Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Doctors Refuse to Fix Smoker's Broken Ankle (10:09am on 09/20/2007)

A little foreshadowing of ObamaCare to come!

Need more proof that the nanny-state of socialized medicine doesn't want to regulate your entire life? Here's John Nuttall:

A man with a broken ankle is facing a lifetime of pain because a Health Service hospital has refused to treat him unless he gives up smoking.

John Nuttall, 57, needs surgery to set the ankle which he broke in three places two years ago because it did not mend naturally with a plaster cast.

Doctors at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro have refused to operate because they say his heavy smoking would reduce the chance of healing, and there is a risk of complications which could lead to amputation.

Not an alcoholic who refuses to give up drinking to get a new liver, a smoker with a broken ankle that the government run healthcare system doesn't want to treat unless he knuckles under to their coercion!

They have told him they will treat him only if he gives up smoking. But the former builder has been unable to break his habit and is now resigned to coping with the injury as he cannot afford private treatment.

He is in constant pain from the grating of the broken bones against each other and has been prescribed daily doses of morphine.

Mr Nuttall, of Newlyn, Cornwall, broke the ankle in a fall in 2005. Initially he refused surgery because he had caught MRSA at a different hospital four years earlier, and was terrified of history repeating itself.

He hoped the fractured bones would knit together with a standard plaster cast to immobilise his ankle.

But six months and three plaster casts later, it became clear that an operation to pin the bones was the only solution.

Oh, they'll give him all the morphine he wants, but nothing to eliminate the cause of the pain!Two years later and this guy ain't even on a waiting list yet! Sheesh!

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