The Times reports ‘GPs give rest cure its marching orders’.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...-give-rest-cure-its-marching-orders-792w52z38

Under the NHS-wide Moving Medicine project, due to begin on September 10, GPs, nurses and other health professional will be given scripts to help them persuade patients to change their behaviour.

The programme gives detailed guidance for 10 long-term conditions, such as diabetes, stroke, vascular heart disease, depression, dementia, arthritis and muscular-skeletal pain. Other patients will also be given advice.

Doctors will be given scripts for discussion, ranging from 30 seconds at the end of a consultation to a 20-minute session. Advice will deal with complaints from patients such as: “I already feel tired, and you want me to do more.” The suggested reply is: “Becoming more active is the most important treatment for persistent fatigue.”

Dr Natasha Jones, vice-president of the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine, which has put together the programme, said: “The societal belief is that if you have pain, you should rest, if you are fatigued, you should stop. People who are ill are constantly told that by their relatives, their doctors, their nurses. You walk into hospital and they put you into bed. You walk into a surgery and they ask you to sit down.

“For the vast majority of patients it is safer to exercise than to sit on the sofa.”

Many doctors are reluctant to advise patients on exercise, either because they fear they may offend them by raising the subject or because the patient may overdo it, she said. Few learnt about suitable exercises during their medical training.

 

More of the same out of the UK.

 

Health Promotion becomes Harm Promotion.

 

How are you going to get someone with dementia to exercise? They might not even understand the concept.

 

Anybody still doubt the profoundly pathological influence of PACE on the whole medical system in the UK?

 

How is this a societal belief? What did happen to the scientific fact of pain being an alarm signal? And why do the NHS people do not share this belief, as they do not stand outside society? Or do they think so?

Now this is a BPS-belief, but I'm not sure if it is scientifically proven. (I'd bet anti-inflammatory treatment would be no. 1.)

 

I think a lot of my relatives, friends and neighbours missed the memo on the 'societal belief'.

Where is the evidence that exercise is good for everyone with pain or fatigue? Millennia of evolution have developed the pain system and a sense of being tired/fatigued/exhausted for good reasons. To tell people to disregard these sensations without clear evidence or guidelines of when to do so is irresponsible; to issue blanket advice when for some there is evidence that this is harmful is gross professional misconduct.

 

Putting the rest cure to rest—again


Rest has no place in treating chronic fatigue

Sharpe and Wessely
BMJ 1998

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1112768/

 

So would such advice to the small minority be negligent?

 

....but it's been reported, both recently and for several years, that the most important predictor of health and lifespan is income. People with more money tend, on average, to live longer and be healthier whilst doing so. The effect is significant.

So the best way to improve health, and quality of life, is clear and simple, give everyone more money and all the trappings of more money, not a prescription of exercise.

 

I like the idea of moving medicine.

See this and weep.

 

I've tried searching for further information and there seems to be a curious lack of anything else. There isn't even really anything at all on the Faculty of Sports and Exercise Medicine website, when you would have thought they would be making a big noise about it.

 

These people really need to be removed from their positions of influencing policy making in the health service ....so we have Jamie Oliver (an ill educated hypocritical chef who doesn’t understand science or how to run a business) dictating health policy and some sports teacher joining in?

Don’t they realise that the teachers who couldn’t cut it teach sports?

 

https://www.fsem.ac.uk/standards-publications/publications/

Left side - 'A Fresh Approach' and the links underneath.

 

OK, thanks. I would have expected any organisation to want to make more of the publicity from this, perhaps these people are the exception to the rule.

 

2015 law Duty of Candour?

 

Their website is under construction, so maybe they're lazy