Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post Reply
User avatar
The utility cyclist
Posts: 3607
Joined: 22 Aug 2016, 12:28pm
Location: The first garden city

Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by The utility cyclist »

So I'm listening to Hugh Fearnley W and he's interviewed a bod at the NHS on 'Britain's Fat Fight' and he states that Diabetes costs the NHS £10B a year AND that one in six beds in hospitals are occupied by people with diabetes. Further the discussion talks about obesity and the massive effects it has on the nations health and obviosuly the huge cost to the country/tax payer.

And yet where is the NHS when it comes to active travel, particularly cycling, there's hardly any backing if any, instead all we seem to hear is some ambulance drivers/service slagging off cycle lanes, and as well as A&E staff bashing people on bikes for not wearing helmets, facilities at hospitals are simply not good enough for both staff and visitors, no encouragement to ensure that their are connecting segregated cycle lanes to hospitals from city centres and from built up areas.
When is the NHS going to actually be pro active and push for cycling to be one of, if not the main methods of addressing this national endemic,when are government going to sit up and actually do something instead of sitting on their arris's and invest in something that will pay itself back and more. :twisted:
Rant over
rjb
Posts: 7200
Joined: 11 Jan 2007, 10:25am
Location: Somerset (originally 60/70's Plymouth)

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by rjb »

I believe they are trialling giving fitbits and encouragement to 5000 volunteers identified as being at risk of diabetes in an effort to increase their exercise and control their diets. One of our club riders has been given one. :oops:
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2017/no ... 29144.html
At the last count:- Peugeot 531 pro, Dawes Discovery Tandem, Dawes Kingpin X3, Raleigh 20 stowaway, 1965 Moulton deluxe, Falcon K2 MTB dropped bar tourer, Rudge Bi frame folder, Longstaff trike conversion on a Giant XTC 840 :D
Ron
Posts: 1384
Joined: 5 Jan 2007, 9:07pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Ron »

One in four of NHS nursing staff obese, that's not just overweight or fat, but obese.
The NHS can't even sort their own staff out, what hope of them sorting out the rest of the population?
https://www.nhs.uk/news/obesity/1-4-nur ... vey-finds/
Psamathe
Posts: 17650
Joined: 10 Jan 2014, 8:56pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Psamathe »

The utility cyclist wrote:.... AND that one in six beds in hospitals are occupied by people with diabetes....

Did they say that those 1 in 6 people were in hospital because of their diabetes or that they happened to have diabetes? i.e. there are many reasons somebody might be in hospital that are not related to their diabetes - making the statistic not particularly useful.

Ian
User avatar
The utility cyclist
Posts: 3607
Joined: 22 Aug 2016, 12:28pm
Location: The first garden city

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by The utility cyclist »

Psamathe wrote:
The utility cyclist wrote:.... AND that one in six beds in hospitals are occupied by people with diabetes....

Did they say that those 1 in 6 people were in hospital because of their diabetes or that they happened to have diabetes? i.e. there are many reasons somebody might be in hospital that are not related to their diabetes - making the statistic not particularly useful.

Ian

That one on six had diabetes but not in hospital solely because of diabetes, the stat is very useful IMHO because diabetes leads on to so many other issues that are directly related to a person being in hospital and the diabetes was a root cause in many instances of an unhealthy lifestyle.
User avatar
Patrickpioneer
Posts: 322
Joined: 25 Sep 2017, 11:18am
Location: Brynteg

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Patrickpioneer »

this week there is a very interesting series on radio 4 PM programme about statistics including the ones to do with health, I should think they are available on listen again or what ever they call it, but the main topic is don't listen to statistics
User avatar
Audax67
Posts: 6001
Joined: 25 Aug 2011, 9:02am
Location: Alsace, France
Contact:

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Audax67 »

Cycling already gets a great deal of support for reasons other than health. It's not the cheapest nor safest endurance exercise that can be used to treat diabetes, either: that nod goes to walking. Much as I love cycling, I never had better blood figures than when a minor affliction kept me off the bike for a month and I kept fit by walking.
Have we got time for another cuppa?
Mike Sales
Posts: 7882
Joined: 7 Mar 2009, 3:31pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Mike Sales »

Patrickpioneer wrote:this week there is a very interesting series on radio 4 PM programme about statistics including the ones to do with health, I should think they are available on listen again or what ever they call it, but the main topic is don't listen to statistics


I think you have taken the wrong conclusion from the programme.

David Spiegelhalter, who has a prominent part in it, is an eminent statistician, and Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University. What he is attacking is the misleading use of statistics, and the misunderstanding of what the figures mean.

Words too can be used to tell lies, to mislead or are just misunderstood. The answer is more literacy, more education in language, not to give up using words.
He would probably be appalled at your conclusion. He wants us to pay more attention to statistics and their use. Statistical techniques are a vital tool in science and technology, and in our layman's understanding of the world.
It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the pleasure
Isn't it a blooming shame?
User avatar
Cugel
Posts: 5430
Joined: 13 Nov 2017, 11:14am

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Cugel »

The utility cyclist wrote:So I'm listening to Hugh Fearnley W and he's interviewed a bod at the NHS on 'Britain's Fat Fight' and he states that Diabetes costs the NHS £10B a year AND that one in six beds in hospitals are occupied by people with diabetes. Further the discussion talks about obesity and the massive effects it has on the nations health and obviosuly the huge cost to the country/tax payer.

And yet where is the NHS when it comes to active travel, particularly cycling, there's hardly any backing if any, instead all we seem to hear is some ambulance drivers/service slagging off cycle lanes, and as well as A&E staff bashing people on bikes for not wearing helmets, facilities at hospitals are simply not good enough for both staff and visitors, no encouragement to ensure that their are connecting segregated cycle lanes to hospitals from city centres and from built up areas.
When is the NHS going to actually be pro active and push for cycling to be one of, if not the main methods of addressing this national endemic,when are government going to sit up and actually do something instead of sitting on their arris's and invest in something that will pay itself back and more. :twisted:
Rant over

The NHS (the whole tradition of Western medicine, in fact) has long emphasised cure over prevention. There are multiple factors behind this but one obvious factor is that cure provides an obvious cause-effect case and thus credibility & status to the curer, whilst prevention is not such an obvious cause-effect relationship, with practitioners often unable to claim a clear & certain responsibility for their preventative procedures having prevented some ill (which, by definition, never appears).

But this to the side.

My wife has been involved with local groups set up by the NHS to obtain the views of the public concerning what new directions might improve NHS services. One major strand discussed has been an attempt to move from the curative to a much greater degree of the preventative, in trying to improve health. These discussions highlighted many difficulties in even beginning to do this.

The first in the inertia of health institutions and the knowledge-base that informs them. Doctors and nurses are both trained in curative, not preventative, techniques. Even the few preventative techniques tend to take the form of cures., for example#: the large scale prescription of statins as a "magic bullet" pill. Big Pharma prefers the magic pill model.

The second is the unwillingness of the public at large to give up their damaging pleasures. They prefer to indulge themselves then seek a magic pill (or several) when their health suffers. They continue to indulge even during attempts to cure them. Many of these indulgences are addictive, to a greater or lesser degree.

The third is the incredible weight of advertising and other cultural exhortations to buy and consume the instruments of these damaging pleasures. The consumers prefer a car to a bike or their legs; sugary salty "convenience" food to cooking raw ingredients; alcohol to non-intoxicating drinks; passive sitting in front of "entertainment" to making their own more active kinds. And so forth. Government, despite their weasel-words, allow and even promote the ability of purveyors of these damaging consumables to push them to their addicted victims.

Fourth is the press & stress of modern life. Long hours in badly-paid jobs that may disappear tomorrow. The damage from social-media gossip and spite. The pressure to conform to consumerist hierarchies of ownership status .... And several other conditions of life that tend to reduce people to degrees of infantilism, wherein they feel unable to direct themselves against the tide of expectations of the norms set up around them by various "authorities".

There are several other socio-economic and cultural mechanisms at work to keep medicine in the curative rather than the preventative mode. These days, many of them have an underlying mechanism: the neo-liberal dogmas that serve big business and their PR agents aka politicians.

Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
Psamathe
Posts: 17650
Joined: 10 Jan 2014, 8:56pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Psamathe »

The utility cyclist wrote:
Psamathe wrote:
The utility cyclist wrote:.... AND that one in six beds in hospitals are occupied by people with diabetes....

Did they say that those 1 in 6 people were in hospital because of their diabetes or that they happened to have diabetes? i.e. there are many reasons somebody might be in hospital that are not related to their diabetes - making the statistic not particularly useful.

Ian

That one on six had diabetes but not in hospital solely because of diabetes, the stat is very useful IMHO because diabetes leads on to so many other issues that are directly related to a person being in hospital and the diabetes was a root cause in many instances of an unhealthy lifestyle.

I'm unconvinced because we have no idea how many were in hospital due to conditions completely unrelated to their diabetes (e.g. to give birth). A more useful statistic would be the numbers in hospital for conditions related to their diabetes.

I always understood that poor lifestyle (diet, exercise, etc.) made some conditions more likely but not really seem any probabilities as "poor lifestyle" is a wide range of degrees.

The utility cyclist wrote:.... and the diabetes was a root cause in many instances of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Or was the unhealthy lifestyle the root cause of the diabetes?

Ian
User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20308
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by mjr »

Psamathe wrote:I'm unconvinced because we have no idea how many were in hospital due to conditions completely unrelated to their diabetes (e.g. to give birth). A more useful statistic would be the numbers in hospital for conditions related to their diabetes.

Maybe, but 1 in 6 patients having diabetes when 1 in 18 of the population has it (3.7m out of 65.6m) suggests diabetics are more likely to be in hospital than average, doesn't it? How much more useful would the other statistic be anyway? How would one decide which conditions are related to diabetes?

I always understood that poor lifestyle (diet, exercise, etc.) made some conditions more likely but not really seem any probabilities as "poor lifestyle" is a wide range of degrees.

The utility cyclist wrote:.... and the diabetes was a root cause in many instances of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Or was the unhealthy lifestyle the root cause of the diabetes?

Surely you could make that same allegation about the statistic of "hospitalised for conditions related to diabetes" too?

Is this really a reason not to tackle the poor lifestyle problem?
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
Psamathe
Posts: 17650
Joined: 10 Jan 2014, 8:56pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Psamathe »

mjr wrote:
Psamathe wrote:I'm unconvinced because we have no idea how many were in hospital due to conditions completely unrelated to their diabetes (e.g. to give birth). A more useful statistic would be the numbers in hospital for conditions related to their diabetes.

Maybe, but 1 in 6 patients having diabetes when 1 in 18 of the population has it (3.7m out of 65.6m) suggests diabetics are more likely to be in hospital than average, doesn't it? How much more useful would the other statistic be anyway? How would one decide which conditions are related to diabetes?
...

I agree. But the straight 1 in 6 can also be said to present figure open to mis-interpretation - easy for people to start talking about 1 in 6 being in hospital because of ... (bit like the £350m a week we send the EU). And it does not really present anything meaningful.

I expect for many deciding which conditions are related to somebodies diabetes is all but impossible as you start getting into "increased risk" and "aggravated by". For comparison, what if in a program about driving a figure of 95% of people in hospital drive cars regularly; some will be there as a direct cause of their driving (crash, ambulance, etc.) others might be there for indirect reasons (e.g. having spent 2 hrs a day sitting in traffic jams breathing in toxic fumes).

I agree with you about meaningful statistics being very difficult but (currently) feel that does not justify "not useful" statistics.

mjr wrote:...
I always understood that poor lifestyle (diet, exercise, etc.) made some conditions more likely but not really seem any probabilities as "poor lifestyle" is a wide range of degrees.

The utility cyclist wrote:.... and the diabetes was a root cause in many instances of an unhealthy lifestyle.

Or was the unhealthy lifestyle the root cause of the diabetes?

Surely you could make that same allegation about the statistic of "hospitalised for conditions related to diabetes" too?

Is this really a reason not to tackle the poor lifestyle problem?

(Think my name is in the chain of quotes somewhere there but anyway), again, I'd agree that whatever the cause/effect (e.g. diabetes causing unhealthy lifestyle or unhealthy lifestyle causing diabetes) we still need to address the far too high levels of diabetes in the West.

I have a bit of a "thing" about "facts" presented on TV and feel they have a responsibility to "get it right". A certain celebrity presenter/physicist has never explained why an inanimate object in free-fall (e.g. a moon round a planet) follows an elliptical path where a human in free-fall follows a parabolic path!!!!

Ian
reohn2
Posts: 45158
Joined: 26 Jun 2009, 8:21pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by reohn2 »

Cugel wrote: The NHS (the whole tradition of Western medicine, in fact) has long emphasised cure over prevention. There are multiple factors behind this but one obvious factor is that cure provides an obvious cause-effect case and thus credibility & status to the curer, whilst prevention is not such an obvious cause-effect relationship, with practitioners often unable to claim a clear & certain responsibility for their preventative procedures having prevented some ill (which, by definition, never appears).

But this to the side.

My wife has been involved with local groups set up by the NHS to obtain the views of the public concerning what new directions might improve NHS services. One major strand discussed has been an attempt to move from the curative to a much greater degree of the preventative, in trying to improve health. These discussions highlighted many difficulties in even beginning to do this.

The first in the inertia of health institutions and the knowledge-base that informs them. Doctors and nurses are both trained in curative, not preventative, techniques. Even the few preventative techniques tend to take the form of cures., for example#: the large scale prescription of statins as a "magic bullet" pill. Big Pharma prefers the magic pill model.

The second is the unwillingness of the public at large to give up their damaging pleasures. They prefer to indulge themselves then seek a magic pill (or several) when their health suffers. They continue to indulge even during attempts to cure them. Many of these indulgences are addictive, to a greater or lesser degree.

The third is the incredible weight of advertising and other cultural exhortations to buy and consume the instruments of these damaging pleasures. The consumers prefer a car to a bike or their legs; sugary salty "convenience" food to cooking raw ingredients; alcohol to non-intoxicating drinks; passive sitting in front of "entertainment" to making their own more active kinds. And so forth. Government, despite their weasel-words, allow and even promote the ability of purveyors of these damaging consumables to push them to their addicted victims.

Fourth is the press & stress of modern life. Long hours in badly-paid jobs that may disappear tomorrow. The damage from social-media gossip and spite. The pressure to conform to consumerist hierarchies of ownership status .... And several other conditions of life that tend to reduce people to degrees of infantilism, wherein they feel unable to direct themselves against the tide of expectations of the norms set up around them by various "authorities".

There are several other socio-economic and cultural mechanisms at work to keep medicine in the curative rather than the preventative mode. These days, many of them have an underlying mechanism: the neo-liberal dogmas that serve big business and their PR agents aka politicians.

Cugel

Absolutely spot on!
It's the way of capitalism,hook 'em,debt 'em,then watch them flop about helplessly as the lifeblood and spirit drains out of them.Then make some more bucks as they're funeralised.
-----------------------------------------------------------
"All we are not stares back at what we are"
W H Auden
User avatar
mjr
Posts: 20308
Joined: 20 Jun 2011, 7:06pm
Location: Norfolk or Somerset, mostly
Contact:

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by mjr »

Psamathe wrote:I agree. But the straight 1 in 6 can also be said to present figure open to mis-interpretation - easy for people to start talking about 1 in 6 being in hospital because of ... (bit like the £350m a week we send the EU). And it does not really present anything meaningful.

Why is it nothing meaningful to point out that diabetics are massively overrepresented in hospitals? It seems pretty meaningful to me and I think you have to be quite wilful to misinterpret it.

(Think my name is in the chain of quotes somewhere there but anyway),

(Well that's what you get with quoting settings that are so awkward to use but anyway)

again, I'd agree that whatever the cause/effect (e.g. diabetes causing unhealthy lifestyle or unhealthy lifestyle causing diabetes) we still need to address the far too high levels of diabetes in the West.

I have a bit of a "thing" about "facts" presented on TV and feel they have a responsibility to "get it right".

Did they not "get it right"? You're commenting on a viewer's report of it, not the original.

Anyway, great that you agree we need to address the levels: perhaps you can help by not misleading people into thinking there's no problem because not all the statistics used to illustrate the scale of the problem are completely optimal?
MJR, mostly pedalling 3-speed roadsters. KL+West Norfolk BUG incl social easy rides http://www.klwnbug.co.uk
All the above is CC-By-SA and no other implied copyright license to Cycle magazine.
Psamathe
Posts: 17650
Joined: 10 Jan 2014, 8:56pm

Re: Diabetes NHS cost £10Billion, why no backing for cycling

Post by Psamathe »

mjr wrote:....Anyway, great that you agree we need to address the levels: perhaps you can help by not misleading people into thinking there's no problem because not all the statistics used to illustrate the scale of the problem are completely optimal?

I never suggested there was not a problem!!!

I only raised the issue of what I regarded as a poor statistic.

Ian
Post Reply