Professor Aziz Sheikh has called for the National Health Service to provide separate (privileged?) services for Muslims to take account of their religious requirements. The Professor is of Muslim orientation and has written an article for the British Journal of Medicine, giving reasons for his argument:
Writing in the British Medical Journal, he said the NHS should record patients’ religion as well as their ethnic grouping. “It is absurd that we do not, for example, know the perinatal mortality or smoking prevalence among Muslims,” he said. Male infant circumcision should be available throughout the NHS, he added. Although some NHS trusts do offer circumcision, most parents are forced into the poorly regulated private sector, he said.
Aziz Sheikh is conflating two issues here: matters of health provision and providing specialised services for particular communities. Whilst there may be problems amongst Muslim communities in terms of infant mortality and chronic illness, it is unclear why their status as Muslims should predispose them to these. Indeed, habits of smoking, an inability to speak English in the United Kingdom as an immigrant and living in relative poverty are better indicators for life expectancy and health. Therefore, these arguments may demonstrate that Muslims suffer from these problems, but that the causes are not specific to Muslims in particular, but are generally prevalent amongst the poor and immigrant communities.
It is not absurd that we do not gather statistics on the basis of faith, as faith is not a primary indicator for health, unlike social class, education or the country of origin for your family. Aziz Sheikh has cited this argument to add ballast to his call for discrimination in favour of Muslims on the NHS. This points the article away from a public health agenda towards a medical version of the ‘identity politics’ that has hindered the effectiveness of other governmental institutions.
The NHS should be more accommodating to the religious needs of Muslims. Many Muslims would prefer to see a same-sex doctor for reasons of modesty, but this was often not possible, despite the increasing number of female doctors in the NHS. More information about drug ingredients should also be available to allow Muslim patients to avoid porcine and alcohol-derived drugs.
If a patient who is Muslim wishes to receive treatment that is compatible with his religious inclinations, the National Health Service is unlikely to meet their requirements. The rationing of healthcare is resolved in a mediocrity of outcomes based upon the equality of all – though contact with NHS personnel or class will often result in a better quality of care.
Aziz Sheikh’s call for services in line with the Muslim faith could be interpreted as the natural demands of a community that has found its feet and started to request personalised treatment, in line with the oft-quoted rise of consumer expectations in health. Some could also see this as the further development of separatism within the Muslim community, demanding special treatment for itself.
The common factor is the state monopoly in health. It encourages communal responses to health issues, allowing professional leaders to make calls for particular treatment, with the corresponding balkanisation and backlash that we would expect from those who perceive that they have been missed out in any sharing of the tax spoils. Hence, the unedifying advance of ‘white welfarism’ in the leafy suburbs.
This would not be reported if health was a choice of individuals purchasing their requirements in a free market. The particular institutions would cater for those who wished to apply these requirements, and one would expect multi-faith alliances to obtain the critical mass that health provision often requires.
The problem is not Islam, it is the National Health Service.
How hard is it to access private care in the UK? In Australia, you are not linked to a GP – so you can pick and choose your GP according to your needs (in urban areas, within reason – there are some cost and supply issues, but generally you can pick and choose). When it comes to hospital care, if you have private health insurance, you can again pick and choose your providers.
I would have thought that achieving the financial ability to pick and choose your desired health care provider via the private system was a more honourable and desirable way of going about things than begging for preferential treatment…but, again, how hard is it to access private care in the UK?
Perhaps the good professor might try an alternate approach: don’t panhandle people to cough up for him if he doesn’t like what’s actually available. He reminds me of the homeless guy who tried to bum a cigarette of me once, and then became abusive because it wasn’t menthol.
I seem to remember that the biblical command was to clothe the naked. I don’t remember where the good book specified Savile Row.
“This would not be reported if health was a choice of individuals purchasing their requirements in a free market.”
This got reported, and so did this, and this and this.
I’m trying to spot a common factor… I suppose the state monopoly might be it, but I just don’t know… They do seem pretty random, don’t they?
The NHS ain’t great.
Whatever.
But this problem is always Islam.
Why do you think they have higher rates of of infant mortality and chronic illness? Islamic births in the UK have a 10x(?) higher rate of congenital/genetic disorders than the general populace. This is because of their tradition of cousin marriage.
Faith is a primary indicator for healthcare. We now have rickets again due to the burkha and subsequent lack of vitamin D
Philip, we’re dealing with C7th savages here.
PS. I’m way too tired to cite the refs but that can be done in the morning.
I’m not a fan of the UK’s system of national health care, but this is just another Muslim attempt to divide your nation.
I believe Mr. Chaston is incorrect. The problem is Islam based on attempts at schools and jobs (see the Minneapolis taxi dispute) to seperate themselve with the eventual aim of substituting sharia law for the law of the country in which they reside with the ultimate goal of sharia law being the law of the land. This is not the same as providing spanish speaking doctors or increasing research for AIDS. I agree that the NHS stinks but this is unrelated to that.
But it is only because the state is involved with medical care that this is a problem, so I must agree with Philip. Get rid of state (and therefore political) involvement and the issue goes away (like so many issues, such as homosexual ‘marriage’) because then it is just a matter of free association and private provision… ditto with Muslim schools and all sorts of other things. I could not care less if Muslims (or Anglicans, Satanists, Moonies or anyone else) in the UK want separate hospitals and schools, just as long as no one else has to pay for them.
http://tinyurl.com/ykxj75 is a link to an AP article about this. A Department of Health spokeswoman is quoted as saying “All patients are entitled to ask to see doctors of a certain sex.”
Interestingly enough it quotes “another Muslim academic, Professor Aneez Esmail of Manchester University, [who] warned that providing special services for defined groups risks stigmatization and stereotyping.”
“While it is reasonable we try to plan and configure our services to take account of needs that may have their roots in particular beliefs…we cannot meet everyone’s demands for special services based on their religious identity,” he said. “It would not be practical.”
I don’t know about the NHS that much (I’m American with Brit friends) but it really does sound like another “You do it my way” verse to the same song.
Nick M,
But this problem is always Islam.
No it isn’t. You’re conflating factors by giving too great a weight to religious identification just as Prof. Sheikh is.
Sheikh isn’t talking about wealthy educated East African Asians here. What the problem is, is that the statistics for Muslims are dominated by two large, concentrated, population groups: poor Bangladeshis and Pakistanis (Sindhis, mostly) in London and northern industrial areas respectively – they have specific problems connected both with poverty and cultural quirks and South Asian genetics (the latter assisting amazingly high rates of diabetes). Sheikh is probably ignoring the recent contingently Muslim refugees who have different nasty sets of health problems (AIDS, Polio, TB, thalassaemia) though they probably don’t have much statistical impact on the “Muslim” category.
As I pointed out when Verity produced that hobby-horse a while back, genetic defect rates may be relatively high in some populations, but (a) this is to do with being culturally/genetically isolated rather than religiously driven. (Some rare congenital diseases are much more common among Ashkenazi Jews than other people.) But birth defects are still not hugely significant health problems in such communities compared with, say, diabetes.
The problem of diseases isn’t caused Islam; but it is possible that zealous labeling by some Muslim physicians, such as Sheikh, in the play either for political power or research funding, could make Islamism an opportunistic infection. Countersupported of course by people taking Nick’s line: accepting the spurious religious categorisation, while attempting to repudiate the values.
For nick, the first commenter,
Private health care is easily available in the UK. BUPA seem to have the highest profile, but there are at least four other providers.
In fact, quite a lot of NHS doctors moonlight for the private industry, and it’s not uncommon on being told of the huge waiting list for NHS care to also be told you can jump the queue if you “go private”. A lot of people get diagnosed for free (which is fairly fast) and then get treated privately once they know it’s something serious.
They probably could do a deal with the private sector to have a special Muslim service, for a price, but that really isn’t the point. The idea is to get it firmly fixed in people’s minds that you must at all times be sensitive to the religious needs of Muslims. They make such a fuss over school meals that the schools dish up Halal to everyone to avoid the hassle. They make such a fuss over prayer rooms that every architect, business, or service provider will soon reflexively include a mosque in every public building. Break times for prayers, fasting during Ramadan, staff uniforms: organisations must change their ways to accomodate Muslims, until in the end it becomes easier to do everything the Muslim way for the sake of a quiet life. Until it starts to seem natural to do so. Faced with the Muslim cultural war, people are starting to make accomodations they haven’t even been asked for; to ingratiate, and for fear of “offending”.
There are other demanding groups (vegetarians spring to mind), and I don’t have a problem with the NHS being flexible towards people’s emotional needs where it can. But the reason this is news is not because other people have to pay for the NHS, or because of the vast expense; but as part of the great multi-cultural integration debate. “It’s that religion again!”
We are all, of course, free to ask anyone for our own personal peccadillos to be satisfied, and businesses should all, of course, be free to comply if that gets them more business. But we should also all be aware of the long-term price we are paying when we do so in the face of a deliberate campaign to change our society. Is it ultimately a change we will like?
This is also, incidentally, an argument against things like the state census, ID cards, centalised state databases on things like ethnicity, etc. It all serves to play into the hands of practioners of identity politics of one kind of another.
If we want to bolster the idea of people being all equal under the law and not allowed to play their religions as a means to chisel special treatment from the state, then we need to reduce those opportunities in the first place.
As a non-religious person, I object to any religion – Islam, Christianity, Judiasm, Hinduism, whatever – being used as a basis for dispensing health care. Muslims should be told that on this matter, as so many others, to get used to living in a secular society, or do the other thing – ie, leave.
Perry
I disagree. It would be great if the goal would be private seperateness for Islam, but that is not the goal. The goal is to impose something on the country as a whole.
Sure, but the mechanisms to do that are via state institutions that already exist. If all these things were private, I makes imposing anything a great deal harder.
If things were private, yes, but the intention to separate is there on this front and many others.
With the NHS I can see the road. First it is identification and accomodation of ‘needs’. Then the move to ensure no muslim is treated worse than any non-muslim. Sounds innocent on the surface but lets restructure the logic to expose the intent: No non-muslim treated better than any muslim. That, alas, is the intention of Islamists – infidels are not “permitted” to get better, have better, be better or considered better than the lowliest muslim.
Unfortunately there are plenty of self-loathers out there who are all too willing to aid and abet that poisonous intent.
The goal is to impose something on the country as a whole.
Pace several commentators it is hard to extract from what was actually said that the “something” being imposed is anything different from a tax-cost. The professor did not suggest segregated Muslim services nor that other people should be treated differently.
Except insofar as any requirement of public services imposes on the (taxpaying) country as a whole, this is just a standard piece of special pleading, tending to enhance the status of the expert making the call. The assertion that group X suffers poor results, and is therefore ill-served, and therefore ought to have special services, is a standard troughing technique. It doesn’t depend on the identity of group X in the slightest.
Group X need not even be a coherent social entity: “Muslims” in Britain aren’t. Nor are black people, gay men, women, or several other categories, frequently cited in such exercises. Even where one can point to greater frequencies of particular medical problems, and knowing about that might help diagnosis, it almost never makes sense to treat the group rather than the individual.
With all the abrasive whining the mohammedans are spewing over in old blighty, no wonder Richard Dawkins is such an irritable curmudgeon when it comes to religion. If they did that over here near me, I would get a pet pig and corral it in my front yard just to piss them off.
Maybe have nice smokey pork barbeques as well, at the nude gay bar I would rent my commercial property to. The property I bought right next to the mosque after it opened.
Anyone that chooses to live their lives according to any kind of peaceful ethical or religious principles is free to do so, so long as they leave other people out of it. As soon as they demand others change their lives to accomodate them they are out of line, are fair game, and deserve to be deliberately target for direct insult and offense.
I don’t see why the argument. It seems to me that both the state involvement and Islam are real separate problems. When combined, they become an even bigger problem.