Nurses Don’t Do Numbers
Can nurses count? You would hope so, given their role in administering medication by pill, injection or intravenous drip, and in observing vital signs. Indeed, most practitioners do this day in day out, proficiently. Nonetheless, while nurses pride themselves on person-centred care, arguably their statistical naïveté has been exposed by the COVID-19 phenomenon. Generally, nurses seem to have fallen for the plague propaganda and shown themselves as uncritical if not willing participants in unethical policy.
As Registered Nurses, we have spent most of our careers in health education and research, doing our bit to bolster the status of nursing as an evidence-based profession. One of us (NM) recalls in his training a standard textbook about community health, a treasure trove of epidemiological information on health and disease in society, with trends over time and differences by age, sex, occupation and other factors. However, this book was withdrawn from the syllabus because most students thought it irrelevant and boring. To them, the only concern was the patient who entered the ward, not the incidence and prevalence of various maladies in the broader community.
Sadly, nursing has a problem with numeracy. Nurse training institutes in universities were expected to improve the academic ability of trainees, but instead we have credentialism. A numeracy test is required for entry and progression on nurse training but we have observed the lowering of standards over the years: some nursing students are so poor at arithmetic that they take several attempts at basic calculation tests to get through the course. Increasingly, learning difficulties are used as a free pass, pushed by another expression of identity politics, calling for ‘neurodiversity’.
When George Orwell’s Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four taught that two plus two equals five, the point was that authoritarians can make people believe something they know to be untrue. If nurses are innumerate, a pandemic can be presented with whatever numbers that the Government wants to induce fear and compliance. How many nurses spoke out against Neil Ferguson’s shock modelling of thousands of deaths per day? How many trotted out the mantra about the COVID-19 vaccines being 95% effective, not realising (as has been often explained) the fundamental difference between relative risk as opposed to absolute risk reduction?
We have found that nurses tend to be no more likely than the ordinary citizen to comprehend official mortality statistics. If you know any nurses, try asking them for the denominator on which a daily death toll is based: what is the average number dying in every 24-hour period in Britain? The Government wanted deaths certified as COVID-19 to be perceived as extra, when they were often nothing of the kind. Most deaths were in older people with comorbidities, at an average age above life expectancy. We have heard NHS staff assert that Britain had the highest mortality in Europe or the world (sometimes blaming this on Brexit), in ignorance of population rates.
The danger of limited numerical skills is becoming more apparent. We now have a steady pattern of 10-15% reduction in births and a 15-20% excess mortality in countries with high COVID-19 vaccination rates. Nurses should notice this and raise concern: this is a requirement of their code of conduct. The last three years, however, have shown that the vast majority of nurses uncritically accept the official narrative on lockdowns (demonstrably the most damaging public health intervention ever imposed on a population), PCR tests (highly dubious), masks (scientifically proven as useless against airborne respiratory viruses) and experimental vaccines that are far from safe and effective.
We can be sure, however, that nurses can count to 15. That is the percentage pay rise they are demanding, after two-and-a-half years of restricted access to healthcare, which they should have challenged rather than being sweetened by discounts, freebies and clapping rituals.
Both Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae are Registered Nurses.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Doctors don’t do numbers either, neither do “public health” officials, medicine regulators (now called “enablers”), politicians, “journalists”, “scientists”, “academics”, “educated people”.
Big Pharma do numbers – they don’t count the people they’ve harmed though, just the £££££s.
Some doctors do. At best we are tolerated, but we may be ridiculed or dismissed as foolish by colleagues(yes, it has happened to me) or in some jurisdictions struck off.
Indeed, I am generalising. Apologies.
Are you a doctor?
I’d like to read about why doctors have, in general, been so utterly useless in calling out the covid garbage, and the ‘vaccines’. I guess a fellow doctor, who has an independently functioning brain, might be a good candidate to write such an article.
The failure of the medical profession over the last three years is to me one of the great mysteries of the ‘pandemic’. I just can’t understand it.
That’s because there are computer models to tell them what to think.
Nurses are to big Pharma what waiting staff are to restaurant owners.
Nursing assistants / auxiliaries do all the actual work.
I heard a nurse express great surprise and consternation the other day that she had been paying for an expensive over the counter brand name remedy for many years and had just been told by a friend that there was a much cheaper Sainsbury’s own product with identical ingredients. She couldn’t quite get her head round the concept.
Nurses are the drug dealers middleman. Paid for every drug pushed on the unsuspecting. Unlikely they can do either maths or ingredients. They are mules in the criminal industry called pharma. And most don’t care and are quite vociferous in their hatred of the anti-stabbinator. Remember the sheeple did clap and bang pots for these enablers of fascism.
A relative who has been a nurse for many years treated me with derision when I talked about the recommended dosage for otc painkillers. She told me that two paracetamol won’t do anything for pain and you need “a good handful”.
She was also the one who when discussing a psoriasis told me that the steroid ointment prescribed needed to be applied thickly and a 25mg tube should last just 2 applications. No wonder the NHS is so expensive.
I tried to find out why protocols couldn’t be altered to suit the individual patient and was treated as if I’d come from space. I was asking why anti-diuretics were being given to my 4’9″ mother who weighed about 6 stone and had no excess fluid whatsoever. The nurse had never given it any thought, she was just doing what she’s been told to do.
Of course, it’s not all nurses, but the majority. We should also remember the nurses and doctors who stood with us in the line and gave up their careers rather than be further coerced; these nurses and doctors are some of the best examples of humanity and the quiet determination of the human spirit. I guess they’re not the ones asking for a 15% pay rise though!
My wife, who’s probably now more vocal than myself about the malevolence at our door, lost a lifelong friend who’s been a practicing nurse for 25+ years. In this morons eyes anyone that refused the ‘vaccine’ should lose their job and should not be allowed to take part on society. The mind boggles. Or it used to. Seems like evil is just lurking in the shadows for many people, just longing for the day to rear its ugly head. Well, we’ve had those days and we know who you are. We will never forgive, never forget. Eventually, one way or another, you people will pay your price.
Who does do numbers these days, a cynic might ask? I can just about remember when electronic calculators became affordable, and the school teachers were superstitious of their use. Certainly not allowed in many situations in those days.
Most people, not just nurses, struggle to think numerically.
People make sense of the world mostly through narratives and stories.
That’s is why TV images of people in ICUs struggling to breathe can drive people into a panic and telling them that the risk of death is a tiny faction of 1% doesn’t change their mind.
A picture’s worth a thousand words. Including numbers. News programme editors are not stupid, when it comes to campaigning for whatever. Oh, and a bit of background audio helps as well.
Jab deaths Nurses can’t add up
Yellow Freedom Boards – next event
Thursday 10th November 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction B3408 London Rd &
John Nike Way, Binfield
Bracknell RG42 4FZ
Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Bracknell
South Hill Park, Rear Lawn, RG12 7PA
Doctors neither. https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/06/23/how-well-do-doctors-understand-probability/
And they also can’t, don’t want to and don’t have to be proficient at organic chemistry anymore.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/should-failing-students-really-graduate-as-doctors
But they are good at googling.
Wilful ignorance.
They don’t do pharmacology anymore in some medical degrees. This explains why they don’t know drug interactions and people end up on 14 different drugs every day until they become ill due to toxicity.
I’m watching this happen to an acquaintance who is getting one problem after another despite, to her evident bewilderment, being 5x jabbed. Steroids for one thing; jabs because the steroids make her immunocompromised; antibiotics for a chronic infection….
I can say nothing other than suggest that that is a lot of medication; she sort of agrees but her son is a heart specialist so any observation from me holds little weight against the official NHS sanction of her all-seeing, all-knowing son.
She’s been very poorly treated by the Practice, too. Spoken to with asperity and drugs prescribed without seeing her.
Only one cheer from me for our medical staff.
My mother-in-law was on 13 different drugs each day. Some were twice a day, some three times, some 4. She had one of these dosage dispensers that the chemist made up and lived her life by the time each drug had to be taken. She became very ill and was admitted to hospital (this was a while back). Her medicine regime was completely overhauled and she was discharged on 3 different medicines each day which wasn’t too surprising as she was 79. Her general health was quite good for the next couple of years when she died suddenly.
My buzzword of the last year is ‘iatrogenic’.
I used to take case histories in a previous job, including lists of medication; average was 5 or 6 different things – 13 is a helluva lot but I really doubt that existing meds are considered when more are prescribed.
My own mother was addicted to OTC drugs such that if she didn’t have her daily dose, the (rhinovitis-like) symptoms returned. Voila! Proof she ‘needed’it.
Iatrogenic is a wonderful word. If you mention that between 10 and 30% of hospital admissions are due to iatrogenic factors, some people nod wisely but haven’t a clue what that is.
Wasn’t it Benylin (sp?) that was reformulated is it was addictive and led to hospital admissions? My friend’s mother was addicted to it and I think at one point it contained alcohol.
My friend is on Prozac which we’re told isn’t addictive but when she comes off it (rarely) the symptoms return and so she takes it again – and again. It’s easy to keep taking medications without realising there can be unwanted consequences.
Didn’t know that about Benylin! Mother’s ‘little helper’ was Actifed but she probably tried the lot.
She developed bowel cancer in her late 70s and I often wonder if there was a connection.
These things should be used with caution!
Being able to “do numbers” earns us the retort,
“Oh, it’s all about numbers with you, isn’t it, so insensitive, you’re trivialising life and death, it can’t all be reduced to a spreadsheet y’ know, haven’t you noticed that PEOPLE ARE DYING!”
Well, D’oh, they always do that!
Unlikely to score a point but may perhaps frighten the moron to a sufficient degree that he/she/it/undecided/can’t be decided runs away.
🙂
My back ground is in zoology and I tried to explain the concept of herd immunity in its widest sense to someone and was accused of sanctioning murder. Most people can’t cope with a dispassionate approach.
Each household pays £10 000 per year for Our™️ World-Class™️ NHS, from which you can’t get a consultation or treatment when you want it and/or not for weeks/months/years when you do. Value for money? Nurses: I want to know why anyone needs a degree to empty a bedpan, or why anyone with a degree would want to empty a bedpan. According to reports, many ‘nurses’ post-degree clear off and do something else. From the early 1970s having spent 5 years in hospital service, then 25 years on the medical supplies side until the new Millenium, I found that doctors and nurses were not the brightest buttons in the box and mostly rather lazy. Nothing I have seen over the last twenty years has changed my opinion. We have just had nearly three years to witness the standard of the medical and nursing profession and its sheer collective incompetence, ignorance and lies about virology, epidemiology and immunology, its collective professional negligence and malpractice. Nurses have voted to go on strike, but they may wish to consider that with 7 million on the waiting list, many not bothering to go to an NHS GP or rely on NHS hospitals and going private… Read more »
It’s worse than I thought. If nurses can’t do arithmetic, what hope have they of comprehending The False Positive Paradox? Ironically, the arithmetic of the paradox is actually taught in GCSE maths (as “Conditional Probability” or with reference to “Bayes Theorem”) but I doubt if the worked examples include the risks of testing for the decaying remains of a low-prevalence virus with a 45-cycle PCR test.
Perhaps they would do better with non-numerical discussions such as The Trolley Problem which is relevant to triage.
A friend, 60 year-old woman, keen cyclist, BMI 23, dropped dead of SADS 6 weeks ago. A neighbour, who’s a nurse, when told said “oh, we call those covax deaths”, from that comment I rather took it that nurses know all this but that they’ve convinced themselves it’s the lesser of 2 evils. That’s where the lack of numeracy comes in.
It’s not just nurses. A UK Chief Medical Officer and one of the BBC’s most highly paid current affairs presenters don’t understand quite simple figures either, and even Fact Check NI initially stated that this CMO and Stephen Nolan’s obviously wildly inaccurate claim was correct, before reversing their decision the following day: Here is a precisely accurate transcript of a 4-minute segment from an interview with Northern Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer on the Nolan Show on Radio Ulster at the beginning of this year. The first reply from Dr McBride is for context, and the part to pay attention to is after that, when they start to discuss the “50%” figure, revealing either their astounding ignorance or deliberate lying. Nolan: “How much does that booster dose raise our protection, our immunity?” Professor McBride: “We have evidence, recent evidence that it raises our protection very significantly. What we know is that two doses of vaccine isn’t enough, it takes three, it takes three doses of the vaccine, your primary course, your first and second dose, followed by your booster dose. And we know that for people, even those who are older and more vulnerable to Covid, that the protection from hospitalisation,… Read more »
Re Nolan / McBride exchange:
I reckon, given McBride’s testimony above, that his trial and conviction for crimes against humanity, could be wrapped up in an hour max even allowing for all the court protocols.
“Next…”
It’s clear to me that Stephen Nolan was not deliberately lying, as he sought clarity from the Chief Medical Officer and tried to double-check that what he was hearing was correct. Nolan simply doesn’t have much grasp of figures and is easily misled by an ‘expert’ he believes to be highly authoritative.
But there is no excuse for the Chief Medical Officer, after Stephen Nolan put the question to him twice, very clearly, and the CMO misled the public both times.
This is all horseshit, anyway, because (one-off) anecdotical relative frequencies are not probabilities. A probability is the likelines with which randomly selecting from some set will pick certain items. Eg, when rolling a dice, the probabilty of the result being 1, 2 or 3 is 50%.
Infectious diseases don’t progress randomly. We just don’t know how they exactly progress. But that’s most certainly a deterministic process.
I taught wannabe nurses on Access courses. The standard of arithmetic and maths was for the most part appalling. Orders of magnitude meant nothing as calculations were done on calculators and therefore had to be correct. Finding the average of something took ages, it was never done on paper or in heads. Units were complete mysteries and the difference between them unknown – litres, millilitres, grams, micrograms etc and any relationships among them were something that remained shrouded in mist. Creating and reading graphs was a skill that hadn’t been acquired. The article is correct in the statement that learning difficulties are used as a free pass. I was surprised at the number of students who required scribes and extra time to pass assessments. Not only that but the assessments could be resat numerous times until the student passed. The prospect of being given drugs by someone who was semi-literate and innumerate is actually quite frightening. However, the students were products of their educational system which had obviously failed them as they had failed it. They’re out there, these nurses, – often 5 to a desk doing things on a computer. Actually tending patients is low down on the priority… Read more »
As a masters prepared family nurse practitioner (retired), I read vociferously all the data available regarding covid, starting with Dr. John Ioannidis’ age stratified infection fatality rate. I avoided medical journals, turned off fearmongering MSM and spent a long time witnessing the reality. Early on, I began to realise people were scared, because they were being scared by the same people they relied on for their well being such as GP’s, PHE, MHRA, gov’t health advisors. These “experts” with the help and support of big pharma and MSM pumped up the fear volume, and there has been no going back. I would have expected more RN’s on the frontline, witnessing the reality, to be more outspoken. They were not. Were they gagged, like the GP’s? RN’s on the frontline in hospitals or outpatient gp clinics in the UK were on duty daily. For this, I take my hat off to them. But like all other healthcare professionals, they did as they were told and did not question the narrative. To do so would have ostracised them.