Plop Dalop

You can’t go in being like “I’m having migraines and I’ve seen that the first line medication intervention for migraines is triptans so I’d like to try that”, many drs won’t LIKE THAT. You have to go “oh nooo my heeeaddd hurtttsss what do i dooo”

As the latest round of unnecessary strikes come to an end, I have written to the BMA Resident Doctors Committee asking to meet the whole committee. It’s time for the BMA to be realistic and reasonable about what the country and the NHS can afford.

Seems remarkable but it's true: in terms of P90/P10 ratio, wage compression in the UK is similar to the USSR at its most compressed. Soviet min wage also peaked at ~60% median income, while we've just hit 66%. Social democracy has achieved greater egalitarianism than communism.

Junior doctors in this country are paid less per hour than the people who deliver their shopping. This is not a metaphor and it's not hyperbole; it's the actual hourly rate after a five-year degree, mounting debt, and the kind of training the rest of the world still sends its students here to receive. They are striking this week and the government's response has been to threaten to cut a thousand training places if they don't fold inside forty-eight hours. Think about what kind of person becomes a doctor in Britain in 2026. They know the pay. They know the hours. They know the system is short-staffed in ways that will haunt their entire careers. They do it anyway, because they are (like people going in teaching in 2026) the most precious and sainted kinds of lunatics, and because something in them still believes the work matters. That instinct is one of the most precious minearls this country owns. Naturally, government's instinct, as is its instinct whenever it encounters value, is to systematically beat and starve it to death. When the last of those people give up and go to Sydney or Toronto or just leave medicine altogether, the loss will not be visible for years. It will become evident later, in waiting lists nobody can clear, in cancers caught too late, in the slow disappearance of the assumption that if something terrible happens to your child there will be someone competent and present to help. You cannot rely on that saving grace any longer. We are eating the seed corn of British medicine, and the bill will be paid by people who don't even know yet that they are going to need it.