Politics is making us more unhealthy |
Wes Streeting has said women have been treated like ‘second-class citizens whose voices don’t matter’. ‘The blunt reality is the NHS is failing women and girls on even the most basic measures of healthcare,’ he added. The Health Secretary’s new women’s health strategy promises £72 million. The problem is that his new men’s health strategy promises £79 million. The gap is small, but quite enough to put him in trouble. Athena Lamnisos, CEO of a gynaecological cancer charity, has deployed herself across an eager press to protest the inequity. ‘Acknowledgement is not enough,’ she has said. ‘Ring-fenced funding is what we need.’
£7 million is an NHS rounding error, but the argument shows how healthcare priorities get twisted by pressure groups, media opportunism, and habitual thoughtlessness. This is the modern NHS: ever more bloated, ever more inefficient, and endlessly in search of headlines, not outcomes. The question is not what produces the greatest gains in health, but who shouts loudest.
Despite being male, I have a professional bias toward women’s health. I’m an NHS physician, but I’m also chief scientific officer for a biotech startup. Our focus is on endometriosis, where tissue normally confined to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body, causing a catalogue of misery. Diagnosis takes almost a........