My vegan experiment: ‘Even in my maddest moments I never saw myself doing this’

The first thing I want to say is that this is the last thing I ever expected to write. Over the years, I have contemplated joining the police, moving to Canada, and taking up darts, but even in my maddest moments I never saw myself doing this. The need I feel to make this disclaimer crystal-clear, however, is something I’ve been puzzling over. The only purpose it can serve is my own vanity – which, I have been surprised to discover, is my single biggest worry about becoming a vegan.

It has only been six weeks, so it’s still early days, and I could be wrong about this. But I don’t think the worst thing about going vegan is saying goodbye to all the lovely things I used to eat. I really like roast lamb and scrambled eggs and ice-cream, but the truth is that you can get used to anything. My problem with veganism isn’t the diet, but the identity.

‘These days it’s the height of fashion and – if you’re a celebrity – practically compulsory.’ Jay Z and Beyoncé. Photograph: Lester Cohen/Getty Images for NARAS

Veganism used to be so niche that I was in my 20s before I first met a vegan, but these days it’s the height of fashion and – if you’re a celebrity – practically compulsory. Famous vegans are ten a penny – Beyoncé, Jay Z, Jennifer Lopez, Brad Pitt. Unlike most celebrity lifestyle choices, any idiot with a Deliciously Ella cookbook can access the glamour of giving up animal products, which may explain why the number of vegans in Britain has almost quadrupled in the past decade to more than half a million. Living in London, one can’t fail to notice that even vegan fashion has assumed a newly confident air; the old passive-aggressive T-shirt slogans (“Vegan. Because My Body is Not a Graveyard”) have made way for knowing hipster humour (“All Hail the Kale”). On a street in Hackney where, last time I looked, crowds on the pavement meant a pub fight had spilled on to the kerb, hordes now queue patiently in the rain, like old Soviet Union shoppers, outside “the world’s first-ever” vegan fried chicken shop, the Temple of Seitan.

So I don’t worry about looking weird. I worry about becoming that person who thinks what they put in their mouth is important enough to merit a significant share of their time and energy every day. Who wants to be sourcing vegan mozzarella on holiday, forever scanning labels, making a nuisance of themselves at dinner parties? To me, it has always felt fundamentally precious, if not borderline narcissistic, to care that much about the purity of one’s digestive system.

That middle-age would force a reappraisal never even occurred to me. In my 20s, it was just about plausible to pass off a diet of Dime bars and Diet Coke as evidence of a life too fabulously busy for trivial distractions such as actual meals. By 45, however, it looks like self-abuse. After I was diagnosed with breast cancer 18 months ago, it altogether ceased to be an option and, for the first time in my life, I paid serious attention to the novelty of taking care of myself – not least because when surgeons, oncologists and nurses have done everything they can to save your life, there is a certain sense of obligation to do one’s bit, too. When nutrition is no longer a lifestyle choice but a medical necessity, eating food that might really kill you becomes patently idiotic – which is why I spent most of last year trying to adopt a healthier diet.

When nutrition isn’t a lifestyle choice but a medical necessity, eating food that might kill you is patently idiotic

The problem, as anyone who has ever tried knows, is that it’s impossible to know if you are doing it right. There is quite possibly greater global consensus on how to solve the Israel/Palestine conflict than on what we should eat, and the more you learn, the less you feel you know. Is a low-carb paleo diet the answer? Is meat OK as long as it is organic? Will five a day do the job? Or is anything less radical than a strict raw-food regime a waste of time? Willpower is hard enough to sustain, even when you know it’s worth it. The possibility that it might, in fact, be pointless was enough to derail every diet I tried.

In the end, I could find only one way to make sure everything you put in your mouth is a good idea. The simplicity of the solution was irresistible. The problem, of course, is that nothing else about going vegan is remotely simple. Was I really going to find time to start shopping in specialist wholefood stores and soaking mung beans? The vegans I knew all promised that after a month I would start to feel so fantastic that the palaver would seem a small price to pay. This may be true, but I worried that faffing about with legumes would defeat me long before the fabled herbivore high kicked in.

Was there, I wondered, an easier way to do it? Of course there was. I found a company in London called Detox Fit, a one-stop shop for lazy vegans, that offers a weekly delivery of gourmet meals. A sort of vegan ready meals on wheels, if you like. Run by a preposterously good-looking vegan couple, the company also provides an AA sponsor-style helpline to call should I find myself outside a kebab shop, having a wobble. If out and about on the high street and hungry, all I need to do is call and they will guide me to vegan options in the vicinity.

Unable to think of a reason not to, I signed up, and embarked on a three-month experiment with veganism. A finite commitment felt much more doable than a lifelong promise, but the very modesty of the challenge also made me anxious. With no excuse for falling off the wagon, what if I still did?

There are so many reasons to be vegan that it is hard to know which one would work best in a crisis of willpower. Health is mine, and the obvious one – but, in a reckless mood, I might decide not to care. Would thoughts of carbon emissions from cattle fortify me? Maybe the trick is to keep a mental archive of factory-farming photos, ready to deploy when necessary. Then again, what if world famine turns out to be the most compelling option? It might be an idea to memorise some eye-opening statistics about how many acres of grazing it takes to make a Big Mac, and how many people the same fields could feed if we planted crops instead. Adopting a belt-and-braces approach, I watched the appropriate documentary material online: Cowspiracy, Forks Over Knives and Earthlings.

Rather to my surprise, at the end of month one, I’ve had no need for either the Detox Fit hotline or my fortifying mental devices. Whatever had I been worrying about? The whole thing has been startlingly easy.

And then I was invited to a dinner party …

My vegan experiment: ‘Even in my maddest moments I never saw myself doing this’

Why baby boomers are hitting the bottle like never before

As an 18-year-old in 1966, I would go to the pub on a Saturday night with five girlfriends, before an alcohol-free dance at the local “palais”. We each drank a half of cider and one green chartreuse because, while it tasted like an antidote to dyspepsia, it was 55% proof. That was it; that was all we could afford. Even if we had the money, shame, social convention and a fear of what the neighbours might tell your mother restrained female, if not male, drinking. Now, for young and old, we live in different times.

Last week Tony Rao, a consultant psychiatrist who has long campaigned on the dangers of older-age drinking, warned that the number of over-50s admitted to hospital because of the amount of alcohol they drink has more than trebled in a little over a decade.

Anyone over 55 who habitually reaches for a glass or several might like to steel themselves sufficiently to consider an alcohol-free day by reading chapter five of The Drink Less Mind: The Truth About Overdrinking by Georgia Foster. It lists the negative side of a bit of a tipple, which includes: impaired coordination, depression, heartburn, nausea, stomach ulcers, pancreatitis, high blood pressure, anxiety, falls, dementia, fractures (divorce isn’t on the list, but could be) and, of course, the cancers, including those of the mouth, throat and rectum. And still the booze appears to be going down the necks of the children of the 1960s and 1970s (but not their offspring and grandchildren) in ever-increasing quantities. The question is: why?

Alcohol has become the baby boomers’ very own form of Russian roulette. Everyone knows the magic figure, no more than 14 units of alcohol a week for men and women (previously, men were permitted 21). And yet more people are taking the risk of going over the top.

In 2015 there were 3,627 admissions of over-50s with alcohol-related brain damage, compared with 994 in 2002. Experts say that the condition could even be twice as prevalent as that, because it is poorly diagnosed. (It can also be argued that in the past older drinkers were more concerned to conceal their habit). “If an educated woman turns up at a GP’s surgery or A&E with a fall,” Tony Rao says, “no one asks about her alcohol intake.”

A study conducted by Rao, published late in 2015, found that 21% of over-65s – one in five – exceeded the alcohol limits then set at 14 and 21 units a week. Rao defines “a heavy drinker” as a woman who regularly drinks one large glass of wine a day (one and a half glasses for a man). Since denial is a major part of boozing, the first reaction of a drinker is obviously to lie about the size of the glass.

Alcohol is a relaxant. It’s a reward. In comparison to other countries, the UK can also argue it’s bad, but not that bad. According to the World Health Organisation, the country with the highest consumption of alcohol per person from the age of 15 is Belarus, with 17.5 litres (of pure alcohol) a year; then come Moldova, Lithuania and Russia. In Russia over-15s consume 15 litres of pure alcohol per year – the rough equivalent of 155 bottles of wine or 1,500 shots of vodka . The UK is 25th on the global list with 11.6 litres consumed per adult per year.

However, according to Rao, in England between 2007-08 and 2013-14 the number of hospital admissions wholly attributable to alcohol rose by 30% in the 25-54 years age group, and by 70% for those aged 55 and above.

Numbers are still relatively small (109,720 aged 55-plus in 2013-14), but baby boomers are only at the outset of what could be a very long journey into retirement that equates to an awful lot of time for habitual and escalating drinking, the side-effects of which cost the NHS billions. So Rao is right to ask that “a brighter light is shone on the scale of the problem”. But what might that light reveal?

Retirement is an issue. The reshaping of what can be 30 years or more of useful post-work life has yet to happen in the UK. This is unlike, for instance, the US, where baby boomers who seek more than decades of “silver fun” in “the third age” can retrain and have a second career and give something back to the community, leaving little time for hangovers.

Ageism and its pressure to become time-defying, seventysomething Peter Pans might also provide reasons why the bottle becomes more attractive the older we grow. Other factors may be that drinking at home is far more common now than for previous generations; more people over 50 are living alone, partly because we are all living longer; and Rao suggests baby boomers may have been seduced by watching years of advertising about the glamour of booze before restrictions were put in place.

Anyone past middle age will remember the promise of what might happen with a martini in hand: sun, sea and summer in Monte Carlo was a promise repeated several times a week on cinema screens and television, echoed by the refrain of “a Double Diamond works wonders … ” without any health and safety warnings. Baby boomers ought to be smarter, but a lot can happen by osmosis with a large advertising budget.

Another major factor, however, goes back perhaps to the scale of disappointment experienced by a postwar generation that believed it was building a better, more equal world based not on the individual but a sense of collective goals. “What does alcohol mean to our generation?” asks Christina Fraser, a relationship counsellor with Coupleworks and herself a baby boomer. “We drink to fill a void. Our parents had a job, retired and dropped dead two years later. They worked hard and had fewer opportunities. The baby boomers were given the promise of a world that was full of possibilities. Instead, we are seeing that world close in.”

In Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, the economist Richard Layard says that what builds happiness at a community level is trust (in scant supply now), a lack of loss (tell that to the Remainers) and a “sense of shared purpose” (also absent), while a concern with status and envy about what others have contaminates the civic heart. “If your sole duty is to achieve the best for yourself, life becomes just too stressful, too lonely – you are set up to fail. Instead,” Layard writes, “you need to feel you exist for something larger …each person counting.”

Most of us can put the glass down rather than go for a refill – an excuse for another drink has always existed – but never before have so many of us had so long to drink ourselves under that table. And that’s a strange price to pay for so-called “progress”.

Why baby boomers are hitting the bottle like never before

8 Reasons You Should NEVER Throw Away Pickle Juice

8 Reasons You Should NEVER Throw Away Pickle Juice

Treat a symptom with medicine but never the cause

There is an important question that begs an answer: is modern medicine the best approach to wellness?
Unfortunately, the unexamined assumption has been yes, but the truth is “not really”.

In some instances of emergency and specific conditions like trauma, fast-growing tumors, and acute heart attacks and strokes, medicine is able to intervene in the disease process, mend broken bones, and stabilize people with heart attacks, etc.

However, 20 years ago the government Office of Technology Assessment clearly stated that only 10 – 20 % of medical and surgical procedures have been scientifically proven. That leaves a whopping 80 – 90% that equates to a guessing game.

In our conscious or unconscious need as human beings to be “taken care of”, we have submitted ourselves to modern medicine. In doing so we must also accept the dark side of medicine.

This trade-off may explain why we seem to be so quick to ignore the mounting evidence that medicine is the number one killer in America.

An aging population wants nothing more than to know how to create a longer and healthier life span and turns to medicine for the answers. However, medicine, purported to base itself on science, has not entered the field of anti-aging or wellness, and is completely ill equipped to even give an opinion.

At this point, it might be a good time to quote Voltaire, who lived from 1694-1778. He said: “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing”.

Medicine is becoming quite adept at causing iatrogenic (caused by medical intervention) injury.
Every year, over the past 20 years, two or three studies have surfaced showing a growing number of people injured by Rx drugs, including treatment with toxic drugs used for non-life threatening conditions such as birth control.

As these studies slowly came before us, as a society we still held on to the notion that medicine was working in our best interest. No one took the time or trouble to compile all the statistics. No one identified the various areas of medicine, each of which causes iatrogenesis or imagined symptoms, ailments or disorders induced by a physician’s words or action. That was a nice way of saying ‘their speculative bullshit’. And when the different injuries and deaths were added up, the final number was incredible.

In a recent compilation of deaths due to properly prescribed drugs, drug errors, surgical mistakes, medical procedure mistakes, bedsores, malnutrition in nursing homes, and hospital based infections, it was found that iatrogenic medicine is the leading cause of death in America.

According to research done by the Nutrition Institute of America under the auspices of Dr. Carolyn Dean and Gary Null, it was found that the 2001 heart disease rate was 699,697; the annual cancer death rate was 553,251. But the annual iatrogenic rate was 783,936.

That’s just the deaths. The number of people injured annually by Rx drugs is 2.2 million; the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections is 20 million; the number of unnecessary hospitalizations annually is 8.9 million; and we really have no way of knowing how many premature deaths can be attributed to overuse of X rays.

Be prepared for another shock. Most studies that care to delve into the topic of what mistakes actually get reported are pretty clear that only 5%, or 1 in 20 errors, are recorded in black and white. We also know that about 20% of mistakes can end up in death, so the undisclosed 3/4 million deaths may be just the tip of the iceberg.

To add insult to injury, drugs are synonymous with modern medicine. “Drugs” and “medicine” are interchangeable words in the dictionary and in most people’s minds, and it’s hard to believe that drug-based medicine is only about 100 years old because of its pervasive hold on our society.

With the discovery of the “Germ Theory”, medical scientists convinced the public that infectious organisms were the cause of illness, not their lifestyle and dietary choices.Finding the “cure” for these infections proved much harder than anyone imagined. Right from the beginning, chemical drugs promised much more than they delivered. But far beyond not working, the drugs also caused incalculable side effects.

The drugs themselves, even when properly prescribed, have side effects that can be fatal. Fully half the drugs prescribed are eventually pulled from the marketplace due to undeniable side effects. By then, the drug companies have laughed all the way to the bank pocketing billions of dollars in profits from an unsuspecting society and are busily marketing the next catastrophe.

The leading causes of adverse drug reactions are antibiotics (17%), cardiovascular drugs (17%), chemotherapy drugs (15%), and analgesics and anti-inflammatory agents (15%). It is, however, probably impossible to estimate the morbidity and mortality due to drugs such as synthetic hormone replacement therapy and birth control pills taken by millions of Americans.

And we haven’t even scratched the surface by not addressing the horrors of Ritalin and Prozac and the mass destruction of shootings and killings at public places by people subjected to these drugs by a psychiatric agenda that never does any tests or blood work and yet throws out the ADHD and Autism labels at will just to push drugs and control people that possibly think out of the box.

NBC’s “Dateline” wondered if your doctor is moonlighting as a drug rep. After a year-long investigation, they reported that because doctors can legally prescribe any drug to any patient at any time for any condition, drug companies heavily promote “off-label”, and frequently inappropriate and non-tested uses of these medications in spite of the fact that these drugs are only approved for specific indications for which they have been tested.

How modern medicine has come to be the number one killer in America is as incredible as it is horrifying. Doctors don’t think of themselves as killers, but as long as they promote toxic drugs and don’t learn non-toxic options, they are virtually pulling the trigger on helpless patients and transforming the Hippocratic Oath into the Hypocritic Oath.

So, what can you do to escape this dependence on modern medicine? Well, maybe there really is no escape but there sure can be a decrease in the dependence by putting your health back in your hands.

If you are eating the flesh of rotting cow bodies, or rotting pig bodies, or rotting fowl bodies, or rotting fish bodies, or dairy products, you need to stop. That includes “range fed” as well. Come on, do you really think that some animal not in a CAFO is running up to someone with a gun or a knife and begging, “Kill me, kill me, please, kill me”.

In reality, when any creature is faced with harm or death, anxiety sets in. Adrenalin pervades the body as do fear hormones. And even though this is what people are eating we are confused as to why there is so much hostility, fear and anxiety in the world. There is so much truth in that old saying, “You are what you eat”.

If you are eating refined grains like white flour products and white rice, you need to switch to whole grains like brown rice, red rice, wild rice, millet, Quinoa, buckwheat, etc. And if our “daily bread” was so great, why is there so much gluten intolerance? Gee, do you think the additives and synthetic chemicals could have anything to do with that?

If you are eating the menstrual cycle of chickens (eggs), you need to stop.

If you are eating malasadas, which are popular in Hawaii and donuts, which the police love, which are nothing more that balls of white flour covered in sugar and cooked in grease, you need to stop.

If you are shopping in supermarkets and not reading labels, you need to start.

The rule is two-fold: if you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it; and, if man made it, don’t eat it.

If you are still ingesting embalming fluid through diet drinks containing Aspartame, you need to stop.

If you are using “Splenda” (sucralose), which is produced from chlorine, or neurologically damaging Aspartame, which was thrust upon us by Donald Rumsfeld just so he could become rich, as sweeteners, you need to stop.

Everything you are preparing to eat can be transformed into nutritious fare by switching the ingredients.
Whole for refined; tofu and analogs for flesh; organic for pesticide and insecticide laden soy, rice, cotton, sugar, and corn; almond, rice or hemp for dairy milk; and egg-less for egg mayonnaise.

If you don’t have a clue, get some vegetarian cookbooks and shop in natural food stores. Be careful though as most of their products contain MSG euphemisms.

Listen to “Health Talk”. It’s a call-in show and I will gladly answer your questions. Feel free to contact me at any time. If you can’t tune in, go to www.healthtalkhawaii.com and listen to uploaded shows, or on Saturday morning at 8AM Hawaii time log in on your computer to www.kwai1080am.com, and listen to my show as it is being streamed.

You are and should be responsible for your health. Not your doctor, not your health care provider, not your neighbor, you!Besides, don’t you think that all that money you spend on prescription drugs could be put to a more enjoyable use if it were at your disposal?

Remember, the marathon of life starts with the first step. Don’t be afraid to take that step.

Aloha!

Sources:
www.articles.mercola.com
www.drhyman.com
www.quora.com

To learn more about Hesh, listen to and read hundreds of health related radio shows and articles, and learn about how to stay healthy and reverse degenerative diseases through the use of organic sulfur crystals and the most incredible bee pollen ever, please visit www.healthtalkhawaii.com, or email me at heshgoldstein@gmail.com or call me at (808) 258-1177. Since going on the radio in 1981 these are the only products I began to sell because they work.
Oh yeah, going to www.asanediet.com will allow you to read various parts of my book – “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”, containing a wonderful comment by Mike Adams.
In Hawaii, the TV stations interview local authors about the books they write and the newspapers all do book reviews. Not one would touch “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Why? Because it goes against their advertising dollars.

Treat a symptom with medicine but never the cause

Why the need for empathetic citizens has never been greater

We are in the midst of an empathy deficit, according to Peter Bazalgette in his latest book, The Empathy Instinct. He believes focusing on empathy can contribute to ‘kinder health and social care, and more effective criminal justice’.

Neuroscientific findings shows that empathy works in more complex and subtle ways and has particular relevance to arts and culture. Studies conducted at UCL a decade ago provided some interesting evidence about how your perceptions and enjoyment of an activity change, depending on whether or not you’ve tried it yourself. Using ballet dancers as subjects, we compared the brain activity when you’re watching a movement you have performed yourself with one that you’ve seen many times but can’t do. It turns out that you use the parts of your brain that control movement to help you see.

This means that we need audiences that have experience of doing as well as seeing, thus grass-roots participation in the arts is essential. The need for ‘empathetic citizens’, as Bazalgette calls them, has never been greater.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Listen to this week’s podcast at theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/neuroscientist-explains

Why the need for empathetic citizens has never been greater

Never mind America, access to abortion is a "nightmare" for many Australians | Van Badham

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How breast cancer and the BRCA gene brought us the sister we never knew

Like all sisters, Tamsin and Lorna Sargeant and Claire Pike are linked by their genes. But in their case, one gene has dominated their relationship; in fact, it was responsible for bringing them together for the very first time. In this picture of the three of them smiling in the sunshine they look happy and carefree – but the gene that brought them together has led to a huge amount of heartache, and desperately difficult decisions.

The story that united these sisters begins one day in spring 2009, when Tamsin, then 40, noticed a strange thickening under the skin of her chest, just below her collarbone. She went to her GP, who knew immediately it was serious. Sure enough, tests revealed a large tumour that had spread to her lymph nodes.

It was shocking and scary: but Tamsin knew she would get through. Her sister Lorna was a big support: the two had been raised by their mother, Jennie, and stepfather, Ralph, who had died a few months before her cancer came to light.

Tamsin had chemotherapy to shrink the tumour, followed by a lumpectomy and radiotherapy. She carried on with her job as a social worker as much as possible as well as caring for her then two-year-old daughter, Esmé, with her partner, Tom. By early 2010, it seemed she had put breast cancer behind her and moved on with her life.

But she hadn’t. At some point, her oncologist raised the possibility of whether Tamsin might be a carrier of one of the most common breast cancer genes, BRCA1 or BRCA2. “We had always been a bit worried about breast cancer in our family, on my mum’s side, because my grandmother and an aunt had it. But from the pattern of the disease in our family, the doctor said it was unlikely the BRCA gene was in our family.”

All the same, Tamsin agreed to take part in some medical research that meant being tested for BRCA. She was asked to fill in a detailed questionnaire about her family history, which meant contacting someone she had barely seen since she was a small child: her birth father, Clive, who had split up with her mother when she and Lorna were very young. “I hardly remembered Clive, and I’d always regarded Ralph as my dad,” says Tamsin. “But I had Clive’s email address, so I wrote to him to ask for information about anyone on his side of the family who had had breast cancer.”

Clive’s reply contained a bombshell. Not only had his sister and other members of his family had breast cancer, but he had another female relative to tell Tamsin about: a half-sister she had not known existed – Claire, the daughter of another relationship.

The news was exciting, and unexpected, and Tamsin hoped they might get to know one another. But first, she felt she needed to rule out the possibility, however unlikely her oncologist thought it was, that her family might be BRCA carriers. “I was very interested in Claire, and keen to meet her, but I felt it was my responsibility, for her and for Lorna, to make absolutely sure I didn’t have this gene,” says Tamsin. “I’d been through a horrible experience, and I thought the least I could do for them was make sure it wasn’t a big risk for them, too.”

The test results took a long time, but Tamsin wasn’t too worried. So when in March 2011 she went along to the Royal Marsden hospital to be told she was, after all, a carrier of BRCA1, the news was utterly devastating. “It was worse than being told I had cancer in the first place. By this stage, my hair had grown back and I felt my life was back to normal: now I was told I had a 50:50 chance of getting breast cancer again, and that I should consider the possibility of having a double mastectomy to reduce the risk.

“But on top of that, I now had to tell Claire and Lorna that they, too, might be carriers – and then they, too, would be at high risk of breast cancer.”

A BRCA gene mutation isn’t the most common cause of breast cancer. According to Martin Ledwick of Cancer Research UK, fewer than one in 10 cases of the disease are linked to it. But where the gene is identified, there’s a higher risk of getting breast cancer. “Up to 65% of women who carry the BRCA1 gene, and 45% of women who carry the BRCA2 gene will develop breast cancer by the age of 70,” he says. So while it doesn’t mean cancer is a given, it does mean it’s worth considering preventive surgery – a double mastectomy – to reduce the risk of breast cancer, and an oophorectomy, to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, which is also higher in BRCA carriers.

Although she knows it wasn’t rational, and that she can’t possibly be held responsible for it, Tamsin says she felt the weight of responsibility of having to tell her sisters about the gene. “They had seen what I’d gone through, and I knew they would now be thinking, will I have all those horrible experiences ahead of me, too?” Like Tamsin, they had choices to make: and the first was whether to be tested for the gene.

“What’s interesting in a family is that different people react totally differently to the same piece of news,” says Tamsin. “It wasn’t just Lorna and Claire – there were others affected, relatives on Clive’s side of the family and my mum and her relatives. Some people wanted to have the test so they knew one way or the other; others preferred to wait and see; others wanted to have surveillance so any tumour would be discovered as early as possible.”

For Tamsin, there was a different dilemma. “I had to think about whether to have a double mastectomy. At first, I was completely opposed to that: I really wanted to keep my breasts, they felt like such an important part of me. Also, I’d had enough of hospitals and medical treatment.”

Eventually, though, she decided to have the operation. “I’ve got a young child, and I thought I owed it to her and Tom to do everything I could to reduce my risk of a further cancer,” she says.

When the operation took place, in February 2012, there was more bad news: Tamsin already had a second cancer in her other breast. More chemotherapy followed, as well as a failed reconstruction; and because the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, these also had to be removed. “Things seemed to go from bad to worse – and all the time, I knew my sisters, as well as supporting me, were thinking this could be what lay ahead for them,” says Tamsin.

After her double mastectomy in 2012, she had her ovaries removed the following year. “But this is another operation you don’t just walk away from – there are big consequences to it. You go through an early menopause and it’s life-changing,” she says. “I like the fact that Angelina Jolie, who made the same choices as me, brought the BRCA gene to everyone’s attention, but I don’t think the suffering that goes with it has been fully appreciated.”

Meanwhile, first Claire, and then Lorna, had decided to be tested. For Claire, who is 37, it took a while for the enormity of the news that she might be affected by the BRCA gene to sink in. “I’d never met my birth father, Clive, but my mum had told me that somewhere out there I had two half-sisters,” she says. “And then one day Mum came round and said she needed to talk to me about something: Clive had contacted her about Tamsin having the gene. This was before Angelina Jolie, so I had no idea what it meant – but I was worried.

“My GP referred me to a geneticist, and after counselling I decided to have the test – I’ve got a young son, and felt I needed all the information I could get.” Six weeks later, she got the news that she, too, was a carrier. “By this stage, Tamsin had had her preventive surgery and found out she had cancer again – so I decided it was too much of a risk not to have the operation.” She had a double mastectomy and reconstruction in 2013, and has just had her ovaries removed.

Lorna, who is 45, was the last of the three sisters to be tested. “I’m the kind of person who’s happy trundling along, so I thought I didn’t want to know,” she says. “But after a couple of years I was worrying about every little bump and ailment and whether it was cancer.”

She decided to have the test in March 2014. “I’ve never told my sisters this, but I was worried that I might be the only one of us who didn’t have the gene. It sounds odd, but I thought I’d feel guilty having to tell them I was BRCA-free.” Sadly, she didn’t have to: she, too, tested positive.

“I’d already decided to have the surgery,” she says. “I didn’t want to live with this ticking time-bomb.”

For all three sisters, being brought together has been a silver lining to the dark cloud of BRCA – but they don’t want to minimise that cloud, or what it’s meant to their lives. “It’s been a very tough journey, and although it’s been wonderful to get to know Claire, the impact of the gene has coloured everything,” says Tamsin. “Apart from anything, there’s always been one or other or us going through major surgery.”

Claire says having two new sisters has been a brilliant boon to her life. “Lorna and I live quite near one another in Manchester and Cheshire, so it’s been great being able to meet up. When I was a teenager, I used to wonder about these sisters I knew nothing about, so it’s wonderful to have got to know them eventually. And given what we’ve had to face up to, it’s great that all of us know exactly what the others are going through – we’ve always had someone to talk to who understands.”

Lorna agrees: “We’ve had one another and been able to compare scars and nipples and lack of nipples,” she says. “My big hope now is that, at some point in the future, we can put BRCA into the box where it belongs, and just enjoy our lives together.”

Tamsin, Claire and Lorna are supporting Cancer Research UK’s Right Now campaign to beat cancer sooner. To support them, visit cruk.org

How breast cancer and the BRCA gene brought us the sister we never knew

Most Powerful Painkilling Essential Oil (You’ve probably never heard of it)

Most Powerful Painkilling Essential Oil (You’ve probably never heard of it)

A moment that changed me: holding the newborn baby I never thought I’d have | David Akinsanya

I never thought I would become a father. I grew up in care and as far back as I can remember I had issues with my sexuality. By the time I was in my 20s I had accepted that I was gay, even though I’d had a couple of heterosexual flings. Over the years, through my work as a mentor and as a foster carer, I met a number of youngsters whom I took care of and some of whom called me Dad. But I’d always wanted to have my own child too.

I met the mother of my child through work. I was delivering health and well-being workshops, and she wanted to talk about the possibility of fostering. We became friends: unbeknown to me pretty early on she decided that I was the ideal candidate to father her child. P was a heterosexual, professional woman in her early 30s. She had always wanted to have a child with a gay man – and someone who really wanted to be a father.

We went ahead without professional advice, gleaning what we could from the internet. For the initial few attempts I produced sperm in east London and took it over to west London. Soon we decided it was best to be in the same place. It was embarrassing to do this in someone else’s home but she blasted a TV programme while I got on with it, which helped. Then a simple syringe was used to insert the sperm.

It took only two attempts like this before we conceived. I remember exactly where I was when I got the news. I was driving, and picked up my phone on hands-free when P told me to pull over. She was pregnant. Sadly, at the 12-week scan we discovered the baby had died. This was one of the saddest days I’d had – to get this far, and for it to end so suddenly. I was comforted by friends who’d had miscarriages and I did consider that maybe it wasn’t to be. The miscarriage wasn’t straightforward, and all I could do was empathise with P. She decided she wanted to try again as soon as possible so we did, and the second attempt was successful.

After the miscarriage it was difficult to accept we were pregnant and there was a lot of worry all the way through the pregnancy. Pregnancy can be an odd thing for men to get their heads around, and it was even stranger for me as I was not in a relationship with the mother. I didn’t see her every day and it was hard for me to be emotionally supportive just through the odd phone call and weekly meet-up.

‘I’d never felt like this about anyone before – even myself.’ Photograph: David Akinsanya

We did have a minor hiccup during pregnancy where we spent a few days not talking. It was my fault: I was angry about some of the pregnancy purchases and treatments, which I thought were unnecessary and costly. P suggested counselling, so we went to eight sessions, learning how to express our concerns, how to listen to really hear each other and say what we mean.

But none of this really felt real to me until the day my son was placed on to my bare chest by his mother’s birthing partner. I was unable to be in the room during the birth as had been arranged in advance. P was supported by her friend who acted as her birthing partner and had three children of her own. Yes, I felt guilty and lots of my mates who were fathers told me how amazing it was to be present. But I am extremely squeamish and hate blood, pain and hearing people struggle. As it happened, our son was eventually delivered by caesarean section so P was in surgery while I spent my first moments with this child we had made.

It was such an emotional experience for me that I couldn’t stop crying. I was crying for the younger me who was abandoned by my parents into the care system; I was crying for every time I was rejected by foster parents as a child needing a family home; I was crying for all the young people I know who had failed because of a lack of love in their lives. Thankfully, P understood and allowed me to just sit with our little man with tears streaming down my face. These were good tears, healing tears. It felt like my brain was rewiring to allow me to love my son unconditionally.

As I sat alone with my son, this brand new little life in my arms, my life changed. That’s why I cried. I thought about whether I had loved anyone unconditionally before him and the answer was no. I’d never felt like this about anyone before – even myself. I felt an overwhelming sense that this person needed me and will love me back if I do things correctly.

I used to have a cavalier attitude to life. I’d let my career slip as I wasn’t that bothered about taking care of myself after my father died. Now I had someone to work for, someone to impress, someone to think about all the time. After all the rejection and hurt of my past, through my son I finally felt like I had a family of my own.

A moment that changed me: holding the newborn baby I never thought I’d have | David Akinsanya

What I wish I could tell my boss: "You never defend me"

You never stick up for your junior members of staff. When another healthcare worker said recently: “I don’t see the point of pharmacists on the ward”, instead of defending us, you brought the complaint to us and lectured us about how we do our jobs. This is the role that you – a senior managing pharmacist – created, and recruited us for. So why don’t you defend us?

And I don’t just hear this from colleagues. Patients routinely tell me: “Oh you wouldn’t know what that tablet is for” and speak to me like I am an uneducated, inexperienced member of staff – oblivious to the fact I have a four-year degree. While others tell me they “don’t understand my job”.

People often assume that the pharmacist is simply there to pick the tablets off the shelf, count them out and hand them over. I get asked by patients’ relatives: “Why does it take three hours just to get the medications up?” I have to defend the job that I do on a daily basis, explaining that I have to make sure the medications are safe before I simply hand them over.

I wouldn’t expect the public to know exactly what a pharmacist does, but now it seems the healthcare colleagues I work with don’t understand the concept of my job either. I am left feeling unappreciated by everyone around me. Our senior pharmacists, managers and leaders do nothing to defend our positions or highlight the importance of our roles.

I continue to do what I do without recognition. Patients are often none-the-wiser about the corrections I’ve made to their prescribed medications. On a daily basis I find myself having to tell junior doctors how they have prescribed essential medicines incorrectly: Parkinson’s medications, cancer treatments, anti-hypertensives, anti-epileptics and anti-diabetics. The prescriptions quietly get changed without the patient or other healthcare professionals knowing.

A doctor prescribes a double dose of a toxic drug – I see the prescription and instantly instruct the doctor to amend it so that the patient is not given a potentially dangerous dose. A doctor documents a plan to start phosphate supplements yet accidentally prescribes potassium supplements – I tell them to change the prescription to avoid potential heart problems. In both instances the patient is unaware. When junior doctors went on strike, we were left with consultants who didn’t know how to use electronic prescribing systems. On whom did they rely? You guessed it: us. It would be nice if, instead of agreeing with colleagues who say they don’t understand my role, you explained to them the importance of what we do.

From a distance it might seem that I am doing nothing, sitting at the corner of the ward behind a screen staring at drug charts, prescriptions and blood results. But if it was not for me checking and cleaning up the mess of inaccurate prescribing by doctors who are too busy and tired to pay attention, then patients would not be treated safely. They would be given the wrong medication in hospitals, with potentially fatal consequences, and they would go home with the wrong prescriptions.

So next time someone questions the importance of our jobs and makes a demeaning remark asking what is the point of us “sitting around on the wards all day”, it would be nice if you stood up and highlighted just how essential our jobs are. I do not expect understanding, praise or recognition from patients and the public, but I do expect appreciation and respect from the other healthcare professionals that I work with – and even more so from you.

What I wish I could tell my boss: "You never defend me"

15 Amazing Uses of Himalayan Salt You’ve Never Heard Before

15 Amazing Uses of Himalayan Salt You’ve Never Heard Before

You Will Never Look at Beets The Same Way Again After Reading This

You Will Never Look at Beets The Same Way Again After Reading This

How price-gouging of opioid overdose cure costs lives: "There"s never enough"

Ben Dunkle died at the age of 20, abandoned in a carpark by panicked friends who had no idea how to save his life as he overdosed on heroin.

“I’m certain that if they had been carrying naloxone, they wouldn’t have run away,” said his mother, Aimee Dunkle.

After Ben’s death, Aimee made it a mission to get naloxone, an antidote that can bring overdosing opioid users back from the brink of death within minutes, into the hands of as many people as she could. In February she founded the Solace Foundation in southern California to distribute the naloxone among addicts, many of them homeless, their relatives and friends. She says the group has saved at least 365 lives.

But Dunkle said she could have saved more if it were not for the surging cost of the drug which has prompted accusations of pharmaceutical companies profiteering from the US’s opioid epidemic. Costs for pre-filled syringes doubled in 2014 and are three times the price of 15 years ago, while injectors used to administer the spray have increased to more than five times the price in two years.

“More people are dead now than would have been otherwise,” said Dan Bigg, director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, an important distributor of naloxone in the city. “How many is hard to count, but programmes that would have started didn’t because of the cost of naloxone. Programmes that would have expanded didn’t because of the price of naloxone. To the extent pricing is an impediment, it will prevent this being used as a lifesaving medicine.”

Deaths from opioid overdoses surged again last year to more than 30,000, driven by a sharp increase in the use of heroin and fentanyl.

Heroin deaths were up 23% on the previous year to 12,989, more than the number of lives claimed by guns used in murders, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday. The sharpest increase came from lives claimed by even more powerful synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, the drug that killed Prince, which were up 73% to 9,580 deaths, although some of those deaths were in combination with heroin. But prescription opioid painkillers, containing drugs such as oxycodone, remained the biggest killers, taking 17,536 lives.

Medical studies say that most heroin users first become addicted to prescription drugs. It is how Ben Dunkle came to die.

Ben Dunkle in 2012. Photograph: Courtesy of the Dunkle family

Overdoses are so widespread that the National Center for Vital Statistics found drug-related deaths are dragging down life expectancy for white adults.

After 15 years of steadily rising deaths from opioids, what the CDC has called an epidemic has finally forced its way on to the political stage with $ 1bn in treatment and prevention legislation passed by Congress. It has also resulted in ever-widening access to naloxone as more police forces carry it and states liberalise access by making it available without a prescription. But increased demand for the antidote has coincided with a sharp rise in cost.

Naloxone is most commonly administered by injection or spray. Kaléo, a Virginia company, has increased the price of its naloxone auto-injectors, sold as Evzio, from $ 690 for a kit of two to $ 4,500 in less than two years. Amphastar of California nearly tripled the price of syringes pre-filled with naloxone.

“When we started in 1996, a 10cc vial of naloxone was $ 1.63. Now that 10cc vial is almost $ 300 at Walgreens here,” said Bigg. “Has the price been raised well beyond what it costs to make in an obscene way for such an important lifesaving drug? Yes.”

Robert Childs, director of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, one of the largest non-profit distributors of naloxone in the US, said his organisation has spent about $ 220,000 this year giving out more than 13,000 naloxone kits to police officers and others working with those at risk of overdose.

“If naloxone wasn’t the price it is, we would be able to buy a lot more and get a lot more out there to high-risk populations,” he said. “There’s a public health crisis with opiate and opioid-based drug overdoses, and the response has often been to increase the price which is probably the worst response you can do.”

The increased demand and rising prices has resulted in a surge in income from naloxone for drug companies, up 400% since 2011 to $ 82m last year.

“It’s one thing to charge more for snow shovels when there’s a blizzard, but this is a public health emergency,” said Dr Andrew Kolodny, co-director for opioid policy research at Brandeis University. “When you have an epidemic of people dying of opioid overdoses, [this] should be readily available. We shouldn’t have pharmaceutical companies profiteering.”

Doctors writing in the New England Journal of Medicine called for government intervention to control the price of the drug, saying that cost is discouraging use of naloxone. They said that legislation has greatly expanded access to the antidote but that the price remains an obstacle.

“We believe that such policies should explicitly call on manufacturers to reduce the price of naloxone and increase transparency regarding their costs, particularly those related to the development of new formulations,” it said.

“The message to lawmakers is drug prices are an increasingly important problem for patients,” said one of the article’s coauthors, Dr Joseph Ross, an associate professor of public health at Yale University and a primary care physician.

•••

Aimee Dunkle took one look at the young man slumped on a bench in a Santa Ana carpark three weeks ago and knew she had only minutes to act.

“The giveaway for me was he was drooling. He was breathing very shallowly. I recognised him and called his name. There was no response,” she said.

The man was overdosing on heroin and benzodiazepines, a lethal combination. Dunkle pumped a shot of naloxone – also known by the trade name Narcan – into him.

“I gave him the first shot of Narcan and no response. I gave him the second shot and he woke up. He was groggy, but he was up almost immediately. Someone had dialed 911 but before law enforcement arrived he was walking away,” she said. “It was exhilarating to save a life for the first time but then I realised this is how Ben died, sitting in a car, slumped over.”

Most of the manufacturers distribute a limited amount of free supplies to community groups and emergency services like Dunkle’s or sell naloxone at a discount.Dunkle said her group received free auto-injectors from Kaléo, but when they ran out she could not afford to buy more even at the discounted price for non-profits.

“There’s no way I can even contemplate buying it,” she said. “We sometimes get some financial donations. One time I had about $ 1,500 that had been donated and I bought $ 1,500 of Narcan. Then I had to select who to give it to. Not who was at most risk but who was most likely to witness an overdose. For a mother that’s lost a child, that’s a hellish decision to have to make: who gets the kits and who doesn’t.”

Supplies dried up for three weeks in September. Dunkle said that inevitably meant lives were lost.

“Our waitlist was over 70 people and that meant people died because we didn’t have it,” she said.

But financial donations mean she now has supplies to see her through the first half of 2017 distributing 70 naloxone kits a week. Still, that falls well short of demand.

“There’s never enough,” she said.

naloxone

The rising costs have drawn scrutiny in Congress. Senators Susan Collins and Claire McCaskill wrote to five pharmaceutical companies in June asking them to explain their pricing of naloxone.

A spokesman for McCaskill said that in meetings the companies defended the increases as necessary to cover the cost of new delivery systems. Naloxone, which has been on the market since 1971, is no longer covered by a patent and is cheap to produce. But pharmaceutical companies do have patents on how the drug is administered, such as by spray or auto-injectors, a spring-loaded syringe.

“In meetings, generally speaking the companies have argued that the price increases are due to new and more efficient delivery systems,” he said. “The question is, are these new bells and whistles effective?”

Manufacturers said the introductions of nasal sprays and auto-injectors are easier and safer to use than regular syringes. But Bigg questions whether those modifications justify the cost given that both means of delivery were already commonly used with other drugs.

An Irish company, Adapt Pharma, which makes a widely used naloxone nasal spray with a trade name of Narcan, denied that the patent was a means to price gouge. It said the spray “is designed, tested and approved so that anyone in the community can deliver a proper dose in non-medical conditions”.

“It’s not as simple as just putting naloxone into the device and selling it,” said Mike Kelly, president of Adapt’s US operations. “To obtain Food and Drug Administration approval, we must consistently meet the standards set by the FDA.”

The list price for the spray is $ 150 for the two shots typically administered to someone who overdoses on opioids which Adapt notes is considerably cheaper than a rival, the Ezvio auto-injector, with a retail price of $ 4,500 for a pack of two.

Kelly said the company discounts the cost for community groups and the police by 40% and that a majority of patients using a prescription can obtain it through health insurance for $ 10.

“We have made it our mission to provide more access and availability than ever before – including donating more than 50,000 doses of Narcan nasal spray to increase awareness and experience with the product and naloxone generally,” he said.

Mark Herzog, vice-president of corporate affairs at Kaléo said the six-fold increase in the list price of Ezvio was made in order to cover the cost of ensuring anyone with insurance and a prescription can obtain the drug cheap or free. The company responded to the senators’ letter by claiming that the real barrier to naloxone access is “lack of insurance coverage or unreasonable coverage restrictions”.

The company said it has donated more than 150,000 auto-injectors to public agencies and community groups. Other drug manufacturers did not respond to requests for comment including one of the largest naloxone sellers, Hospira, which has raised the cost of a vial of the drug by 1,700%.

How price-gouging of opioid overdose cure costs lives: "There"s never enough"

Mother Nature vs. Patented Drugs—one of these was never meant to cure you. Do you know the difference?

It may surprise you to know, the medical diagnosis and drugs you take for it, have only been around for about one hundred years. Prior to the rise of Western Medicine as the standard of care, and patented drugs as their treatment—for millennia-since the beginning of time—Mother Nature reigned supreme. After all, none of us would be alive if our ancestors died on the way to the drugstore.

It may also surprise you to learn that all laboratory-created patented drugs were originally taken from nature. In nature there is balance and order. Plants are living beings that have their own innate intelligence that can restore the human body to balance as well. This intelligence is why a plant can either enhance or diminish a certain condition as needed; as opposed to a laboratory created drug—which has no intelligence, and simply substitutes a pill for a function, until that function is suppressed.

Penicillin was created quite by surprise when Alexander Fleming, Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, returned from a holiday in 1928, to find a discarded petri dish containing colonies of Staphylococcus bacteria had grown mold while he was away. The area around the mold—later identified as a rare strain of Penicillium notatum—was clear, as if the mold had secreted something that inhibited bacterial growth. Fleming was credited with the discovery of the first antibiotic—a group of compounds capable of inhibiting and killing competing microbial species. This was hailed as the greatest discovery of our time. However, this phenomenon was known long before by ancient Egyptians—who applied poultices of moldy bread to infected wounds.

Antibiotics are naturally occurring compounds produced by bacteria and fungi. Good bacteria balances bad bacteria. Good yeast balances bad yeast. Western Medicine, by simply killing the bad bacteria—upsets the natural balance or order of things by not replenishing the good. With bacteria—it’s always a matter of numbers to keep things in balance. E Coli, for example, can be present in water, but isn’t a problem until the bacteria numbers reach a certain ppm, or parts per million. Simply killing the bacteria does not cause balance—because bacteria are intelligent, opportunistic living organisms and nature abhors a vacuum. Sooner or later, those bacteria that survive will colonize again, unless you seed the body with their competing and balancing good bacteria. Imagine the conversation between those antibiotic surviving superbugs colonizing in your small intestine:

“Dude—you’re a savage —nobody survives that many rounds of streptomycin.”

This is why antibiotics are becoming increasingly less effective. Bacteria and Fungi have the same innate intelligence that most humans do. When you denature them, you rearrange their molecular structure. This is why patented drugs, created in a laboratory, do not bring the condition into balance. Patented drugs are about creating customers who rely on these drugs to function. And because they are not natural molecules that your liver can break down into natural elements for healing—they simply add to the toxic load on your liver. This causes side effects. Which leads to more drugs to combat the side effects– which are sometimes worse than the simple solution to the original problem. All disease is a matter of balance—too little nutrients and too many toxins.

All of us have lost our connection to nature, to our origins, to the earth and plants and soil and organisms that came before us. Ron Finley said it best:
“No one’s a more prolific gangster artist than Mother Nature. We should replicate what she does. Yes it’s art. It’s knowing where life comes from. It’s knowing that nothing ever dies, ever. Nothing dies—it’s the energy transfer.”

Resources:

https://thetruthaboutcancer.com/
http://ronfinley.com/

Mother Nature vs. Patented Drugs—one of these was never meant to cure you. Do you know the difference?

Nostalgia for things that never happened

After recent events, some will already be nostalgic for a pre-Trump world. Yet nostalgia is a feeling of familiarity which doesn’t always connect to actual memories. Indeed those who wanted Trump to make America great again were harking back to a version of the country that never really existed. Research has found that the brain systems which control recognition and familiarity are quite different from each other. The two usually work together but can be activated separately, meaning it’s possible to feel a strong sense of acquaintanceship with a place or thing, when in fact you have never been here or used it before.

This is why you can completely forget where and when you were introduced to someone, but just know that you’ve seen them before. Familiarity is instant, whereas memory recall can be a slow process – with lots of effort, it’s sometimes possible to remember the room where you met them, or the time of year it was. These details can then help unearth the full memory, something we should rely upon more than fleeting familiarity, especially in the post-factual world we live in.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Nostalgia for things that never happened

The night shift in A&E: a hellish blur where my best is never enough

It’s the start of my night shift in the district general hospital as the medical registrar. I’m on my own and I know it.

Like every night shift, I have no idea how I’m going to function effectively and people’s lives are in my hands. These thoughts are not new – I expect them – but each time they feel painfully new and unwelcome. I push down feelings of panic and remind myself that I have experience and training. I have done this, I can do this.

There is a long line of people waiting in A&E. They must experience only one thing: reassurance. It isn’t a convenient time to feel the anxiety that threatens to overwhelm me, so I ignore it. These people are sick and worried, and they deserve the best.

After putting on scrubs, I sit down with the team of doctors and nurses who’ve been on the day shift and listen to their handover. Half them haven’t eaten that day. It’s been a busy one. Things started to go wrong after 5pm so at least 10 people have not yet seen a doctor and two of them are so ill they are being monitored in resuscitation. Someone jokes: “It’s OK though, A&E is closed now”. If only.

I need to prioritise but there are distractions. A family member is kicking off on the acute medical ward about their mother not getting appropriate feeding time that evening. Important but not life threatening, they will have to wait.

The surgical team wants the medical team to take over a patient who, they’ve found, “doesn’t have appendicitis”. This patient, too, is de-prioritised – I have two adults about to die in the resuscitation bay. It’s 10pm and we have already spent far too long talking about the patients from the day – I need to crack on.

I’m told there are no critical care beds available, so if one of my patients needs intensive care, we’ll need to send a patient in an ambulance to another hospital to create space. This is not a new scenario. I tell the bed managers this is “exactly what I want to hear”. Another joke. Without this attitude, we wouldn’t be able to get through the night.

A lot of people will be unhappy with how long they’ve spent waiting by the time I get to see them. Although I won’t rest, it will never be enough. I thank the stars for the nurses. They are masters of everything and seem to be everywhere in the hospital at night, roaming the wards, expertly identifying sick patients. They can put in cannulas blindfolded, and support you with tea and banter.

All six beds in resuscitation are full. Two patients require machines to breathe: one is alert, the other is already anaesthetised. Anyone who can’t talk, as a general rule, needs to be seen immediately. However, these sick people cannot be moved from their temporary beds in A&E – there are no beds free in the hospital.

It’s going to be a long night. I see the exasperated paramedics in a queue; they can’t drop patients off. My juniors, just two of them for 150 patients, get to work, but it is hard. There is nowhere private to see people. They are reduced to clerking patients on trolleys and chairs – it’s not dignified. The unsung heroes of A&E – the technicians – efficiently take blood and perform basic but critical investigations such as urine dipstick and electrical heart traces.

In a moment of clarity, at 1am after I have barely stopped to breathe and an elderly lady has died in my arms, I ask myself: “Is this not supposed to be a developed country? Do we not care for our people? Do we really accept that this is the way it needs to be? Doesn’t anyone out there care that there are no beds?”

The night starts to blur. At 4am I anticipate a huge drop in my performance as my mind sleeps while my eyes remain open. I attempt and fail to get 20 minutes’ sleep – the bleeper doesn’t stop. But before I know it the porters, domestics and secretaries start turning up in the corridors, usually the earliest to start, and I know that this hellish night shift is almost done.

I hand over my patients to the day team and the consultants. I get changed. I leave. For a moment it feels like I am a kid again, carefree, outside, letting a warm downpour wash over me, soaking my clothes, removing the things that happened overnight. Relief.

I have a brief, pointless cry in the driver’s seat. And then it’s forgotten. It has to be, because in in a few hours, I’ll do it all over again.

If you would like to contribute to our Blood, sweat and tears series which is about memorable moments in a healthcare career, please read our guidelines and get in touch by emailing sarah.johnson@theguardian.com.

Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views.

The night shift in A&E: a hellish blur where my best is never enough

4 Reasons You Should Never Leave Your Toenail Fungus Untreated

For most people, hearing the names of big ailments like diabetes or cancer scare the crap out of them. On the contrary, most of us ignore a simple infection like the toenail fungus. This is not surprising as it seems pretty unimportant compared to other chronic health challenges. Toenail conditions are hardly painful which also explain why it easily gets ignored by most people. Some even see it as a cosmetic problem. However, bear in mind that an untreated toenail fungus could degenerate into other serious health issues. Therefore, treating toenail fungus is necessary because the aftermath could be catastrophic. In this article, we would explore some complications that come with an untreated toenail fungus.

Gradual loss of the Nail

A toenail infected by fungus will make it hard and brittle. The brittleness makes it easy to crack, chip and break. By ignoring the infection one could risk the loss of toenails altogether. This nail loss could also be permanent. Likewise, the growth of fungus could separate the nail from the nail bed, resulting from the infection. This could cause the nail to fall off and you might have to remove it surgically to prevent further damage.

Foot Pain

An ignored toenail infected with fungus could become deformed and thick. At the onset, it might be painless but with time, pain could set in. The condition could degenerate with time and pose difficulty walking with foot wears. It is thus necessary to get the toenail treated to avoid inconvenience and pain.

Spreading of fungus

An untreated fungal infection could spread to other skin areas, particularly areas surrounding the toenail fungus. This could lead to athlete’s foot – a serious foot infection. A red, cracked and itchy skin are symptoms of athlete’s foot. Wearing shoes and socks all day with an untreated toenail fungus could influence its spread to the skin. Not treating the toenail fungus could even result in worse conditions.

Spreading of infection

This particularly applies more to people with chronic medical illnesses like diabetes. The weakness of the hormone system can result in a lot of other health problems. Should the toenail fungus infection spread to the skin, it will cause skin crack. This crack could allow bacteria into the skin, causing cellulite, a condition resulting in a swollen and tender skin. Antibiotics should be used to treat the condition. A further degeneration could cause the infection to enter the bloodstream and result in further health complications. However, you can save yourself all this by treating the onset of toenail fungus infection on time.

Treating Toenail Fungus

Without a doubt, an untreated toenail fungus could have a serious adverse effect. Thus, being equipped with ideas to treat the condition is important. It is advisable to see a doctor as soon as possible. However, a number of home remedies could be helpful as well. Tea tree oil, baking soda or the apple cider vinegar etc could be used to effectively treat the infection.

Consulting a doctor, however, will bring peace of mind. A new or recent infection could simply be monitored as advised by the doctor.

A doctor’s opinion will prevent the condition from getting out of hand.

References

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1882105/

http://feetremedies.com/toenail-fungus/
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/nail-fungus/basics/complications/con-20019319

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/ask-well-leaving-nail-fungus-untreated/?_r=0

4 Reasons You Should Never Leave Your Toenail Fungus Untreated