A round-up of the health news in the papers on Friday 10 February
Rebel Tory ministers have called on that well-known revolutionary body, the Conservative Home website in the battle to have the beleaguered health bill scrapped, according to the Guardian.
The newspaper says Conservative Home, seen as the voice of the grassroots of the Conservative party, has been instructed by ‘three cabinet members' to write an editorial today, calling for the health bill to be dropped.
The Guardian says it's ‘extraordinary that cabinet members feel so frustrated at the political deadlock that they have resorted to urging Conservative Home to raise the flag of rebellion'.
Concerns are raised today in the Independent about an increasing number of ‘eccentrics', ‘oddball romantics' and ‘the lonely, shy and sad' being labelled as mentally ill. A major revision of the 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is due for publication next year and ‘threatens to extend psychiatric diagnoses to millions of people currently regarded as normal.
These, according to the article, include ‘oppositional defiance disorder' for challenging adolescents, ‘gambling disorder' for those compelled to have a flutter and ‘hypersexual disorder' for those who think about sex at least once every 20 minutes; are these the ‘oddball romantics' the Indy was referring to?
Critics fear the latest edition of the ‘psychiatric bible' could increase the number of people diagnosed will mental illness and ‘treated with powerful drugs' when their problems could be addressed by ‘social, educational or political initiatives'.
Surgeons have warned against cosmetic surgery clinics which are ‘cashing in' on the PIP implants scandal by trying to up-sell on procedures to remove the ‘toxic implants', according to the Times (paywall). The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) is concerned that the sales technique is being used on women ‘at a time of stress' in order to persuade them to undergo a breast uplift operation at the same time as having their PIP implants removed.
Combining the procedures could help clinics recoup their losses or even make a profit out of removing the dangerous implants they had previously embedded in their patients, but has been condemned by BAAPS as ‘risky and unethical'.
