Does the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom diagnose rare conditions? If so, does it provide treatment for them as well?
08.06.2025 09:49
One issue with all rare diseases is the awareness of them by clinicians. My GP had never personally seen a case but remembered it from his medical training. Also for us as patients it can be hard to identify when we should seek help with a disease we have probably never even heard of.
I was treated at St Bartholomew’s and The Homerton hospitals by a consultant who is one of the leading experts in the world on anal cancer and of course did not have to pay for treatment.
I was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2020. It’s a rare cancer, with only around 1,000 diagnoses in the U.K. each year. As a comparator lung cancer is diagnosed almost 50,000 times a year in the U.K. When I did eventually go to see my GP with what I thought was a troublesome haemorrhoid he recognised it immediately, I was at hospital the same afternoon to pick up prep for a colonoscopy, had the proceedure three days later followed by a biopsy and MRI scan and was diagnosed two weeks after the initial examination.
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