"swine flu is now the only illness in the UK"

My daughter is 10 and started being sick a week ago. At first to us it did look like swine flu so we called the "help line" who said nothing can be done unless she got a temperature of 38 or above. Day 3 of being sick and calling NHS direct, doctors etc we decided to take her into hospital and now we can’t get her to even drink water. The doctor (Dewsbury Hospital) diagnosed her with upper respiratory tract infection (this was after 3 days of throwing up). We went home and found the questions they asked, and it seemed the diagnosis was not right.

The next day I found my daughter collapsed in her bedroom so again we took her to hospital. After several hours they diagnosed her with migraines and said the migraines are making her sick and gave her some tablets that would stop the sickness. She had seen 2 doctors now and one paediatrician. Day 6 and the poor kid is still being sick and had had no food for a week now. So we took her to Dewsbury again and this time made a point that she DOES NOT have swine flu. She was weighed and came in at just under 4 stone so they took her in and finally diagnosed her with having gastroenteritis. This kills 5-8 million people every single year and is also one of the biggest killer of kids there is.

She is getting better now and slowly getting her strength back but this is not the whole story. The doctor who first diagnosed her wrongly came and apologised and said the reason why he did this is because they didn’t want to panic us by saying she had swine flu as everyone will be getting it anyway.

It seems the doctor in this case came to check my daughter to see if she was only critical and at risk of death from swine flu. As she did not meet their criteria, they didn’t tell us that it’s swine flu. But what is also bad is that if they put you in the swine flu clinic then that’s all they think about. People like my daughter still get other illnesses, they will still have heart attacks and food poisoning etc but if you show any symptom of swine flu then it gets put down to this and this only.

I think the doctor who saw my daughter ought to have thought outside the box. Yeah we will all get swine flu, but we get other stuff too and some of these things can be just as deadly. I also think that the spread of swine flu could be prevented if we knew we had it, I don’t know why the NHS feels that they should not tell us or treat us if we don’t fit into the category of bad publicity.

anyway if anyone can tell me how you make a formal complaint to some kind of medical board I would be very grateful.

kind reagrds