Well Dr Freeman’s presentation at the 2016 EASL Liver Conference is going to be a big thing. I cannot mention the details of his presentation but I can tell you that it will have a huge impact on international Hep C treatment options and I am very proud to have made a small contribution to this important work.
One of the wonders of the 21st century is that I can still keep in contact with everyone even when I am traveling. Because of email and the Internet and the small team of dedicated people that I work with we are able to keep helping people access generic Hep C treatments from Indian and Australia regardless of where in the world I am.
Right now I am in London where I have met up with a couple of folk who I assisted access Indian generic Hep C meds. It really is wonderful to hear their stories and the new hope and energy they have found.
Of course the down side of that is that I also hear how anti- generic the NHS Establishment is and how doctors in the UK down right refuse to even monitor their patients who have chosen to take control of their own health and treat themselves rather than wait to qualify for treatment through the NHS.
Basically the NHS, like the health insurance industry in the USA, triages patients with Hep C and people have to be near to cirrhosis or have cirrhosis before they qualify for the new Hep C DAA treatment.
So people are being told to wait until they sustain permanent liver damage before they can get treated.
Sorry but that is just so stupid. The NHS is saying
“ Yes you are sick but we are not going to treat you until you are very very sick.”
This is contrary to all health wisdom which says that the best thing to do with any sickness is to treat it early.
It is like saying to a cancer patient
“Well we’ll just wait until the cancer has spread a bit before we treat you.”
Absolutely crazy. The longer a person has Hep C the more chance there is of developing liver cancer. The closer to cirrhosis a person gets the more chance there is of developing liver cancer.
So the NHS is saying to people:
“We are going to wait until your chance of getting liver cancer increases before we treat you.”
And then when someone says that they do not want to wait for that and will treat with generics the NHS doctors get angry and refuse to monitor them.
There is something very wrong with the UK’s NHS system when it comes to Hepatitis C treatment.
I would like to finish by drawing a comparison between the doctors in the USA and those in the UK.
For those of my readers who have read my earlier posts on this subject of doctors not supporting patients choosing the treat their Hep C with Indian generic medicines you may recall that I threw the doctors in the UK and the USA in the same bucket and referred to them all with the same disdain.
Things have changed.
Six months ago if a person with Hepatitis C in the UK or USA went to their doctor and asked them for a prescription for generic Harvoni or generic Sofosbuvir it was almost impossible to get one.
Indeed in the UK six months ago there were three doctors who would write prescriptions for generic Hep C medicines. Today there are none (well none I know of).
It was the same in the USA.
But today in the USA things have changed and most people with Hep C in the USA can now find a doctor who will write them a prescription. Not all but most. In the UK it has gone from three to none and in the USA it has gone from a few to many.
Why the difference?
In both the USA and the UK there are plenty of people getting cured of Hep C by generics. In the UK and the USA it is now a well known fact that generic Hepatitis C treatments are just as effective as the branded versions.
However in the USA doctors have started to support their patients and in the UK they have just got more and more offended by the fact that their patients have decided to take the matter of their health into their own hands.
Its a kind of arrogance, a kind of power trip.
Of course there are doctors who would like to write prescriptions for generic Hep C treatments, I know a few who have and a few who would like to, however the BMA, the British Medical Association, immediately crushes any doctor who dares to do this.
And so in the UK there are no doctors who will write prescriptions for Hep C meds and in the USA the number of doctors who will write prescriptions for generic Hep C meds increases every day.
The really crazy thing about this is that the UK has the best rules on the entire planet for importation of medicines for personal use and people in the UK with Hep C do not even need a doctor’s prescription to import generic Hep C medicines.
But of course it is always better to have a prescription and always better to have a doctor monitoring your treatment.
But you know what the best thing is? To get rid of you Hep C!
