Informative Health Articles And News: really

really etiketine sahip kayıtlar gösteriliyor. Tüm kayıtları göster

6 Mayıs 2017 Cumartesi

What I’m really thinking: the care home visitor

I come whenever I can, a round trip of several hours. And although the care staff are always welcoming, I see the disappointment in their eyes when I leave. With a couple of short breaks, I can usually last three hours. It’s all I can take of the mumbled sentences that make no sense, watching television while he sleeps and swapping pleasantries with the staff, who always seem surprised by my presence.

They assure me that there is a steady stream of other family and friends who drop in. I try not to take it personally, although it feels like a criticism. I am thankful for the way the staff look after our relative but we all know he barely registers my presence. As far as I can tell, he is happier in the company of the people who care for him and clean and feed him.

Frankly, I feel like an inconvenience, a stranger interrupting his routine. I have thought about not coming any more and I secretly wonder how a civilised society can allow a person to subsist in his condition – not living, merely existing in a gradual, unstoppable decline.

He lies there bedridden, half-paralysed and hovering between worlds. I am in no doubt that he receives the very best palliative care, but I can’t help thinking that society shows him less compassion than it would an animal in making him endure this.

The whole experience has made me think about making a living will, and also about the wider issue of end-of-life care. I also question my own motives more now. Do other visitors wish their loved ones dead, to end their suffering and ours?

• Tell us what you’re really thinking at mind@theguardian.com

What I’m really thinking: the care home visitor

18 Mart 2017 Cumartesi

What I’m really thinking: the adult bed-wetter

I always wait until everyone has left our student house to tiptoe to the shower. You probably wonder why I wake up so early or late. Or why I do the laundry so often, and never invite anyone into my room. It is because I live in shame.

I have wet my bed every single night for the past 23 years. I use adult diapers, but sometimes even those are not enough to keep everything dry. When I wash, I use different shower gels each time, because the same smell only reminds me of my morning trauma.

I was diagnosed with nocturnal enuresis at 16. Until then, each specialist told my parents simply to wait it out, that the bed-wetting would end one day. My parents found it a challenge, but I was the one who was giving up on having a normal life.

At 17, I became suicidal. I could see a life of loneliness ahead of me. No one will ever want to share a bed with me. No one will love me. I will have no sex or intimacy with anyone. I can never have children. How can a bed-wetting adult – a baby adult – ever have a baby of her own? How can I ever bring a child into this life knowing that the chance of them also being a bed-wetter is higher than 40%?

Bed-wetting comes with low self-esteem and no hope. It also comes with exhaustion. Mentally and physically, I am drained all the time. Next month I will see yet another specialist, but my hopes are not high. I dream of waking up dry, and slipping out of my room and saying good morning to you. But for now, I can’t. I am ashamed.

• Tell us what you’re really thinking at mind@theguardian.com

What I’m really thinking: the adult bed-wetter

14 Mart 2017 Salı

"He was really really let down": Thomas Orchard"s family speak out

The ordeal began for Thomas Orchard’s mother, Alison, as she strolled beside a river in Devon in October 2012. She took a call from her son’s social worker saying he had missed an appointment for a mental health assessment.

“I remember thinking: ‘Tom needs my help.’ I ran back home. There was this incredible knock on the door. It was two police officers. Their first words were: ‘We have some worrying news.’ They blue-lightedme into the hospital. I kept asking the police officers: ‘What’s happened?’ I thought he was dead.”

Orchard was not dead but unconscious. At first his family thought he had suffered a heart attack, though he was a physically fit young man. Gradually, as they kept vigil at his bedside over the next seven days, sketchy details emerged. He had been involved in a disturbance in Exeter city centre. He was taken to a police station and from there was rushed to hospital, gravely ill.

“It was very hard to get any information,” said Alison. “We didn’t know what had happened. I don’t think the medical team did either.” Orchard was put into a medically induced coma. “I remember doing things like getting his deodorant to give him a familiar smell,” said Alison. “We were talking to him constantly. But there came a time when it was obvious life was not possible, so the machines were turned off.”

Thomas’s sister, Jo, said they were baffled. “We had a lot of questions about why a 32-year-old healthy man would go into a police cell and come out essentially dead,” she said.

For four-and-a-half years now, the Orchard family – Alison, Thomas’s father, Ken, and his siblings, Jo and Jack – have fought to find out the truth of why he died. Now they believe they have an answer. “I’m completely certain that had it been picked up as a mental health crisis and taken to a place where that was understood, he would be alive,” Alison said.

The family were to discover that Orchard, who was being treated for paranoid schizophrenia, had had a mental breakdown and was arrested after approaching a passerby and beginning an argument. Police were called and he was pinned down in the street and restrained by his hands, legs and ankles.

At Heavitree police station in Exeter an emergency response belt (ERB), a heavy cloth device with handles most often used to secure prisoners around the body so that they can be carried, was held over his face. He was carried in the prone position to a cell, where he was searched while lying on his front, still masked by the ERB. The belt was removed and he was left alone, face down, in the cell. He suffered a cardiac arrest and brain damage. The ERB had been applied to his face for a total of five minutes and two seconds.

Orchard’s family were devastated when they found out what had happened to him. “It wasn’t dealt with appropriately,” said Alison. “I think they made assumptions that Tom was either drunk or on drugs or was an angry man. I know he was very frightened. That’s why he was acting as he was.”

Jo said: “Tom was really, really let down. It was clearly a medical crisis, not a criminal one.” His family believe Orchard’s confusion and fear would been exacerbated by the use of the ERB. “I think the [ERB] being used over the face is barbaric anyway,” said Jo. “If you add mental health crisis into that, it must be so, so scary.”

In their defence the officers made it clear they did not know Orchard had a mental health condition and thought they were dealing with an angry, aggressive man. They believed the force they used was proportional and lawful and pointed out that the ERB had been approved by Devon and Cornwall police for use as a bite or spit hood.

Orchard was raised in rural Devon. “As a child he was very physical,” said Alison. “Small, wiry, fit. He was a very free spirit. He was deeply sensitive.”

He struggled academically and began to suffer mental health problems. “He hit teenage years very badly,” his mother said. “He got into drugs and into petty crime associated with drugs. He was homeless for a while. He never settled in a job.”

On his 21st birthday Orchard was sectioned and, over the next decade, spent lengthy periods in hospital. There he found religion and, when he was judged fit enough to be treated in the community, was discharged. He had digs in Exeter and became a member of St Thomas’s church, where he acted as a part-time caretaker.

“He didn’t have any close friends except God,” said Alison. “He was very devout, very OCD-ish about saying the Lord’s prayer in exactly the same way. He loved crosses and candles.”

By the end of September 2012, his condition began to deteriorate. He stopped taking his medication, heard voices and had hallucinations. On the morning of 3 October, precisely at the time when he should have been arriving for the mental health assessment, he was in the city centre involved in the disturbance.

The officers involved in the arrest and detention clearly saw Orchard as violent. Their explanation for using the ERB was that he was threatening to bite.

Violence is not a trait his family recognise. “I had childhood spats with him but never in adult life have I seen him be violent,” said Jo. “The exact opposite. He would plant seeds and want to save the world.” His mother saw him get angry. “But, at heart, he was incredibly sensitive and gentle,” she said.

It was seven months before Orchard’s family got his body back for a funeral. “That was hugely difficult,” said Alison. “Tom became the property of the state.”

Almost two years after Orchard’s death – August 2014 – the family saw CCTV footage from the police station. “To see how they treated Tom, it was very deeply shocking,” said Alison. The worst part of the video for her is the section in which he is left alone in his cell and remains apparently motionless. “That’s the image that stays with me, that haunts me. It’s a deep, gut-wrenching, sickening feeling. It’s an achingly long time he is lying there and I am willing someone to go in.”

Watching the three officers on trial has been difficult. “I have a range of emotions,” said Alison. “From compassion, to disdain, to loathing.” The family remains angry at Devon and Cornwall police. “I think I have seen an arrogance and I think I’ve seen them not take this death seriously,” said Alison. “None of the officers involved were suspended until they were charged with manslaughter.”

The conclusion of the six-week trial, with three officers cleared of manslaughter, does not spell the end. Through the campaign group Inquest, the Orchards have spoken to other families who have lost loved ones in custody including relatives of Sean Rigg, a musician with schizophrenia who died at Brixton police station in south London after being held for eight minutes in a prone position.

Orchard’s mother and sister are contemplating a life of campaigning. Jo said: “This is a lifelong cause for us now. There are a lot of deaths in custody.” Alison said: “I’ve got to stop thinking it will be all right once this trial is over. I’ve got to accept that this is my purpose in life. It’s not the road I would have chosen in my life but I hope I can be there for anyone else who has to go through this.”

"He was really really let down": Thomas Orchard"s family speak out

7 Mart 2017 Salı

Sex education: what do today’s children really need to know?

From 2019, children will be taught about healthy adult relationships from the age of four, and sex education will be compulsory in secondaries. But there are caveats. Schools will have flexibility in how they teach the subjects and can develop an approach that is “sensitive to the needs of the local community” – and, crucially, to religious beliefs. Parents are expected to retain the right to withdraw their children from lessons.

What details do children these days need to know? And how much freedom should headteachers have to decide?

Education worker, Brook sexual health charity, in Coleraine, Northern Ireland

Fiona Johnston: ‘Most of the time, the information young people have is completely wrong.’ Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian

Karl Young — Fiona Johnston: ‘Most of the time, the information young people have is completely wrong.’ Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian

18 Şubat 2017 Cumartesi

What I’m really thinking: the woman trying for a baby

I’m 33, and my husband and I have been trying to conceive for three years. When we were ready, we threw caution to the wind and decided that if it happened naturally, it would be wonderful. Then as the months passed, we began to wonder if there was something wrong, so we got tested. My husband’s fertility is A++; his swimmers are practically Phelps-like in their speed and precision. My eggs, on the other hand, are a little more Humpty Dumpty.

In the past year I’ve been referred to doctors, specialists, naturopaths and acupuncturists. They all ask the same questions. And despite their years of experience, most of them still fill silences with ridiculous lines like, “It’ll happen when you least expect it.” The last thing you should say to a woman who is desperately trying to have a baby is, “Try not to think about it.” It’s all we think about.

We unlucky few reach a point in the road where we start living our lives period to period, or pregnancy test to pregnancy test. We wake and immediately calculate which day it is in our cycle. Is today a sex day? Am I ovulating? Every little pull or twinge in our tummies, we read far more into than we should. Imagine, then, how tough it is when all the practitioners tell you to lower your cortisol levels and stop stressing about conception.

Lo Cole illustration of stork for what i’m really thinking — Illustration: Lo Cole

14 Şubat 2017 Salı

Is Brexit really to blame for the decline in plastic surgery? | Tim Dowling

Almost exactly a year ago I visited a Harley Street address, notebook in hand, to interview a plastic surgeon, a number of his staff and a few of his satisfied clients. The story was simple: business was good. The place was high-ceilinged and expensively decorated. In the UK the number of cosmetic surgical procedures had increased to record levels, by a whopping 13% year on year, in line with a decade-long upward trend.

What a difference a year makes. Figures just released by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Baaps) show that procedures actually dropped by 40% in 2016. A total of 31,000 cosmetic surgeries were performed in the UK last year, fewer than in 2007. It’s one of those statistics that seems to indicate – in contrast to all the other evidence – that sometime last year people started to see sense.

In a press statement Baaps cited several possible explanations for the decline, from uncertainty surrounding the EU referendum to “global fragility”. It’s also been suggested that larger cultural forces – mainly Instagram – have left us with less rigid ideas about beauty.

The thing about such a surprising reversal is that no one knows exactly what’s behind it. It makes sense that in times of upheaval people are reluctant to make life-changing decisions or commit to big purchases, but there was no corresponding drop in first-time mortgages or foreign holidays. It’s true that more people are opting for non-surgical cosmetic procedures, which are cheaper and less invasive, but that’s been the case for some time.

I’d love to believe that the public has begun to seen the light regarding the often illusory benefits of cosmetic surgery, but if I had to guess I’d say it was plastic surgeons themselves who are driving this shift. Non-surgical procedures are cheaper for them too, and they can do lots more of them. The practice I visited last year had already thoroughly diversified into Botox, thread-lifting, and proprietorial anti-ageing ointments.

Non-surgical clients require no hospital stay, and they have to keep coming back because the treatments wear off. Plastic surgery remains risky, and comes with tiresome ethical obligations on the part of the surgeon. It’s estimated that about half of plastic surgeons turn away 10% of all patients, and that one in five surgeons turns away a third. You don’t have to tell a patient they may be having Botox for the wrong reasons.

Newspapers are displayed on a stand outside a newsagent on November 28, 2012 in London, England — ‘I arrived to find that two freezer cabinets had been moved to the spot where the newspapers used to be.’ Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

4 Şubat 2017 Cumartesi

Who You Really Are

When I was growing up in Newark in the 40s the “race-cards” were constantly being thrown around.

Being a little Jewish kid I was subjected to being called a “Kike”, a “Jew bagel”, a “Heeb”, and a “Sheeny”.

The Italians were the “Wops”, the Dagos, and the Ginnies”.

The Irish were the “Micks”

The Germans were the “Krauts”.

The non-Jews were the “Goys”.

Non-Jewish girls were “Shicksas” and the non-Jewish men were a “Shagatz”.

The African Americans were the “n” word, “Jigaboos”, “Colored”, “Coons”, “Tar Babies” and “Aunt Jamimas.”

This was my life in the East Coast. And if some label was in the territory of a different label you got your ass kicked.

Somehow surviving this growing up nightmare I found myself living in Hawaii in 1975.

What I found there were the “Haoles” (whites), the “Nips” (Japanese), the “Kimchies” (Korean), the “Portagees” (Portuguese), the “Bookbooks” and the “Flips” (Filipino), and the “Pakeys” (Chinese).

Then somehow I got involved in spiritual life and a very clear understanding came my way. All these derogatory labels were manifested by ignorance. The analogy I received was a mind blower.

The analogy was relating the body to a motor vehicle.

A motor vehicle comes in different shapes, sizes, labels, colors and accessories. Likewise, does the body.

I was then asked what the similarity was to a parked car and a dead body? Because, after all, in the parked car everything is still there as in the dead body. One has all the accessories, etc, and the other has all the organs, blood, and parts. What was missing in both examples was the driver.

When the driver leaves the car it just sits there until the driver gets back in. When the driver leaves the body, the body is dead.

It was at this point that I learned that the body was material and temporary but the driver was spiritual and eternal and instead of being known as the “driver”, it was, in reality, the soul.

A huge door full of questions opened up at this point. Why does a soul come into a body and where does it go when it leaves a body? If the soul equates to life does that mean all living beings have a soul? Is the soul in a human being guaranteed another human form next time around and if it isn’t, why? Where do the souls in the forms below the human forms go when they leave those forms and what determines why and where they go?

This door that was opening before me was the door of identity or essence. Was my identity matter, a mere collection of material atoms and molecules, or was it something else?

What a question to ponder at the ripe ol’ age of 36. It opened my eyes and my consciousness and made me look at me and realize that I may have been spending my life in a dream state, not knowing my true identity, yet falsely identifying myself as something or someone I was not.

Then on the basis of this false identification, I’d have determined my goals of life and the purpose of my existence and I would use these goals to gauge whether or not I was making “progress” in my life and whether or not I was a “success” or on a path toward “success”.

It then got worse because it made me think about being aided and abetted in this delusion by a complex network of relationships with other dreamers. And then at death (and sometimes before) the whole thing turns into a nightmare.

So knowing who I was is a very practical necessity and asking the question of “Who am I?” is not a philosophical football, meant to be kicked around in coffeehouses by pseudo-intellectuals. It is a real-life question and nothing was more important and more relevant than to know who I am, what my purpose in life really was and if I am off track how do I get back on?

That will be a story for another time. The story for this time is that for the first time in my life I could transcend all the labels and see beyond the “race-card” and understand that the person I was looking at and talking to was more than the eye could initially see and as such took on an entirely new dimension.

No longer was the person a label but a transcended being that was the same throughout all life forms.

Imagine the peace and harmony in the world if everyone could embrace this consciousness and realize that we are all brothers and sisters and all of the same essence, but for the most part, lost due to only seeing the shapes, sizes, colors and accessories.

You may not believe any of this. If you do not, and if you have ever seen the movie “Roots”, how would you like to be viewed? As the “driver” or as the “vehicle”? If you choose the “driver”, then work on seeing your true essence and all the other “vehicles” you come in contact with.

If you can grasp the reality that the Supreme soul is in your heart and in the heart of every living being on the planet, then it will be easy to relate to and develop a relationship with Him. And, if you can develop a relationship with Him and turn to Him when you leave your body, there’s a really good chance you will not have to take on a material body next time around and be plagued with the endless frustration of yearning for temporary sense gratification.

Aloha!

Source:
www.kjvbible.org
www.gotquestions.org
www.crivoice.org

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.

Who You Really Are

25 Ocak 2017 Çarşamba

Is the NHS really facing a humanitarian crisis?

The NHS is hitting the headlines daily at the moment. This is not surprising given that we are in the midst of winter, which always seems to bring bad NHS news stories and is a time when photos of patients waiting on trolleys in A&E corridors crop up more frequently in the news and on social media. Even the Red Cross, which seldom speaks up about the NHS, has warned of a “humanitarian crisis” following trusts reporting overcrowding in their A&Es.

There is no escaping the fact that the NHS is under immense pressure and this winter feels slightly more wearing than any other. Comments such as “unprecedented” and “record” levels of demand are correct, and reflections from clinicians that pressures in A&E are “the worst I can remember” ring true.

It is therefore right that we acknowledge and raise these concerns, but we should also be wary of frightening patients and undermining public confidence. The four-hour A&E waiting time standard is widely known but the reasons behind a breach of this standard are complex and, as our recently published briefing explores, if taken in isolation does not necessarily paint an accurate picture of the standard of care being delivered.

One thing is definitely clear – trusts are treating a record number of patients. More than 60,000 people attended A&E departments on 27 December 2016 – the second highest level for a single day. Some trusts are even reporting increases in A&E attendances of more than 20% compared with this time last year.

The reasons for this rise in demand are well reported and widely acknowledged – patients who are often more ill at this time of year, ongoing and worsening pressures in social care, restricted access to GPs and other parts of primary care, insufficient funding, workforce shortages – the list could go on. But how trusts are dealing with this rapid increase in demand is often clouded by official statistics based on the rather simple metrics.

While official data does show that as a collective hospitals are not meeting the four-hour waiting time standard, if you look beyond these figures and at the actual numbers, trusts are admitting, transferring or discharging more patients under four hours than ever before (5,462,464 patients between July and September 2016 compared with 5,350,952 in the same period in 2015).

We must therefore recognise the outstanding effort being put in by frontline NHS staff and managers, often working beyond the call of duty, to cope with record levels of demand. We should also celebrate and promote the progress being made by local health and care services across the country to keep patients well, at home and outside of A&E, for example:

Trusts are implementing new protocols that help improve patient pathways, by placing clinical expertise at the doors of A&E departments.

Some trusts have successfully put in place new arrangements where specialist clinicians from other hospital departments are based in A&E, so patients can be treated quickly and discharged, rather than needing to admit them to hospital to receive this care.

Others have developed “discharge to assess” schemes that allow patients to receive care assessments at home rather than on an acute medicine ward.

In many areas trusts have developed “trigger tools” that give staff a prediction with several hours notice on whether patients are likely to breach the waiting time standard based on early warning indicators, meaning there is sufficient time to call in additional staff and resources to support patients being admitted in a timely fashion.

Alongside the above interventions, there has been a renewed emphasis on local communication to improve public awareness of the increased pressure at A&E departments and how to proactively self-manage conditions and illnesses. Local urgent and emergency care system boards, often chaired by acute trusts, have also been established to oversee improved system-wide A&E planning and delivery, focusing on ensuring appropriate primary and social care capacity is available for patients who need it.

Demand management, however, must be a joint effort and cannot just be addressed at a local level. There is a need for a national debate on what is expected of our A&E departments, as well as the NHS more widely. We welcomed the health secretary’s recent comments about the need for an honest discussion with the public about the purpose of A&E and the need to avoid inappropriate attendances.

It is right that A&E services should be focused on those with most urgent care needs and the public needs to be aware of that, but patients won’t always have a choice. So there must also be alternatives available to those who are turning to A&E because other local health and social care services are unavailable to them. This will either require national investment or an honest recognition that, despite the commitment and hard work of frontline staff, the NHS will struggle to meet all its existing priorities and performance standards.

In reality the NHS is neither “breaking down” nor “coping well” – the vast majority of trusts are delivering a good service and high quality care to patients, despite the pressure they are under.

Some may even say the NHS is “just getting by”. And we shouldn’t underestimate how difficult this level of performance is given the unprecedented pressure the health service is under.

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.

Is the NHS really facing a humanitarian crisis?

17 Ocak 2017 Salı

Secret aid worker: Is the NHS really comparable to a humanitarian crisis?

In 2015 I left the UK to provide humanitarian medical care to a refugee camp stuck in the midst of a civil war. The camp’s population quadrupled in the space of four months while I was there and the onset of the rainy season led to a demand for care that exceeded all expectations.

Hundreds queued to the door of the hospital with an official capacity of 90. Patients shared mattresses and sat in corridors. Where else could they go? They were sick and needed treatment and sending them home without medical care would often have been a death sentence – there were no other hospitals within hundreds of miles.

As the death toll rose in our camp, an emergency was declared. Last week the British Red Cross declared that the NHS is facing a “humanitarian crisis” too. Dr Mark Holland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, admitted that this was strong wording but “not a million miles away from the truth”. We may not have thousands of people suffering on shared mattresses, but we do have thousands of our sick and our elderly and our children needlessly suffering in corridors around the country.

We have intensive care units that have to ship patients to distant hospitals in search of capacity. One month ago we ran out of intensive care beds for children throughout Leicester and the whole of London.

It may not be a civil war, epidemic or earthquake causing this crisis, but a hurricane of political ineptitude, denial and poor funding. There is an over-reliance on the compassion, blood, sweat and tears of NHS staff around the country. Staff that are already working 24/7, despite the suggestions we need a seven day NHS.

The symptoms are already visible, NHS workers are stretched. In a humanitarian crisis, people work to breaking point, burning themselves out in their endeavour to save people, often in the knowledge that they will go home to recuperate and resume their “normal” job. In the UK, NHS staff don’t have that luxury. This is their life and they are at breaking point.

The mantra we repeat to drivers that “tiredness kills” seems to be easily forgotten. Mistakes will happen. In Worcestershire, two poor souls died waiting for beds in a corridor, forgotten and lost amid the tsunami of other people waiting to be admitted.

I challenge any nurse or doctor to maintain that in the current environment the same could not happen in their own A&E department. From our state-of-the-art trauma centres to our small district general hospitals, we are overwhelmed. Suggestions by the health secretary that 30% of people attending A&E do not need to be seen in A&E does not solve the fact that 18,000 people in one week required A&E and waited over four hours to be admitted to a ward.

When the death toll in our refugee camp exploded, my organisation responded by providing more resources and staff. The levels of death and suffering began to drop. We know the costs of not responding quickly to a medical crisis. In 2014 the initial alarms raised by health professionals in response to the number of reported cases of Ebola in west Africa went largely ignored. They were further downplayed for months. This delay ultimately led to the unwarranted death of thousands of people and a panic on a global scale.

The problems faced by the NHS are complex and there is no easy solution, but perhaps the British Red Cross’s recent declaration is not wholly inappropriate. A humanitarian crisis is defined as a singular event, or a series of events that are threatening in terms of the health, safety or wellbeing of a community. This isn’t some faraway country seeing a civil war, epidemic or flood. But a slow-burning, manmade disaster of our own governing. The death toll I pray will not go in the thousands, but thousands are already suffering.

Do you have a secret aid worker story you’d like to tell? You can contact us confidentially at globaldevpros@theguardian.com – please put “Secret aid worker” in the subject line. If you’d like to encrypt your email to us, here are instructions on how to set up a PGP mail client and our public PGP key.

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter.

Secret aid worker: Is the NHS really comparable to a humanitarian crisis?

28 Kasım 2016 Pazartesi

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?

Until very recently, common wisdom held that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. We’ve anecdotally tied all sorts of ills to a failure to sit down to a “complete breakfast.” But health research has proven that skipping that fried egg or bowl of cereal does not, in fact, lead to weight gain, health issues or underperformance.

Our reverence for breakfast is actually relatively recent. Before the late 19th century in the US, breakfast didn’t have any particular importance ascribed to it. But all that was changed by a small group of religious fanatics and lobbyists for cereal and bacon companies.

Historically, breakfast didn’t come with its own list of prescribed foods, says Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. People simply ate whatever they had around for breakfast, which was often leftovers from the night before.

By the 1800s, what Americans think of as a farmer’s breakfast started showing up at the table.

Eggs have always been a popular breakfast food, says Heather Arndt Anderson, author of Breakfast: A History. Chickens lay eggs in the morning, and egg dishes are easy and fast to prepare. Meat that did not have to be slaughtered that day and could keep was also incorporated. Chicken was never a breakfast food, points out Arndt, as no one is going to kill a chicken first thing in the morning, but cured meat from a pig that was previously slaughtered could be.

In the late 19th century, however, people began to worry about indigestion as the Industrial Revolution saw people move from farm labor to factories and offices, where a lot of their time was spent sitting or standing in one place. Heavy farm breakfasts before work got the blame for indigestion, a major preoccupation at the time, and a lighter version became the ideal.

It was around this time, in the middle of a general healthier living fad, that breakfast cereals got their start at sanatoriums founded by followers of the newly formed Seventh-day Adventist religion.

These religious health gurus opened sanatoriums and introduced people to vegetarian diets and eating bland, whole wheat as a way to counter ill health. The first cereal, invented by James Caleb Jackson, and the better known Kellogg’s brand, invented by John Harvey Kellogg, were both born at sanatoriums.

Jackson was a preacher, and Kellogg a religious man who believed that masturbation was the greatest evil, which bland, healthy foods like corn flakes could prevent. Both Jackson and Kellogg were early Seventh-day Adventists, further tying a sense of religious morality into their ideas around the importance of healthy eating.

Using moralizing rhetoric to sell the idea of a healthy breakfast in the 19th century changed how people thought about the meal, says Carroll. That moralization wasn’t just around religion and health: it also incorporated our reverence for hard work. In the early 20th century, the idea that if you ate a lighter, healthier breakfast you were going to be more efficient and productive at work added “another moralizing layer”, according to Carroll.

The cliche that breakfast is the most important meal – and one with very specific food groups – developed from those early days of cereal.

After vitamins were discovered, it did not take long before, in the 1940s, breakfast cereals were fortified and heralded as a source of every vitamin under the sun, making breakfast that much more important, according to advertisements at the time.

It was also around that time that women were entering the workforce in droves during the war, and needed something quick yet nutritious to feed the kids in the morning. Maternal guilt was used to market cereal as the best food to give to children, and underline the importance of eating breakfast.

It was a combination of fear of indigestion, religious moralization and advertising that helped push the idea of breakfast as the most important meal of the day – but it was a campaign to sell more bacon that really solidified the idea. A public relations expert working for the Beech-Nut company, Edward Bernays, whose other claim to fame was being the nephew of Sigmund Freud, exploited all the moralization and health fears around breakfast to help the company push its bacon.

Bernays got a doctor to agree that a protein-rich, heavy breakfast of bacon and eggs was healthier than a light breakfast, and then sent that statement to around 5,000 doctors for their signatures. He then got newspapers to publish the results of his petition as if it was a scientific study, explains Carroll. That brought bacon and eggs back into fashion and added more weight to the idea that breakfast was not only very important but medically recommended.

Today, we are still mostly eating foods like cereals, bacon and eggs, rolls, bagels and croissants for breakfast. Dinner and lunch somehow never got the same treatment, and our adherence to the same narrow category of breakfast foods continues unabated.

It’s not just the moralization that got caught up with breakfast that has changed how we see it, says Arndt Anderson. Unlike lunch and dinner, there is something about the meal that lends itself to judgment.

“I think that the breakfast table is one place where you see the most blatant demonstrations of this human tendency to tie what one eats to who one is,” says Arndt Anderson. “People make their lifestyle change at New Year and every morning is like a small New Year’s Day – a chance to start things off in the right direction. So if you have cold pizza for breakfast, it says what sort of person you are.”

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?

25 Kasım 2016 Cuma

How do women really know if they are having an orgasm?

In the nascent field of orgasm research, much of the data relies on subjects self-reporting, and in men, there’s some pretty clear physiological feedback in the form of ejaculation.

But how do women know for sure if they are climaxing? What if the sensation they have associated with climax is actually one of the the early foothills of arousal? And how does a woman know when if she has had an orgasm?

Neuroscientist Dr Nicole Prause set out to answer these questions by studying orgasms in her private laboratory. Through better understanding of what happens in the body and the brain during arousal and orgasm, she hopes to develop devices that can increase sex drive without the need for drugs.

Understanding orgasm begins with a butt plug. Prause uses the pressure-sensitive anal gauge to detect the contractions typically associated with orgasm in both men and women. Combined with EEG, which measures brain activity, this allows for a more accurate picture of a woman’s arousal and orgasm.