I certainly want to comment on the proposals about what to do with the petition. I hope that the committee will not close the petition but include it in the legacy paper because the committee’s hard work over this session has unearthed a whole lot of problems. Some of us knew that they were there but there is now a lot of evidence to show that they are. When the petitioner first started with the round-table discussion, the problems involved with the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid conditions were perhaps not quite as clear.
I thank the committee for the time that it has given to the petition, for its deliberations and for how it has looked into the issues. It has not just taken things at face value but it has dug deeper into some of the issues.
I also want to thank the petitioner, Lorraine Cleaver, for all her hard work in sticking with this petition. It can be a hard thing to do when you are not feeling particularly great at times.
The committee had a lot of submissions after the last meeting but one of the most significant ones is probably from Lyn Mynott on behalf of Thyroid UK. Perhaps one of the most significant points in that submission is that the trials that were mentioned are old trials. They also perhaps do not tell you how much of the T4 and T3 were trialled on people. If you add up everybody who was trialled, the total is lower than the number of patients who responded to the Thyroid UK survey.
After all this, the bottom line for me is that a lot more work needs to be done. If re-elected to Parliament, it is certainly something that I would wish to pursue much further.
The bottom line overall is that we are not listening to patients. We are taking a clinical approach to the issue and so many people are affected by it in so many different ways. People may not even know that they are affected. They are not put on T4. They are told, “You are fine—your blood is fine.” They may not understand that the fibromyalgia, the hair loss and the continued tiredness that they are suffering—you know the symptoms, I could go on with a host of things including depression and cholesterol issues—can all be related back to the fact that the T4 is not fully working for them.
In bald economic terms, the condition takes people out of being economically active if they are not well. It also means that the national health service is, frankly, wasting a lot of money on tests and treatments for things that could be sorted out if the person was given the right thyroid medicine.
I ask that, if the petition is put in the legacy paper, all your hard work is also passed on to the next petitions committee.