I am merely a visitor in this country, despite the fact that I work here and pay taxes and whatnot. While I am entitled to use the health services, I do not feel that I can criticize the system. At least until August, when my permanent residency is certified.
However, I do have major concerns about the treatment I have received during the so-called flu epidemic.
Not that it was insufficient – quite the opposite.
I flew back to the UK from an area of the states with verified swine flu cases. I fell sick within the incubation time, and had several of the defining symptoms of the malady.
But I didn’t feel bad enough to seek medical attention, and didn’t know there was a public health issue as I failed to read the newspaper during the tenure of the illness. By the time I was persuaded to call, I was almost entirely better and certainly past the contagious point regardless of any other factor.
Why then was I prescribed Tamiflu? After my official government quarantine ended?
Or, more worryingly, why was I prescribed anything without a proper physical exam?
Nobody even asked if, for instance, I have allergies or a history of adverse drug reactions.
The anonymous people at the call centre did not, in fact, ask any searching questions about my particular history; they just noted whatever it occurred to me to disclose.
My questions about Tamiflu as a specific chemical compound could not be answered by the person on the line. My reluctance to take any drug for any reason whatsoever was disregarded. My resistance to taking medications before consulting my own doctor? Brusquely dismissed.
I’d already been in a state of self-imposed isolation for ten days, and was willing to accept formal quarantine as a condition of refusing medication.
That was not an option – I was told I absolutely had to take the drug.
In a word, why?
I didn’t want it, I didn’t have any symptoms it could help with, and I was no longer a threat to the public, even if Tamiful has magical unknown anti-infection properties (it doesn’t).
When I tried to weasel out of it using the ‘no ride to the chemist’ excuse the very nice concerned NHS people dispatched a delivery.
Now I have a spiffy unwanted box of a drug I will not take.
I’m going to go way outside of my normal remit and make a prediction that this approach to prescribing a relatively unknown drug to people who are not especially sick is foolhardy at best, dangerous at worst.