The FAST campaign wants you to call 999 if you can answer, about someone you’re with, “yes” to the question “Has their Face fallen on one side?”, “no” to “Can they raise both Arms and keep them there?”, or “yes” to “Is their Speech slurred?” The idea is to get people with strokes to hospital as quickly […]
Continue Reading →In praise of wild swimming
Indoor swimming pools have many attractions. Heated and disinfected water, private changing space, and even the occasional Jacuzzi on the side. So why would anyone want to swim outdoors? Britain’s seas and rivers are often shockingly cold, and they are also inhabited by all […]
Continue Reading →Shift work, cancer, and compensation
Denmark is reported to be paying 40 women compensation after developing breast cancer. The women are being compensated because they were shift workers. It seems that women with a family history of breast cancer are not going to be compensated. Is this going to be a precedent? How certain can we be that shift work is […]
Continue Reading →Facts: the facts
I was talking to a composer a few weeks ago. “This stuff doesn’t really exist except when it’s played,” he said, pointing to his score with heavy despair. “Whereas you’ve got a job where you can actually see that you are doing something good.” He couldn’t understand that my protests to the contrary were genuine: […]
Continue Reading →Cleaning up the superbugs
I am pleased to see that PatientPak (“introducing the world’s first antisuperbug kit”) have been admonished by the Advertising Standards Authority . I wish I had been able to mention it in this piece for the BMJ before it went to press….
Continue Reading →A test of tolerance
Autism is not the only developmental disability that a child can be born with. It does, however, garner a lot of attention. Part of the reason is that we still don’t understand the condition as well as we would like. And we still have no way of testing for it through prenatal screening. Recent research […]
Continue Reading →Smoking: Your employer is watching you
In the UK, smoking in workplaces is banned. But we can do what we want in our own homes and in our own time (as long at it’s legal). Glancing through job adverts (reading them is a recurrent hobby, not a search) I note that the World Health Organisation wants to recruit only people who […]
Continue Reading →Are medical surveys good for our health?
Invitations have been pouring through letterboxes all over the UK to take part in the Biobank. If you haven’t received one already, let me explain what this particular bank wants from you (thankfully, it doesn’t involve money). The Biobank is a research project, and its aim is no less than to improve the “health of […]
Continue Reading →Dying of cold
The snow falls, public transport grinds to a halt, schools are closed, and the Met Office issues “severe weather” warnings. And death rates go up: as the temperatures drop, so-called “excess winter mortality” kicks in. This phenomenon has been noted in many other countries, too, but why does it happen? A reasonable suggestion is that fuel poverty […]
Continue Reading →Facing the facts about the MMR vaccine
When is it time to say “enough”? As Barack Obama settles into the White House, I am hoping that his new surgeon general, widely expected to be CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta, will decide that with one particular issue, the time has come. The MMR – measles, mumps and rubella – vaccine is […]
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