Tag: cancer

Stop throwing food in the trash: it’s killing the planet

landfill-pexels

For the sake of keeping the peace I had to bite my tongue. The meal had been a rare treat: succulent sirloin steak cooked medium-rare, smothered in a rich, creamy peppercorn sauce, served alongside bowls of al dente vegetables. But as the plates were piled up at the end of the meal, I watched aghast as I glimpsed a kitchen bin lid being flipped up and two thirds of an uneaten 10oz steak being scraped into the inky blackness of the bin liner. Not only had a week’s worth of sandwich fillings gone for good but a cloud of planet-warming gas would soon be billowing heavenwards when that lonely piece of cow flesh reached its journey’s end in landfill.

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Hope and terror: I just had most of my frontal lobe chopped out

 

The grizzly details

The frontal lobes contain all that makes us human – our personality, thinking abilities, problem solving and memory (image By Polygon data were generated by Life Science Databases(LSDB). – Polygon data are from BodyParts3D.[11], CC BY-SA 2.1 jp, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9499837)
 A little over two weeks ago, a tall Greek surgeon, with a name that literally means “to die” in Ancient Greek sawed a dessert plate-sized wedge of bone from the front of my head then cut and scraped a cancerous tumour from my right frontal lobe, leaving me with only a slither of normal brain on that side. Fifty years from now, what he has just done will be considered barbaric – just like the way ancient medicine men would use sharp flint tools to bore large holes in the skull of people suffering migraines and epilepsy to try to release sinister forces (an operation called trepanning), or like the cruel act of slicing off the frontal, thinking regions of the brain (frontal lobotomy) to treat serious mental health conditions – which was widely performed up until the 1950s when doctors realised it was turning patients into zombies. After half a day on a 21st century operating table, I awoke in a hospital ward with a paralyzed left hand. Thankfully I wasn’t a zombie and with intense concentration, I could just about persuade my clenched hand to open and close, but it would then be clamped shut again. In a moment, my future of writing seemed to have been thrown in the bin along with my excised brain. The book I have been writing would be forever unfinished.

Medical school training had taught me that nerves in the adult brain and spinal cord do not regenerate but are forever lost when damaged. Yet through many tears, I have already experienced that this wisdom does the human brain and body a great disservice. The bodies we have are far more incredible than we give them credit for:

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Mystery symptoms? Get your lead levels checked

Lead Balls (via Flickr CC)It’s every gardener’s nightmare. Digging deep into the earth, you strike something hard and, with a metallic thud, a geyser of water fountains up into your face. One of our neighbours recently experienced such a shovelling disaster while erecting a new fence when an old lead pipe supplying her mains water was punctured by a misplaced spade.

An emergency repair job soon restored her drinking water supply and her unwanted new water feature suddenly vanished. But her watery debacle unearthed the reality that many of our homes are supplied by ageing lead pipes. Old pipes can sometimes leech into tap water and, if at sufficiently high concentrations, can cause harm to health. Time for a lead level check-up methinks… Read more

Test yourself: Could you spot a skin cancer? Never miss a melanoma.

Test yourself: which do you think are malignant skin cancers? Click to enlarge. Answers at bottom of post.
Test yourself: which do you think are malignant skin cancers? Click to enlarge. Answers at bottom of post.

If you ever doubted humankind’s ability to do great things for our planet, just look at the sky. Or rather, look toward the ozone layer high in the stratosphere. If you cast your mind back, you will remember that there was a lot of talk of the ‘hole in the ozone layer’ brought on by CFCs in the eighties and early nineties. Today, no one seems to mention it anymore, even though climate change is still a very hot potato. This fragile ozone layer is the Earth’s way of blocking out the worst of the sun’s harmful UV rays and without it everyone would die of cancer. But ever since all the world’s nations outlawed all CFC-releasing chemicals in 1987 – such as those in fridges and aerosol cans – ozone layer damage has stopped. Better than that, the ozone layer is now actually repairing itself and the ‘hole’ is shrinking. Read more

It’s ‘mo’ joke – moustache month is here!

You too can be this coolMoustaches are a bit like flares, perms and tie-dye t-shirts – they only come into fashion once a generation. Now I don’t care what the fashionistas tell me, or how many glossy fashion mags feature models sporting ‘hipster moustaches’ – moustaches are anything but hip. Surely the last person who looked cool with a tash was Freddie Mercury. And that was when he was wearing skin-tight white Lycra. Read more

New Study: Can Religion Help You Fight Serious Illness?

This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.org
“Do you believe in God?” is not the sort of thing you normally expect to hear in a hospital clinic. But for a group women quietly waiting in a breast health clinic, their wait to see the doctor was interrupted by this question. However, this wasn’t an enthusiastic evangelist trying to win a new convert; it was all in the name of science…

Congo
Religious belief is common to every culture - but does it actually help?
The science vs. religion debate has been raging for centuries. Even though God and spirituality are by their very definition unprovable, ardent atheists and zealous believers continue to bicker. I wonder just how civil and controlled a dinner party attended by Richard Dawkins and Pope Benedict would be!

Even if a spiritual dimension cannot be measured, some things can: For example, does a religious belief help people deal with hardship, illness or strife? Many of the faithful would say yes – and that would seem to make sense. A belief in a higher is often presumed to help people cope in times of difficulty – but is this a real effect or just an act of self-delusion? Researchers from Canada have been on the case to try to find out… Read more

When Not to Lick Your Fingers: Artificial Sweeteners

 
When I learnt NOT to lick my fingers 

  Whenever you work in a science lab, you are taught never to eat or drink anything. And there is good reason for this:  During medical school I had weekly human dissection lessons. I once licked my fingers straight after one of these sessions… never would I do that again!  

Oddly, artificial sweeteners, the subject of today’s blog, were all pretty much discovered by such accidents; careless scientists licking their fingers and realising the chemical they working with tasted sweet. Today we will be looking at these man-made chemicals that trick our taste-buds: why bother? Can they really help you lose weight? Will they kill you?   

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Coffee – Drink Up! The virtues of coffee drinking…

Coffee is that strong smelling and bitter drink that people love or hate.

Conference Time...Personally, I love it. Last year, I visited the UK’s first coffee festival and had so much fun that I’m looking forward to doing it again this summer.

But next time I think I will curb my consumption: Over 20 espressos was probably over-doing it a bit! This major caffeine indulgence left me feeling slightly worse for weather – but could this opinion-polarising beverage actually have any health benefits? Today’s blog tells you more, and there’s plenty in here to satisfy a coffee-lover and a coffee-hater…

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