As from 15th April 2020, all new Dr No posts will be on a new, more mobile device friendly website. This website, badmed.net, has served Dr No well for over a decade, but it struggles at times, and is not easily converted to a responsive website that works on desktops, tablets, ipads and mobile phones.
All future posts will be just as if they had been posted here — the same Dr No style and content as before, but just posted on the new website. This website will remain as an archive of previous posts.
If you are a Dr No subscriber by email, Dr No suggests you follow him on twitter, as all posts are announced there. The badmed.net emails will cease, as they are triggered by a new post here, and that isn’t going to happen.
The new website (appropriately enough dr-no.co.uk) can be found here.
Update 2nd May 2020: the handful of 2020 posts that were first published here and then on the new website have now been removed from this website, to avoid double posting of content.
Update 23rd June 2021: Dr No has migrated this website from the old drupal 6 platform to this current Wordpress platform. The appearance, theme and styling are different, but the content remains the same, and all links, including historical links, should end up on this new website.
Late April 2016. As hospital consultants and staff doctors across England prepare for the first ever full walk out by junior doctors, similar preparations take place at Walmington-on-Sea… 
Of all the reasons to end a long and bitter industrial dispute, imposing an unwelcome contract on a demoralised workforce to “end the uncertainty” has to be the most bizarre, given the inevitable outcome of the imposition will be not less, but more uncertainty. The demoralised workforce, our junior doctors, are already in bad shape, overstretched and in poor morale. Record numbers are considering – though we don’t yet know how many will pull the ejector seat lever – working abroad. Late last year we learnt that almost half of juniors completing their foundation training chose not to proceed directly with their training – a sure sign of ambivalence about the direction of their chosen career. Hospitals face unprecedented recruitment problems, winter pressures are now being mirrored by summer pressures, with the imminent prospect of all year round pressures. The health service is in a critical way, at risk of implosion. So what does the Health Secretary do when he doesn’t get his own way with the juniors? He hits them on the head. Hard.
After the season of good will, the season of bad omen. More Blu-Tack than tack sharp, Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, stuck at the end of last week to her message that there was no such thing as a safe limit to alcohol consumption, but if you wanted to live dangerously, then she supposed up to 14 units a week was tops. On the Today programme, she was the worthy teacher cajoling the dull child, only to be out-smarted by J Webb, who popped the public health message balloon by pointing out that normal drivers face a similar lifetime risk of death as that implied by the new alcohol limit, yet the Government has yet to advise us that there is no safe level of driving, or that drivers should limit themselves to 14 miles a week. The balloon popped so far above Dame Sally’s head that she missed it. When Jay repeated the point, the response was of the ‘oh no, we don’t need to bother with that sort of nonsense round here’ kind, followed by more chugging rhetoric on the risk of dying from breast cancer. 
As the post nuclear option Heremy Junt/BMA contract row rumbles on behind the scenes – the top hit on google news today for junior doctor contract is a three day old 
At the eleventh hour, the BMA suspended the junior doctors’ strike. It hasn’t been called off entirely, it may still happen, but probably won’t. As a conspiracy theorist, Dr No suspects the whole shebang was a clever ruse by the doctors: a strike that was not a strike, a neat foil to Absolutely Stilton’s tanks lining up in the hospital car park; as a cock-up theorist, he suspects the whole bang shoot is further evidence that, even if it wanted to, the BMA couldn’t fire a rocket on Guy Fawkes Day. Apart from some bizarre even by Daily Mail standards doctors’ leader in love nest in Neasden style hackery, not to mention its doctors on dark web exposé, media coverage has been thin for what is after all serious domestic news. At the coming up of the sun, the Today programme looked the other way, and at the going down of the sun, Hoo Wedwards and his harem of squawking reporterettes hardly ever mentioned the conflict. There was some coverage of the ‘overwhelming’ 98% in favour ballot result, but few pointed out that 98% of those who voted is about just over half of all junior doctors, though even that is still an eye-watering result. For the BBC in particular, the junior doctors’ contract was, like the Health and Social Care Bill before it, to be just another ship that passed in the night.
Britain and sugar go back a long way, and the history is not that glorious. Sugar, or white gold as it was known, was the reason for the infamous trade triangle, the round trip that took slaves from Africa to the American colonies, sugar from the colonial plantations to Britain, and goods from Britain back to Africa to buy more slaves. By the mid 18th Century, the trade was so lucrative that the then British Government, blissfully unaware of yet to come concepts of coercive healthism and the nanny state, did the fiscal thing, and slapped a tax on sugar, making it a luxury item. The situation was turned on its head in the mid 19th Century, when the Free Breakfast Table movement, an early Liberal free school meals idea aimed instead at the working classes as a whole, brought about the abolition of duties on sugar and other breakfast table commodities, and the masses were freed to shovel ever larger quantities of sugar down the cake hole. Every Little Helps, as they say at Tesco. Even today, The Great British Bake Off, when it isn’t about the BBC showing off its ethnic credentials, is all about devising yet more elaborate ways of getting yet more sugar through the cake hole.
Dr No approached last Sunday evening’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (BBC1) in a bad mood, having just had his computer freeze up in the last moments of an ebay auction he was particularly keen to win. Maybe there’s an app out there baddies can use to freeze up other bidders’ computers at the critical moment. Any road, he hoped some good old fashioned rumpy pumpy would distract him from his ebay woes, all the more so as the BBC’s adaptation was by Jed Mercurio, once upon a time a doctor, and known more recently for dramas such as Line of Duty. He was up against stiff competition, not just in the trouser department. For Dr No, Ken Russell’s Women in Love is the defining big or small screen adaptation of DH Lawrence’s work, with a none too bad 1980s BBC adaptation of The Rainbow definitely in the running. How did Mercurio do?
Those who are smug about data security have this week had their assertions torn asunder once again. The Ashley Madison hack – Dr No rather liked Henry Tudor’s tweet ‘Cromwell was my Ashley Madison. He got hacked too’ – reminds us that data said to be impregnable is in fact all too pregnable, if in the circs that’s the word Dr No is looking for. High profile hack after high profile hack tells us there is no such thing as secure data, just data yet to be hacked. Those signing up blithely to care.data may want to wonder whether the day will yet come when they will sheepishly tweet ‘care.data was my Ashley Madison. I got hacked too.’
2017: Mid term and the Tories have got fed up with pesky doctor led clinical commissioning groups. The government fires all medical commissioners and appoints its own chosen panel members, often high profile individuals with no understanding of the health service. Westminster’s own clinical commissioning group, known locally as the Dragons’ Den, has a panel consisting of Alan Yentob, Lord Sugar, John Humphrys, Jo Brand and, in a nod to glamour, Siobhan Sharpe, who replaces Stilton, fired because all he ever said was ‘absolutely’. The top of Yentob’s head glows, as if there was a halo inside trying to get out, Sugar has blacked himself up and looks like the last king of a minor African state, Humph sits crumpled like a sack of potatoes with a particularly large King Edward with two eyes in it sticking out of the top, and while the other panel members have stacks of tenners on the tables to their sides, Brand has a stack of Black Forest gateaux. Sharpe is taking a selfie.