Health Policy InsightGuardian – Society – Health
Covid destroyed my lungs; a double transplant saved my life – video
Cesar Franco is the first person in the UK to undergo a double lung transplant as a result of a Covid-19 infection. He spent five months in St Thomas' hospital on the NHS's highest level of live support, with an Ecmo machine effectively breathing for him. When doctors told him his only chance of survival was to have a transplant, he was transferred to Harefield hospital for the operation. Now, after several months of an arduous recovery programme, he is able to breathe normally and walk again
Continue reading...Telling Americans to ‘eat better’ doesn’t work. We must make healthier food | Mark Bittman
For decades public health authorities have encouraged us to choose healthier foods – yet most choices available to Americans are bad ones
Diet-related chronic disease is the perennial number one killer in the United States, responsible for more deaths than Covid-19 even at the pandemic’s peak. Yet we cannot manage to define this as a “crisis”. In fact, our response is lame: for decades we’ve been telling people to “eat better”, a strategy that hasn’t worked, and never will.
It cannot, as long as the majority of calories we produce are unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that determines our diets, and those, in turn, are factors of agricultural policy. For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least incentivize growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn and soya beans for junk food.
Continue reading...Overloaded GPs forced to limit access to online consulting site
Triage system eConsult was supposed to improve patient care but UK surgeries are having to switch it off for periods as demand soars
An online consultation platform widely used by GP surgeries and promoted as being available “around the clock” is being turned off by some practices for most of the day because of high demand.
The eConsult platform is used in more than 3,000 GP practices in England, Scotland and Wales to help direct patients to the care they need. The online facility, offered to about 28 million patients, is described in promotional material as “available to use any time, day or night, from any device connected to the internet”.
Continue reading...When exactly do everyday fantasies go from ‘little white lies’ to a mental disorder? | Yvonne Roberts
Billy Liar, created in the 1950s, is a fantasist; a teller of tall tales who lives much of his time in the imaginary world of Ambrosia.
He is engaged to two girls and fancies a third. He is desperate to get out of the dead-end town of Stradhoughton where he lives with his working-class family and where he has secreted 211 “luxury” calendars under his bed that he should have posted nine months before, on behalf of his employers, Shadrack & Duxbury, “funeral furnishers”.
Continue reading...Radical new therapy for Parkinson’s will use stem cell transplants
Lab-grown nerve cells will replace those destroyed by disease – scientists hope treatment may be available in five years
Early next year, a radical new treatment for Parkinson’s disease involving tissue transplants will receive its first trial with patients – including a group from the UK.
Stem cells grown in the laboratory and transformed into nerve cells will be used to replace those destroyed by the disease. It is hoped that these will stop the spread of debilitating symptoms.
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