Medicine

When I was pregnant, nearly everyone who’d had children asked me and my husband whether we’d booked our antenatal course with the National Childbirth Trust. Men tended to ask with a gleam of sadistic glee in their eye, and the question was almost always followed by a hurried disclaimer: ‘Ignore most of what they say, but it’s worth it for the friends.’ It seemed like an expensive and boring way to make friends: the courses are usually 17 hours long and they cost several hundred pounds. The NCT offers heavily discounted rates to people who can’t afford it, but for most of its pupils, the full fee is an accepted

Tell kids the Tooth Fairy is fake, and their lips are sure to tremble. Reveal the list of their birthday gifts the day before the party, and they may well despair. Those who don’t want to hear such things can try covering their ears with a ‘la-la-la-not-listening,’ but the blabbers, in most cases, aren’t violating anyone’s rights. But what about a nurse who blurts the gender of a baby to parents who didn’t want to know? Or adoptive parents who tell kids their birth origins even though it may mess the kids up? And how about terminally ill patients who would feel hopeless if they knew they were dying? Ethicists

The idea of dyeing a rhino’s horn pink is not absurd. It’s everything else about the 21st-century rhino-human interface that’s ridiculous. The pink-horn notion is a serious proposal and it’s as sane as the whole thing gets. There are plenty of other wacky notions out there. One is to drill a hole in a rhino’s horn and fill it with poison; the idea of the dye is to mark the horn as a poisoned one. Cutting the damn things off has also been tried. There are experiments that involve a horn-cam placed on a living rhino. If you’re involved with rhino conservation, you’re waist-deep in brochures for drones. That’s the

The drugs giant AstraZeneca (AZ) has signed a deal with heart researchers in Canada which pushes forward the project to prevent – and even reverse – heart disease and diabetes by identifying the genes that put people at risk. There’s been a lot of talk about ‘personalised medicine’ that offers us our own therapy tailored to our own weaknesses – specifically, the genetic time-bombs lurking our DNA. Until now, GPs have looked at our family history of heart disease, cancer, diabetes etc and (at least inwardly) shrugged. There’s only so much they can do. The AZ deal with the Montreal Heart Institute will produce one of the largest genetic screenings to date. To quote

The age of enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the natural world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Eventually real universities were created and real democracy developed. The modern world was born. People like Francis Bacon, Voltaire and Isaac Newton changed the world for the better. Well, that’s what most people think. But not Charles, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. In 2010 he said: ‘I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,’ he told a conference at St James’s Palace. ‘I felt proud of that.’ Then he added:

As the FT reports, Apple and IBM have got into bed together. The deal they’ve struck has major implications for the growing number of people using wearable tech (and indeed mobile phones) to monitor their health. Here are the details. IBM has entered into partnership with Apple and other manufacturers of medical devices to make health data from wearable tech available to doctors and insurers. One outcome will be personalised treatments for diabetics. But that’s only part of the picture. This is how it will work. If you’re self-monitoring your heart rate, calories and cholesterol levels – as more and more of us are – you will now be able to

Apple’s new smart watch, unveiled by Tim Cook yesterday, had incredible potential. But its functionality has been hindered by technical hitches – and, especially, overzealous legislators. Their cloying presence must have been felt at every product meeting. Engineers working on Apple’s watch did so with the rasping breath of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the back of their necks. The result? Apple is nowhere near giving us a device that allows comprehensive self-monitoring of health – thanks to federal regulations. Public health services everywhere tell us that prevention is better than cure. But the FDA doesn’t trust Apple, or any manufacturer of wearable tech, to gather the sort of intimate

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local surgery, what with one thing and another, sitting among the stoic and snivelling, drifting between different doctors. They’re pleasant, if perfunctory, but with each visit I became more sure that something fundamental is awry. The docs seem ill at ease, as if their collective nose is out of joint, and I don’t think it’s overstretching or underfunding that’s the problem. My unprofessional diagnosis is that there’s a change under way in the balance of power between patients and medics; the status of GP as unimpeachable oracle is under threat, he

Every so often you read a piece about alternative medicine that asks: how does it work? How does homeopathy work, how does acupuncture work, etc. There was a piece in the Telegraph recently that asked: how does naturopathy work? There was a complicated answer about ‘healthy electromagnetic frequencies’ and so on; ‘bioresonance’, ‘modalities’, and a marvellous quote about how ‘Every cell in the body puts out a certain electromagnetic frequency, that can be measured – a healthy stomach cell sounds different to a healthy brain cell…’ Presumably those words have some sort of meaning to someone. But the problem with this piece – and with an awful lot of other

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_15082013.m4a” title=”Andrew Haldenby and Sean Worth join Sebastian Payne to discuss NHS reforms.”] Listen [/audioplayer] GPs enjoy the salary of bankers, regularly pulling in £100,000 for a five-day week, with no on-call or weekend duties and a lovely taxpayer-funded holiday every year. I know this because it says so in the papers, so it must be true. Stories of GP largesse are far from accurate, and bear testament only to the media’s desire for sensationalism. GPs are the true medical heroes of the NHS, the soldiers in the trenches, too loyal to the metaphorical army to revolt, protest or express opinions, lest such opinions serve as an indirect abrogation

Did you know that one in six couples in the UK have difficulty conceiving? That’s roughly 3.5 million not very happy people. A healthy diet, not smoking and not being too overweight or too underweight can all improve your chances of having a baby. Here are some other ideas worth a try. Take care with technology. Both mobile phones and laptops have been implicated in reducing sperm quality. Research has found that while using a phone increased testosterone, it also reduced levels of luteinising hormone, important in male fertility. Carrying your phone around in your trouser pocket is not great either and, as for laptops, using one on your lap if

Lacking in pep? Looking for some extra zing as winter sets in? The Spectator recommends our energy conference on 1 December. Tickets are still available, sign up here. Society is changing fast because we live longer. But the NHS was designed for a different age where the gap between retirement and death was much smaller. The result is that the health service’s financial footings are fragile and require new ways of delivering health to keep spending at sustainable levels. A new roadmap for reform of the NHS has been produced by Sir Simon Stevens. But there is a large hole where herbal medicine should be. Sadly, it does not merit a single

Lacking in pep? Looking for some extra zing as winter sets in? The Spectator recommends our energy conference on 1 December. Tickets are still available, sign up here. I don’t want this to become the ‘Tom Tells You To Get High’ blog, so this will be the last time I write about cannabis for awhile, I promise. Unless there’s something interesting in the news about it again. Anyway, pass the dutchie on the left-hand side and all that. The Daily Mail, the BBC and the Telegraph report that teenagers who smoke cannabis regularly do worse in their exams. Per the Mail: ‘The findings. . . add to a growing weight of evidence