Preserving the Fertility of Cancer Patients: Necessary Treatment or Additional Luxury?
A diagnosis of cancer is often devastating. Prognosis varies greatly and treatments can be debilitating; even as they cure, treatments may cause significant and lasting damage. One possible consequence is the loss of fertility, (a significant risk in many radio-...
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Fat Chances? The Obesity Problem in Tamworth
A childhood friend recently told me Tamworth, a Staffordshire town which I’ve called home for the majority of my 25 years, had received the tragic honour of being the UK’s ‘fat capital’. This particular term was used by Joanna Moorhead...
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Health Tourism: What are the real costs?
On 2 July, I found out that I could potentially lose my access to free NHS health care, due to proposals by Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health, to restrict access to the NHS for non-EU migrants. This...
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The Inter-generational blame game
Older people are costing us money. They are using disproportionately more of the NHS, social care and welfare budgets, and expenditure on prescription drugs is significantly higher for the over 65s than their younger peers. Older people are costing the...
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Poverty in Primetime – Reality TV in the Age of Austerity
For most developed countries the concept of “food poverty” is controversial. A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlighted that living costs have risen 25% in the past five years and placed an “unprecedented” financial burden on the poor”....
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Why do firefighters take such risky jobs?
Firefighters put their lives on the line to protect other people’s property and lives. Why do they choose to take such dangerous work? Sociologist Matthew Desmond asks this question in his book, On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, and the...
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Questions of trust…?
Another week, another scandal involving the Care Quality Commission (CQC). This time the sorry catalogue of events relates to a maternity unit in Morecambe Bay. As details of the report were leaked prior to publication this week, the tone and...
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We’re all doomed! – What happens when normality is so dangerous that it might kill you?
When driving through the town of Omagh the other day I found myself (somewhat unsuccessfully!) trying to quote the great Ulrich Beck from memory. We had just driven past a health promotion poster showing the midriff of a man wearing...
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Be happy, be healthy and get well soon
Rows continued to rumble this week about the proper content of general practice in the new NHS. Are GPs ducking their responsibility for out of hours care? Are they being pulled away from medical practice by the new responsibilities of...
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From victims to heroes to scroungers: changes in the public perception of disabled people.
Disability and disabled people have regularly featured in the media over the past few months. Radio 4 is currently running a series exploring disability across history, we have had extensive coverage of the Oscar Pistorius court case in South Africa...
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Nudge Nudge Push Shove
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) recently put benefit claimants through a series of psychometric tests, designed to ‘nudge’ claimants into a more positive frame of mind regarding job seeking. This process was exposed as meaningless by the American...
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Bloody markets