The Witch Doctor just needs to hear a whisper of the word “toolkit” and she loses the will to live.
So, can you imagine the effect that a “dementia toolkit” will have on her?
No?
Well, put it this way. If you never hear from The Witch Doctor or My Black Cat ever ever again, you can blame our demise on Simon Stevens and the damned dementia toolkit that is patronisingly “aimed at ‘demystifying’ the condition for GPs.”
Below is a cut and paste from a post we first published here in 2008.
The Witch Doctor is still as perplexed as she was then.
So is My Black Cat.
Furthermore she is hopping mad that the money she pays to HMG in tax will be spirited away to bribe GPs to herd in all the dementia patients they can lay their hands on.
What are they going to do with them once they find them, My Black Cat?
Will the enthusiasts running the NHS make a database and sell it on to any Tom, Dick or Harry willing to pay for it?
Eh?
POST FROM DECEMBER 2008
They thought no-one would notice when they introduced The Dementia Thing at Christmas, My Black Cat.
Now Dr Crippen has picked up on it and has a lot to say.
The Witch Doctor was just musing over a lecture on dementia she attended a long time ago. She took the form of The Human Kind on that occasion, because it was she who organised the lecture, so she had to be visible – it would have freaked everybody out if she had donned her witch garb.
Please don’t question why The Witch Doctor was arranging a lecture on dementia – it is a convoluted story. Interesting, but too convoluted to tell.
Anyway, it was really a long time ago, before Memory Clinics were heard of.
The lecturer, who was a young, enthusiastic, clinical psychologist described the service she ran. To all intents and purposes, it was A Memory Clinic.
Maybe The First Memory Clinic. Who knows.
The lecturer’s role did not involve excluding other medical conditions unrelated to dementia. This had already been done before patients were referred to the clinic.
The audience, who were all doctors, listened attentively and seemed to agree it was a good idea for the patient and his/her family to obtain a firm, early diagnosis and prognosis of dementia.
This perplexed The Witch Doctor. She couldn’t work out why how this might benefit the patient.
IS THIS THE REAL REASON?
So, at the end, at question time, she asked the question.
““What do you feel are the main advantages of patients knowing their cerebral symptoms are due to dementia?”
Apparently there seemed to be two main advantages.
1. Patients would be able to make practical plans for the future and tidy up their finances and other aspects of their lives before they became severely disabled.
2. The knowledge would encourage them to do things they wanted to do with those closest to them sooner rather than later. A world cruise was mentioned as an example.
The Witch Doctor remained perplexed.
No-one else in the room seemed to be perplexed.
This confirmed that The Witch Doctor is odd.
Funnily enough, a few days after that, The Witch Doctor encountered a patient at her clinic who had early dementia.
By coincidence she had attended this very same embryo “Memory Clinic.”
The Witch Doctor couldn’t resist talking about it with her for a little while.
The patient said:
“You know doctor, one of my neighbours has really bad dementia, and no one told her what was wrong, poor soul. I just keep thinking how lucky I am, now that I know what’s wrong with me.”
The Witch Doctor became even more perplexed.
And still is.
The Witch Doctor is odd!
Do you suppose HMG is going to pay for these unfortunate patients to have a world cruise?
Is that why they want everyone trained to “recognise” the early symptoms of dementia?
The Witch Doctor 
I’ll tell you what they’re going to do with all those diagnosed dementia patients – they’re going to persuade them that it would be far easier for everyone if they put their affairs in order, went on a world cruise and then took another trip to Switzerland.
By: gabbyjulie on October 31, 2014
at 2:04 am
If only more doctors were ‘odd’ like the Witch Doctor! Some people don’t want to ‘KNOW’. My sister didn’t want to know that she was losing her 12 year fight to survive a malignant melanoma, but all the nurses and doctors were baffled because ‘an intelligent woman SHOULD want to know’ – indeed despite her clear assertion that she did not want to discuss death under any circumstances, they continued, both overtly and covertly, with their attempts to make her do so, . It was in her diary right up until the day she died “a nurse came to see me and insisted on talking about death for half an hour”. She was too weak by then to send her packing. In my book that is abuse.
I may (or may not) have a condition which caused my father’s death and which my sister also had (though it wasn’t the cause of her death). I will not be tested as I prefer to fight my tendency to fear future illness and to live as long as possible, without a named death sentence hanging over me. I wish the BBC would stop talking about cancer and dementia and other illnesses at every opportunity – some of us like to listen to speech programmes on the radio without being dragged down into fear, anxiety and depression. Phone ins, plays, endless medical people and ‘health’ experts telling us to look for symptoms as we’re bound to have something nasty….. and if our sleep patterns aren’t ‘normal’ we will almost certainly develop an incurable condition – great news for nightshift workers’ parents of young children and those caring for elderly parents. And if we live with stress of this kind in our lives, we may as well book Switzerland now as we apparently haven’t a hope in hell of surviving without serious illness and early death.
By: ruth822 on March 27, 2015
at 7:52 pm