"When we realised that the pseudoscientific gender ideology has captured all our medical bodies, we recognised a threat to patient safety, and long-term damage to medicine. But we didn’t anticipate a parallel medical scandal designed to achieve the same aim - a PA scandal 🧵
In short, for the past 15 or so years, the government and medical establishment have conspired to replace doctors in the NHS with people who complete a 2 year course, taught by non-clinicians, which has 100% pass rate, no standardised curriculum and no defined scope of practice. They used to be called “Physician Assistants” and were originally sold as help for junior doctors - taking blood, taking forms and samples to labs, maybe clerking a patient on arrival and similar. A few years ago, a small council of this novel profession, voted for themselves to be called “Physician Associates”.
Since that time, everything changed. These people who barely have a clue about what being a doctor entails, and have no actual medical training, are allowed to fill doctors’ rotas, including in extremely sensitive settings like neonatal. They are paid more than junior doctors as soon as they graduate, and are fast tracked to positions that would take a doctor 10-15 years of training. Then these PAs are tasked with teaching doctors.
PAs are also employed in primary care to see undifferentiated patients. There have been many incidents of missed diagnoses, and even PAs prescribing drugs while logged in as a doctor.
On TikTok you can find PAs posting content from inside hospitals, betraying lack of understanding of ethics and patient confidentiality. They brag and have hugely overinflated sense of confidence in what they are doing, betraying lack of awareness that there is so much they don‘t know. This makes them especially dangerous.
Therefore it’s not surprising that there have already been deaths and serious incidents in both hospitals and GP land, as a consequence of these PAs doing doctors’ jobs.
Meanwhile, NHS Trusts are advertising for PS jobs, where the job description is no different from a doctor’s job description, and advertising PAs as “Assistant Physicians” (keeping in mind it is actually illegal in the UK to misrepresent a non-doctor as a “physician“), and ”Cancer Specialists” even though medically, a cancer specialist is an oncologist, a doctor with 15 years of training. These roles are being deliberately conflated in order to bamboozle patient into thinking they received medical attention for their health problem.
PAs are even misrepresenting themselves as “medics” and patients are reporting being threatened that they will be pushed down on a waiting list if they refuse to see a PA instead of a doctor in the first instance, ie. when they could have any illness, not just something already diagnosed.
And now there is a push to allow these PAs full prescribing rights, despite not having any medical knowledge.
Simultaneously, I’ve been told, some medical schools are no longer teaching medical students pharmacology and toxicology, ushering new doctors into an era of being told what to prescribe by the government. NICE/pharmacists, even though only doctors have the comprehensive knowledge to understand how a drug physically affects a patient, and why it might be indicated. It’s a deliberate crippling of skill, to make para- and non-medical professionals like PAs prescribing nurses and pharmacists, indispensable, in doing what is essentially a doctor’s job.
And now imagine a whole generation of doctors compliantly prescribing puberty blockers to healthy children, high testosterone to healthy teen girls and any other dangerous drug regimen that’s recommended by “standards of care” somewhere..
It takes 4-6 years to train a doctor into being safe no matter what walks through her door. It takes another 10 years to gain experience and specialist training, to become a consultant. PAs are just let loose in these job roles, and doctors are expected to “supervise them” which basically amounts to a doctor taking responsibility for these people acting independently.
10,000 doctors can’t find jobs. Medical students can’t find jobs. Doctors cannot progress in their higher training. Job roles for doctors are disappearing, and PAs are replacing them at all levels.
The ultimate goal is a two-tier medicine: for the plebs, you will have algorithmic medicine - a PA following a yes/no checklist, utterly blind to all the skills a doctor would have, in diagnosing and managing complex or atypical patients. For the wealthy, you will have access to private hospitals with actual doctors, but if you end up needing to go to a public hospital, good luck to you.
Having seen what we have seen with gender ideology, it will not surprise you to learn that the GMC, Royal Colleges and the NHS have conspired to do this behind people’s back. The GMC - a medical regulator - has agreed to regulate these non-doctors, in order to bamboozle the public that they are safe. College of Physicians seems to be most involved in green-flagging this (against their members’ wishes). With gender ideology, it was the College of Psychiatrists. But it’s the same stitch up, with people building careers on a medical scandal, and anyone who confronts them is either ignored or accused of bigotry and similar.
A group of anaesthetists are bringing a legal challenge to the GMC, about “Anaesthesia Assistants” - yes it is as dangerous as it sounds - and the medical profession is resisting. Lawfare seems to be the best way to push back. But it worries me tremendously that medicine is under multi-barrel attack: ideology which corrupts critical thinking and evidence-based medicine, bleeding into a neoliberal market creation for body modification and a lifelong subscription to intensive medical care, finally culminating in two-tier society where the workers have access to basics and are hoped to die before they can withdraw pension, and socialism for the ultra-wealthy."
https://x.com/lascapigliata8/status/1835258649557549199
"When we realised that the pseudoscientific gender ideology has captured all our medical bodies, we recognised a threat to patient safety, and long-term damage to medicine. But we didn’t anticipate a parallel medical scandal designed to achieve the same aim - a PA scandal 🧵
In short, for the past 15 or so years, the government and medical establishment have conspired to replace doctors in the NHS with people who complete a 2 year course, taught by non-clinicians, which has 100% pass rate, no standardised curriculum and no defined scope of practice. They used to be called “Physician Assistants” and were originally sold as help for junior doctors - taking blood, taking forms and samples to labs, maybe clerking a patient on arrival and similar. A few years ago, a small council of this novel profession, voted for themselves to be called “Physician Associates”.
Since that time, everything changed. These people who barely have a clue about what being a doctor entails, and have no actual medical training, are allowed to fill doctors’ rotas, including in extremely sensitive settings like neonatal. They are paid more than junior doctors as soon as they graduate, and are fast tracked to positions that would take a doctor 10-15 years of training. Then these PAs are tasked with teaching doctors.
PAs are also employed in primary care to see undifferentiated patients. There have been many incidents of missed diagnoses, and even PAs prescribing drugs while logged in as a doctor.
On TikTok you can find PAs posting content from inside hospitals, betraying lack of understanding of ethics and patient confidentiality. They brag and have hugely overinflated sense of confidence in what they are doing, betraying lack of awareness that there is so much they don‘t know. This makes them especially dangerous.
Therefore it’s not surprising that there have already been deaths and serious incidents in both hospitals and GP land, as a consequence of these PAs doing doctors’ jobs.
Meanwhile, NHS Trusts are advertising for PS jobs, where the job description is no different from a doctor’s job description, and advertising PAs as “Assistant Physicians” (keeping in mind it is actually illegal in the UK to misrepresent a non-doctor as a “physician“), and ”Cancer Specialists” even though medically, a cancer specialist is an oncologist, a doctor with 15 years of training. These roles are being deliberately conflated in order to bamboozle patient into thinking they received medical attention for their health problem.
PAs are even misrepresenting themselves as “medics” and patients are reporting being threatened that they will be pushed down on a waiting list if they refuse to see a PA instead of a doctor in the first instance, ie. when they could have any illness, not just something already diagnosed.
And now there is a push to allow these PAs full prescribing rights, despite not having any medical knowledge.
Simultaneously, I’ve been told, some medical schools are no longer teaching medical students pharmacology and toxicology, ushering new doctors into an era of being told what to prescribe by the government. NICE/pharmacists, even though only doctors have the comprehensive knowledge to understand how a drug physically affects a patient, and why it might be indicated. It’s a deliberate crippling of skill, to make para- and non-medical professionals like PAs prescribing nurses and pharmacists, indispensable, in doing what is essentially a doctor’s job.
And now imagine a whole generation of doctors compliantly prescribing puberty blockers to healthy children, high testosterone to healthy teen girls and any other dangerous drug regimen that’s recommended by “standards of care” somewhere..
It takes 4-6 years to train a doctor into being safe no matter what walks through her door. It takes another 10 years to gain experience and specialist training, to become a consultant. PAs are just let loose in these job roles, and doctors are expected to “supervise them” which basically amounts to a doctor taking responsibility for these people acting independently.
10,000 doctors can’t find jobs. Medical students can’t find jobs. Doctors cannot progress in their higher training. Job roles for doctors are disappearing, and PAs are replacing them at all levels.
The ultimate goal is a two-tier medicine: for the plebs, you will have algorithmic medicine - a PA following a yes/no checklist, utterly blind to all the skills a doctor would have, in diagnosing and managing complex or atypical patients. For the wealthy, you will have access to private hospitals with actual doctors, but if you end up needing to go to a public hospital, good luck to you.
Having seen what we have seen with gender ideology, it will not surprise you to learn that the GMC, Royal Colleges and the NHS have conspired to do this behind people’s back. The GMC - a medical regulator - has agreed to regulate these non-doctors, in order to bamboozle the public that they are safe. College of Physicians seems to be most involved in green-flagging this (against their members’ wishes). With gender ideology, it was the College of Psychiatrists. But it’s the same stitch up, with people building careers on a medical scandal, and anyone who confronts them is either ignored or accused of bigotry and similar.
A group of anaesthetists are bringing a legal challenge to the GMC, about “Anaesthesia Assistants” - yes it is as dangerous as it sounds - and the medical profession is resisting. Lawfare seems to be the best way to push back. But it worries me tremendously that medicine is under multi-barrel attack: ideology which corrupts critical thinking and evidence-based medicine, bleeding into a neoliberal market creation for body modification and a lifelong subscription to intensive medical care, finally culminating in two-tier society where the workers have access to basics and are hoped to die before they can withdraw pension, and socialism for the ultra-wealthy."