 90%, that of a twenty one year old.
Glad you are feeling better. When I am on our boat I pee in a bottle and chuck it over the side when full. The other day I was peeing to much and had some discomfort - a burning feeling - when peeing and a need to pee when there was no pee to do. This lasted for a about five days or so. I noticed, looking at the pee in the bottle that the pee had changed its color to a sort of cloudy light orange color and not the usual clear almost brown color that it usually is. The bottle is a five liter water bottle and it takes about a week or more to fill. I noticed that the cloudy layer stayed at the bottom and was distinctly different from the usual color on the good pee on top. I used an AI engine to tell me about this and found that cloudy urine, urgency and discomfort are signs of some sort of infection. I took no drugs. Did not see any doctor. I cut down on drinking wine and coffee. Increased intake of clean water. peed as much as I could. increased sleep and decreased my work rate. Took a rest. The problem sorted itself out. It sounds to me as if you poisoned yourself with that drug. What was it? Our general policy ( and this is just for info and is not advice of any sort) is to take absolutely no drugs for any reason other than acute pain relief in the immediate short term. Our mantra is " the best drug is no drug". We never take any long term drug. Check any drug on line for side effects before you consider taking it. Take no new drug ever and only old tried and tested drugs. At the same time protect good health with healthy living, good diet, regular exercise, good sleep, harmonious family relations, literature, history, writing, music, practical hard work like gardening, getting out of breath each day for 10 minutes or more, avoidance of stress. Simple stuff. Good health is the only doctor the wild animals living on our mountain need and they are doing fine.
A firm belief in karma sometimes seems like the only comfort when I hear about all these cases like the ones you describe. That one with the awful 'complainant' in particular. I would imagine a fair few types would infer a great deal from your inclusion of the word 'kosher' there. I'm not going to comment in that regard. But I recognise that sort of callous character - my own mother has similarities with regards to the abusive treatment of her mother, involving something called 'power of attorney', which grants permission for all manner of sins...
Thanks Scott, a very useful perspective coming from what must be a unique area of expertise .
Wonder if they will publish? i am sure health journals wouldn't publish a similarly challenging paper which probably says a lot about the health industry and what is wrong with it.
Sadly, this whole case eminates from health service failures.
Wishing you every success.