Category Archives: medical

medical, personal, ramblings

Ten Things

Having just had my second knee transplant (sorry, total prosthetic knee replacement) I thought that for this month’s Ten Things I should maybe write a few of the important things I’ve learnt about knee replacement operations.
Ten Things I’ve Learnt about Knee Replacement
I’m taking as read all the usual stuff about operations, general anaesthetics, etc. (like anti-DVT stockings, morphine causing constipation). This is knee replacement specific things. First of all it is important to realise that no two knee operations are the same, so what follows is based on my experiences; yours may be different.

  1. There are three key people in a good outcome: a good surgeon, a good physiotherapist and you! Yes, you! A good surgeon and good physio are critical, but it is equally critical that you put in the work at rehab!
  2. If you can find out who your surgeon will be, check him (or her) out. If you have a choice, ensure you get someone who specialises in knee replacements rather than a generalist. What’s their track record? How many have they done? The more experienced they are the better.
  3. Anything you can do before your operation to strengthen your legs muscles, specifically the quads at the front of the thigh, is going to be helpful in rehab.
  4. Before you go into hospital ensure everything is ready at home, especially think about trip hazards: gangways are clear, rugs are stuck down or removed.
  5. Get a urinal (maybe two) with a lid – something to pee into in the middle of the night. (They’re cheap and many come with a “female funnel attachment”.) Even with a light on, you do not want to be staggering to the bathroom, on crutches, maybe in pain, barely half-awake, in the wee small hours and while trying to avoid the lurking cats and dogs.
  6. Unless you have a “slave” (aka. a partner) to fetch and carry for you, get a good bag (shopping bag size) which you can put over your shoulder or round your neck to carry things around when you’re using crutches.


    7. A typical before and after x-ray; note the realignment of the femur and tibia

  7. Post-op your enemy is infection. Ensure no-one (and I mean no-one) touches your operated leg without having visibly washed their hands and are preferably wearing disposable gloves.
  8. Do as much as possible to ensure you get a good physiotherapist. Poor, or no, physio is the fastest way to ensure you don’t recover your mobility. Rehab physio will start in hospital; they’ll likely have you standing with a frame and walking a few gentle paces just 12 or so hours after your operation. You will be given exercises to do. Do them – as much as you can through the pain (but stop when it gets too painful). And keep doing them. Make sure you get as much post-op out-patient physio as you can and that your first session is within 7-10 days of leaving hospital; these sessions will help monitor your progress and adjust the exercises to your needs. The physios are not there to be sadistic (though sometimes it feels like it!) but to get you doing the right exercises, the right way, and at the right time, to ensure the best possible outcome.
  9. Recovery is painful! Think about what has been done – someone has done around 90 minutes serious carpentry to remove the degraded bone and replace it, very accurately, with some highly engineered metalwork; and that’s all on one of the most complex joints in the body. Discuss pain control with your clinicians; they will prescribe the right analgesics. Although the pain will recede over time, do not expect to be pain-free for several weeks. But a good outcome is well worth the pain.
  10. You should be provided with elbow crutches and taught to use them in the day or so after your operation. You will need them for several weeks. Go carefully and don’t get over-confident as this will lead to accidents. On the other hand you should be encouraged to dispense with the crutches as soon as you safely can.

There is a lot more I can say, and I do intend to try to write all this up for the benefit of others. But that will do for now!

medical, personal

Knees Up Again

1 Comment

[If you don’t like things medical, skip this.]
So it’s now a week and the day since I was let out of hospital after a complete left knee replacement to match the right one that was done at the beginning of the year. On the left, here’s the knee before (notice the impressively neat scar on my right knee that was prepared earlier) and on the right dressed post-op:


I suppose the knee is getting better although it doesn’t feel like that much of the time. Initially when I was in hospital it was a lot less painful than the right one had been but since I’ve been home the pain has been more like the same and at times obviously quite bad – which is very frustrating, depressing and demoralizing; but I guess that all part of healing process.
Admittedly all this is being done privately – we’re very lucky in that we can afford medical insurance – and generally I cannot fault hospital. [For anyone contemplating having knee surgery privately, don’t expect any change out of £15,000 per knee.] I had the same surgeon, the same anaesthetist, most (if not all) the same theatre team, and even the same physio on the ward – and I’m even booked in with the same guy as before for outpatient physio – that’s just one of the benefits of going private!
I had a spinal anaesthetic (so I was conscious; recovery is much nicer than a general anaesthetic) and was in theatre on the Wednesday afternoon (13 September) for about two hours. This was followed by an hour in recovery and overnight in the HDU because of my sleep apnoea. Then back in my room for lunch on Thursday.
I still don’t understand how the medics do this! They can rip you open; do 90 minutes serious carpentry; glue you back together; and have you on your feet 12 hours later. In fact the physio had me out of bed and walking few steps with a frame at 10 o’clock the following morning. Rinse and repeat twice a day. On the Friday morning the physio took the Zimmer frame away and left me with crutches; they also made me do a very small, test, staircase in their gym – this was fine although I had struggled with it back in December.
On Saturday morning my surgeon ran in about 8:20, wearing jeans and a rugby shirt, had a quick look, said yes OK you can go home, I’m now off to Portugal for a week (playing golf, needless to say!). Later that morning a physio arrived and took me to do a complete flight of stairs (down and up) and walk a corridor, which was all OK. All the boxes ticked I was allowed my freedom at lunchtime.
What annoyed me was that everyone arranged follow-up appointments according to some notional idea of what they should be and not what the surgeon had told me to do, and as I had requested. They then left me to chase around on the Monday to rearrange everything. That I was not impressed with.
By the time left hospital I had about 80° of flex on the knee; I probably now have about 90° – which is more quite a few people manage after a year; so I guess I should not be too downhearted.
However since I’ve been home everything seems to have been more painful. My GP had a quick look at the knee on Thursday as she was slightly concerned I might have wound infection. However the nurses at hospital changed the dressing on Friday and were very happy everything was OK and no infection. In fact the wound was actually very good and healing well as you can see from the photograph below.

Yesterday, Saturday, I was worried because I seemed to be able to do nothing except sleep all day; totally unable to stay awake. I just could not get the knee comfortable: sitting at my desk was unbearable, lying down slightly better. It’s still not great, but a bit better today.
What more is there to say? Obviously I’m still on crutches and painkillers and will be for a while – although my surgeon says to get rid of the crutches as soon as possible. Obviously I’m also having to do exercises and I know once I see the physio in out-patients in a couple of days time they will get more and harder.
Noreen is being heroic in putting up with me – anxiety, misery, depression and all – and everyone has been sending me good wishes (thank you, one and all!). To top it all, to cheer me up, my lovely friend Katy has sent me a tasting box of various gins (below) which I shall enjoy exploring once I’m no longer on wall-to-wall codeine.

history, links, medical, science

Monthly Interesting Links

There seems to be quite a lot in thus month’s round-up of links to items of interest which you may have missed the first time round. So let’s get straight in …
Science & Medicine
A lump of rock the size of a house is apparently going to whiz past Earth on 12 October at a distance of 44,000 km – that’s like an eighth of the way to the moon. And yes, astronomers are confident in the predicted distance so DON’T PANIC, but do take a towel!


And now to the more mundane … New Scientist has a rather spectacular feature on the variety of jellyfish in the oceans. You never knew they were so beautiful!
Octopus and squid have the unhelpful habit of producing ink to cover their escape. But why? And what is the ink?
Don’t breathalyse a goldfish. At least not in the winter. For you see they avoid being frozen to death by turning turning the lactic acid in their body into alcohol.
Now you don’t expect a new species to be discovered in the UK, and certainly not right under our noses. But it seems that our (not so common) grass snake is actualy two different species.
Most of us don’t like ants in our kitchens, however the humble ant is a rather amazing creature, as researchers are beginning to understand. And there are lots of them too!
Wasps! Yes they’re intensely irritating at this time of year. But that’s only the handful of social wasps we have; there are many thousands more species of solitary wasps. Without them we would be knee deep in creepy-crawlies as they are excellent predators of other insects (as well as your BBQ burger). They are also important pollinators. But surprisingly little is known about the UK’s wasps, which a citizen science project is now trying to delve into.
Incidentally ants, wasps and bees are all quite closely related and are all members of the order Hymenoptera.
Now to our pets! Very few animals can be said to know themselves, at least according to the standard test using a mirror. And on that scale dogs are not included. However it seems that they probably do know who they are using smell.
We all know that in emergency we can give CPR to our fellow humans. But did you know it works on cats and dogs too? Here and here are a couple of items on the subject.
And finally in this section … Medics are now coming to realise that some common surgical procedures are no better than a placebo, just as some drugs aren’t.
Social Sciences, Business, Law
Constant worry, anxiety and panic about the future now seems to be a part of everyday life. But it is counter-productive and leads to burn-out rather than action.
Art & Literature
Here’s one for your diary … Next Spring the National Portrait Gallery will be showing Lewis Carroll’s photographs of the real Alice among an exhibition of early Victorian portraits.
History, Archaeology & Anthropology

I wasn’t sure whether to put this under “science” or “history” … It appears that trigonometry wasn’t discovered by the Greeks, but around a millennium earlier by the Babylonians. As one might expect it was all recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets. And they used a totally different system from that used today. However, Evelyn Lamb in Scientific American has pointed out that in fact little of this is actually new knowledge.
You wouldn’t really expect biologists to be doing research on ancient manuscripts, but they are … and they’re discovering all sorts of odd things about the parchment, the book covers and even the monks who did the calligraphy.
While on the medieval, and in other research, historians are coming to realsie that many of the supposedly iconic medieval images of the plague are nothing of the sort.
London
Did you know that for just £10 you can visit the Royal Mews and see all the Queen’s horses and carriages?
Lifestyle & Personal Development
Author Kasey Edwards discovers that so many people would like not to be married and just stay together for all sorts of reasons – but she isn’t one of them.
Berlin is designing new unisex urinals for its unisex public toilets.
Food & Drink
And finally … another that could have gone under “science” … geneticists have been hard at work on the apple and have traced its roots back along the Silk Road to Kazakhstan and China. The Romans may have brought the desert apple to England, but it had a long journey before that.

As usual more next month!

history, links, medical, science

Your Monthly Links

So here’s our round-up of links to items which have caught our attention in the last month. There’s a lot in this month, so here goes …
Science & Medicine
Suspicious that expiry dates on products are a nonsense? Well that might be justified for some drugs.
The expected continual rise in life expectancy is slowing down. A leading medic suggests austerity is to blame.
It seems like what you always suspected may be true: a broken heart may damage your health.
We all know that cats purr. But do they purr only for our benefit?
An American veterinary service is working on making vet visits stress and fear free for nervous pets.
You thought plague was a thing of the past? Wrong. It is still alive and well in the American Southwest. Here’s the story of how one biologist tracks and identifies plague outbreaks before there’s harm to humans. [Long read]
Flying ants all seem to emerge on the same day. But do they?
Sexuality
Good news, lads! Science says you should masturbate 21 times a month – not that you needed an excuse! (Well actually they mean you should ejaculate that often; not necessarily the same thing.)
Environment
Jason Hickel in the Guardian posits that even if we all adhere to the Paris climate deal that isn’t going to be enough to save us – our future depends on de-growth
There’s a plan to reintroduce Eurasian lynx to the Kielder Forest.
Art & Literature
Worried about your books? Why not protect your library the medieval way with horrifying book curses?
History, Archaeology & Anthropology
Archaeologists are suggesting that a find of buried tools and pigments means humans reached Australia 65,000 years ago – that’s 18,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Yes, we knew the Romans had concrete. And now we know why it was so good that it still stands today when our modern concrete decays.
Infertility isn’t just a modern phenomenon. The mediaevals recognised it and realised that it could be the man at fault rather then the women – not really surprising as many in medieval times believed the embryo originated solely from the man. Oh and in true medieval style they concocted some horrid cures.


The Russian Hermitage Museum employs 74 cats just to keep its basements mice-free.
London
IanVisits investigates a south London experiment in tube tunnelling.
Lifestyle & Personal Development
What brings you happiness? Money? Stuff? Time? Surprisingly research is suggesting that you can gain the most happiness from freeing up time, even if that is paying someone to do things for you so you have the time to devote elsewhere.
So how often should you wash your bed sheets? A microbiologist looks at the problem.
On a similar note, here are a few suggestions for getting rid of pests and bugs the Buddhist way. While I can see some of this would work, a lot does seem rather unlikely.
To me this seems like a non-question: should teachers be allowed to have tattoos? Well why shouldn’t they; isn’t it all part of the life we’re supposedly educating our kids to navigate?
From which it is but a short step to asking whether witches are the ultimate feminists.
Shock, Horror, Humour
Two amusements to conclude this month …
An American researcher has used a neural network to generate a whole host of quaint, and sometimes rude, British place names.
And finally this summer’s latest fashion trend: Glitter Boobs …

medical

NHS Data Sharing – II

What follows in this post is a very short summary of two of the NHS data sharing initiatives (care.data and Summary Care Records) which I wrote back in 2014 when they were new and care.data was still very much alive. I record this here in order to provide more background and clarity to my post of yesterday on NHS Data Sharing. This is unedited and provided in its entirety; note the date at the bottom!

Summary Care Records and Care.data
A Very Brief Introduction

By Keith Marshall, Chairman, Barnabas Medical Centre PPG, Northolt

The NHS currently has two initiatives to share patient medical data electronically: Summary Care Records and care.data. The two initiatives are very different. Let’s look at them.
Care.data is the initiative which was in the news a lot early in 2014, and is what was referred to in the leaflet which should have been put through your door in January 2014. It is about sharing aggregated data with a variety of organisations (public and commercial) to enable better healthcare planning and research. The programme will take GP and hospital records, remove or obscure anything which can identify you, and then merge all the records into a single national database. Any record which can identify you, as a patient, is not permitted to be shared outside the NHS. This is not new: hospital records have been used in this way for many years and the system is now being extended to include GP records. The intention is that over time this improves everyone’s healthcare by looking at where, and why, better outcomes are being achieved. The start of this has been delayed to at least Autumn 2014 in recognition that it has not been well communicated.
Summary Care Records [SCR] are different; they are about sharing data within the NHS for the provision of your immediate medical care. They will make your essential data (your drugs, allergies, drug reactions) available electronically to other parts of the NHS, but only when they need to treat you. So A&E and out of hours services can see your record if you need emergency treatment. This will mean you, as an individual, get better and safer care especially if you end up, unconscious, in A&E. Only healthcare staff with a special authorisation card and a PIN number will be able to access your data – just like you using your credit card – and if you are conscious and capable they must ask your permission at the time of access.
A very senior A&E consultant of my acquaintance, who works at a major South Coast hospital, recently commented to me:

Please think very carefully before opting out. I have just received my SCR access card, and it has been a revelation. Most elderly people are on lots of medicines and can remember about 10% of them. They turn up at my Emergency Department confused and unable to remember much. I can now get their medication list and their past history exactly and it means that they get much better treatment, especially with medications like Parkinson’s disease ones that are time-critical. I’m not saying that you are elderly and confused, but I am saying that you may be one day, and you won’t have opted back in. Is SCR secure? It seems no worse than the security to access my bank account.
Quite reasonably many people have concerns about the privacy of both Summary Care Records and care.data records. While we can never absolutely guarantee that security cannot be breached or abused, there is no reason to believe your data will be less secure in future than it is now.

Of course, you may opt out of one or other or both of these systems. Opting out of one does NOT opt you out of both. It is your right to opt out if you wish to do so – you just need to tell your GP. But please think very carefully before you do opt out.
Version 2 filed: 2 November 2014

medical

NHS Data Sharing

2 Comments

I wrote what follows the other day for a friend whose parents (I was going to say “elderly parents” but realised they’re only a couple of year older than me – so maybe I’d better not!) are confused about the various NHS initiatives for sharing our medical records. And they weren’t getting much help from their GP.
So this is my understanding based on my involvement over the last few years as a patient representative, as Chairman of my GP’s Patient Group and from discussion with NHS staff. It may not be complete and it may not be entirely accurate – though I think it’s pretty close – so I’m happy to be corrected by anyone on the ground in the NHS who has factual information. I’m also happy for this to be shared as long as this preamble is included and I’m credited.


There are six NHS data sharing initiatives which people might want to be aware of; they are often confused and mostly misunderstood – mainly beacuase of the NHS’s inability to communicate effectively. I’m going to start with what was proposed about 3 years ago so you have the whole context.

  1. Care.data. This is the scheme which was proposed about 3 years ago in which GP patient records would be extracted, anonymised, and used for research and planning purposes (potentially including academic and commercially). Understandably many patients had big fears about confidentiality and the reverse engineering of data to identify them, despite assurances that this couldn’t happen. Patients were able to opt out (the default was for everyone to be opted in), which many felt was the wrong way round. The scheme was also very badly communicated and thus widely misunderstood. As a result the public concerns, the scheme was withdrawn pending a rethink and has never been resurrected.
    My opinion: This is, at least for now, irrelevant; forget about it.
     
  2. Hospital Event Recording (or whatever it’s officially called). This is the hospital equivalent of care.data where hospital records are extracted and anonymised for research and planning use. It has been running for many, many years (maybe 20 years?) without anyone knowing (or apparently caring). I am not aware of any means of opting out, but there may be one. Given that GPs have 90% of the patient contact in the NHS this will be generating one, even two, orders of magnitude less data than would care.data.
    My opinion: You can’t change it, so it’s not worth worrying about.
     
  3. Summary Care Records (SCR). This is one of the two initiatives you do need to know about. It was introduced at the same time as care.data (hence a lot of the confusion). Again the default is to opt in everyone, although you can choose to opt out.
    This is an extract of your GP’s records. It contains information about what drugs you are currently prescribed, what you have been prescribed in the last 6 months, your allergies and very little else. It does not include specific information on your ailemnts, nor does it contain information on your GP consultations etc.
    This record is available throughout the NHS only to specifically authorised clinicians (eg. A&E consultants) who may need it urgently. [You will know that every NHS employee has a “chip & pin” ID card which gives their appropriate authorisation to NHS IT systems; it works like your bank card. A&E consultants (and possibly some others with a real need to know) have an additional authorisation on this card which gives access to SCR.]
    So if you turn up at A&E, and cannot remember/say what drugs you’re on, it allows the clinician to see your medication etc. to (a) get an idea of your underlying conditions and (b) know what drugs they can/cannot give you. If the clinician wants to access your SCR they are required to get your consent before doing so; if you are unable to give consent (eg. you’re unconscious) they may still access the record but they have to make a note in the record of the circumstances under which they accessed it. I believe that your GP sees an alert to tell them your record has been viewed – but they should be getting an alert that you’ve been at A&E anyway. As you’ll see, this can be a life-saver and you really do not want to opt out of it.
    My opinion: The vast majority of people will want to be opted in to this. It could be a life-saver.
     
  4. GP demographic/epidemiological data. The NHS collects, from every GP practice, some high-level demographic and epidemiological data – ie. number of patients, their age profile, ethnicity profile, and how many suffer from which ailments. As far as I am aware this is aggregated data collected at the practice level; it does not contain information (even anonymised) on any individual. This is used for future planning of healthcare services – eg. this area has a high prevalence of diabetes, therefore we need to provide more diabetic nurses or clinics. This data is collected automatically and has been for some years. You can neither opt in nor opt out.
    My opinion: You can’t do anything about this, so forget it.
     
  5. Your GP’s Clinical Records. Your GP keeps records of your medical history, drugs prescribed, hospital referrals and so on, which they update every time you visit them (or the practice nurse etc.). The clinical information is available only to clinicians; it cannot be seen by (for instance) receptionists, as there is strong masking of the data in the GP systems depending on the viewer’s authorisation (see “chip & pin” card above).
    One thing which is happening is that GPs are moving towards patients being able to interact with the practice online, via a specifically authorised system. This allows patients to do things like book appointments and request repeat prescriptions online, even when the surgery is closed. One option in this is to allow the patient to see the coded clinical parts of their medical records, including things like blood test results, for the last year or so. This requires a second level of authorisation of the patient by the practice – you have to request this; the practice has to permit it specifically for you.
    Many people will not want to do this as it is just one line coded descriptions. For example I just looked at my record and it shows, in seven codified entries, that I saw the nurse the other day to have wax removed from my ears. The entries look like “Tympanic membrane normal”; “Syringing ear to remove wax”. Not hugely informative. As a patient you can see only the coded parts of the record created by a clinician; you cannot see any free-form comments or non-clinical actions.
    My opinion: This is too much information for most people and it can be ignored unless you’re really inquisitive. It is available only if you actively request it.
     
  6. Clinical record sharing. This is the other piece of data sharing you do need to know about. Increasingly GPs are able to share clinical records electronically with hospital consultants (and other providers) – assuming, of course, their IT systems can talk to each other. This goes beyond the SCR. If you are referred to a hospital your complete record can be made available to the consultant; they then have your full medical history and are not reliant on the minimal information which your GP will provide in the referral. The idea is that this will result in better healthcare, better outcomes and fewer stupidities like consultants prescribing conflicting drugs because the don’t know what the other is doing.
    This sharing is NOT automatic: on each occasion your GP should ask if you consent to your record being shared, with this specific consultant/clinic, for this referral; you may say “yes” or “no” or ask for some parts of your record not to be shared. My understanding is that the consultant must also ask if you are happy for them to read your records. Unless you consent twice the records should not be opened. The intention is that, over time, the system will also work the other way, with your GP getting access to your hospital information – but we’re not quite there yet, although some parts may be working.
    My opinion: In most instances you will probably want to permit this sharing as it is in the interests of you getting good care.

It is important to note that in each case where you are able to opt out, you must do so specifically for that one piece of sharing. Opting out of one does not opt you out of all.
So in summary …
Option 1 is irrelevant (and included for clarity).
Options 2 & 4 you can do nothing about, so stop worrying about them.
Option 5 is something you have to request from your GP practice (if they have the facility available; not all do); many people won’t want to do this.
Options 3 & 6 are the really important ones and in my view the vast majority of people will want to be opted in to these – they could be life-savers.
Hopefully that is a bit clearer for everyone.
As I said, if anyone in the NHS knows (yes, actually knows!) of anything factually wrong, then please let me know. (I do NOT want the comments filled with conspiracy theories, flapping about confidentiality or security, and anything for which there is no evidence – I reserve the right to remove such comments. My blog; my rules!)

environment, food+drink, medical, people, personal, science, sexuality

Your Interesting Links

There’s a lot in this month’s edition so let’s get straight in …
Science & Medicine
Medics are now saying that arthroscopic surgery for degenerative knee problems (ie. essentially arthritis) does not actually do any much good.
[TRIGGER WARNING] Breaking the taboo of talking about miscarriage.
Another new study shows that, against expectation, women who source online and use abortion drugs do so with very little need for emergency medical help.


And yet another on reproductive medicine … It seems the folk contraceptive “Thunder God Vine” (Tripterygium wilfordii, above) really does prevent conception.
On the physics of having a shit.
More new research has found that daily small doses of cannabis can slow brain decline with ageing – at least in mice.
And here’s yet another instance where it seems we’ve had it all wrong … apparently eating cheese does not raise the risk of heart attack or stroke.
It has long been thought that the way we categorise colours is cultural, but surprisingly it appears to be genetic.
Sexuality
Porn is allegedly having a “terrifying impact” on men. Girl on the Net lifts the lid and finds the evidence rather thin and attitudes biased.
Is the “Dildo of Damocles” daunting? What does/will happen when sex toys connect to the internet?
Environment
It is estimated that the Fukushima accident gave everyone on the planet radiation exposure equivalent to a single X-ray – although unsurprisingly those in Fukushima received rather more it was unlikely to be more than two year’s worth of background radiation, so tiny in the overall scheme of things.
Hedges are as important for the environment as trees, at least in cities.
In another non-obvious finding, research is showing that beaver dams keep streams cool.
History, Archaeology & Anthropology
There are some amazing things happening in palaeoanthropology at the moment, not least that researchers have discovered how to extract DNA from the soil around archaeological sites.
Another of those amazing pieces of palaeoanthropology is the number and age of the Homo naledi finds in South Africa.

At the other end of Africa, a 4000-year-old funeral garden has been discovered in Egypt.
In a recent, and rather more modern, find a rare medieval text printed by William Caxton has been discovered lurking in University of Reading archives.
One of our favourite London bloggers, diamond geezer, visits the Parisian Catacombs.
Finally in this section, another of our favourite London bloggers, IanVists, explores an abandoned railway tunnel used by the BBC in WW2.
London
Which brings us nicely to London itself … Londonist suggests some of London’s more secret places to visit.
Meanwhile Time Out tells us nine things we mostly didn’t know about Euston Station.
Lifestyle & Personal Development
The Guardian magazine on Saturday 27 May featured Laura Dodsworth’s upcoming book Manhood: The Bare Reality in which 100 men talk about manhood through the lens of “me and my penis” as well as having their manhood photographed.
This a follow-on to Bare Reality: 100 Women, Their Breasts, Their Stories
Pre-order Manhood: The Bare Reality from the publishers Pinter & Martin or from Amazon.
[Full disclosure: I was interviewed for this book and there’s a little bit of me in the article, although unless you know you’ll never find it.]
Following which here’s Lee Kynaston in the Telegraph on male pubic hair grooming. My only question is “Why?”.
The key to happiness is not knowing oneself, but knowing how others see us.
But then scientists and philosophers also doubt the ancient claim that vigorous self-examination makes you a better person.
Food & Drink
WFT is alkaline water? Oh, I see, it’s no different to what comes out of the tap.
If you like sushi, you might no longer as its popularity has brought rise in parasitic infections.
People
I wasn’t quite sure where to put this next item, but it is one for the railway buffs amongst us … Geoff Marshall (no relation) and Vicki Pipe are doing All the Stations: They’re travelling to every train station in mainland UK, documenting and videoing as they go. Their videos are all on the All the Stations channel on YouTube; watch the introductory video first to see what they’re planning.
[Geoff Marshall has twice held the official record for travelling the whole London Underground in the fastest time, so he had to be up for another challenge!]
Shock, Horror, Humour

And very finally here are some stories of what happens when scientists take research specimens through airport security.
More in a month’s time.

environment, medical

Not King Coal

Well who would have guessed it? Well to be fair, I don’t think I would have guessed it, at least not quite in this way … because according to a report in yesterday’s Guardian, coal-fired power stations are more injurious to health than nuclear ones.


In what’s described as a “natural experiment”, researchers followed the switch from nuclear to coal following the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, where they could compare power generation by nuclear (before) and coal (after) in the same area. They found particulate pollution increased by 27% and average birth weight fell. And that’s without any effect of the particulates on things like asthma.