AvMA, a charity, is inviting signatures to a petition

AvMA, Action against Medical Accidents, a charity, is inviting people to sign a petition to urge the Government to reconsider proposals to remove clinical negligence claims from the scope of Legal Aid and to further restrict access to justice by changing the rules that govern making claims under a condition fee ('no-win no-fee') agreement.

This Telegraph article may help you to decide whether to sign it. I agree with every word of Mr Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson, as quoted in the article. The proposed removal of legal aid would certainly increase the incidences of clinical negligence and avoidable suffering ,and would therefore not save any money at all.

Hypnotic, sleep-inducing drug zolpidem increases risk of nighttime falls, loss of balance and potential injury

Hypnotic, sleep-inducing drug, zolpidem, increases risk of nighttime falls, loss of balance, cognitive impairment and potential injury, reports physorg.com. Zolpidem is a generic drug that is marketed under a number of different brand names, including Ambien, Zolpimist, Edluar, Hypogen, Somidem and Ivedal.

A country physician with an admirably candid blog and a great respect for vitamin D

That physician is Dr Ken D Berry and here is what he has written about vitamin D and the widespread need to take supplements of it. Dr Berry came to my attention initially because he left a helpful Comment on this blogpost of mine.

It is so refreshing to see a doctor who is not afraid of criticising the faults of his profession: faults like proffering firm advice on a subject about which they know very little, if anything. - See his blogpage about coffee and its effect on blood pressure, for example.

The many health benefits of avoiding salt and salty food

The many health benefits of avoiding salt and salty food include lowering high blood pressure, lowering your risk of heart disease, heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, most cancers and dementia. It helps with asthma and other breathing problems, inadequate sleep, tiredness, depression, chronic pain, osteoporosis, varicose veins, arthritis, red face, failing memory, inability to concentrate - and so many more! - And that's apart from the benefit I usually write about, namely losing excess weight.

The thing is, pretty well every overweight or obese person loses weight very quickly when they seriously cut down on salt and salty food, and I did believe that it was every one of them. - But last night I heard from a guy in America who was very grateful to me for the advice on my website and blogs and has cut down on salt as a result of taking that advice. - I can't properly remember how long since he started avoiding salt, but I think it's something like a couple of weeks. He says he feels much more mentally alert and is feeling soooooo much better - just like I say will happen - but he hasn't lost any weight yet. So it seems that it's not correct that all overweight people lose weight rapidly, though I assure you that of the people who contact me about cutting down on salt, most of them are eager to tell me straight away that they are losing weight so easily and so fast, as well as all the other benefits, and the compliments they are receiving because they are looking so much better and their work performance has improved so much. Anyway, maybe with some people they get the other benefits first, and the weight loss takes more time.

If you are feeling better because of cutting down on salt but you are not yet losing weight, maybe you have a problem with sugar and other carbs. Not living in America I've not encountered the phenomenon of most food there containing not just salt, but loads of HFCS, High Fructose Corn Syrup, and other alien pretend-food, manufactured in laboratories and factories, loads of genetically modified crops/products, loads of hormone-contaminated and pesticide-contaminated frankenfood. Maybe all that 'food' that is so unsuitable for our species that lived for about 2.4 million years on plain, natural animal meat and its fat, plus some plants, and water (not coke! - and not diet coke!) does even more harm to Americans' body chemistry than the UK processed food does to us in the UK. Watch The Bitter Truth when you have 90 minutes to spare. And of course, Americans take even more pharmaceutical drugs than people in the UK, and these drugs do very, very great harm to your body's chemistry and physiology. See Amitriptyline and other drugs. See Prescribed Steroids, HRT and other drugs.

So as well as avoiding added salt/sodium, try low carb, high fat to help you with losing excess weight. - But make sure the fats you eat are good fats - fat from the meat of pastured animals, not from animals that have been fed on grain and hormones and pesticides and anti-biotics. Make sure the butter you eat is made from the milk of pastured cows. Don't ever eat margarine, or low-fat perversions of food. Don't eat oils like corn-oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, 'vegetable oil', etc. You want food that is as natural and unprocessed as possible: so cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil is good. - And don't diet or eat 'diet-foods' or 'slimming foods'. Just eat good, natural, nutritious food. - You will feel sooo much better!

About microbes in your gut that share your body with you

The food you eat influences the proportions of those microbes in your gut that share your body with you. - Personally I favour eating Probiotic, organic, unsweetened, full fat yoghurt from pastured cows in order to increase the proportion of 'goodie' bacteria in my gut.

By contrast, if you eat a lot of sugary food or foods that contain yeast, then the 'baddie' bacteria like Gardnerella, responsible for Bacterial Vaginitis/Vaginitis, and some undesirable yeasts or fungus infections, like candida/thrush, will be more likely to thrive. It is also widely believed that eating sugar feeds cancer...

I suggest that you consider cutting down on the foods that feed 'The Enemy Within'.

I'm stepping up my water intake.

I've read so many times that this is good for you, so I'm really going to try drinking more water. In addition to the water I was already routinely drinking during the day and the glass of water I drink before bedtime, for a few days now I have been drinking at least ten ounces (i.e. half a pint in my country) of water before each meal. And I'm swapping a few of what would normally be cups of tea or coffee and having a glass of water instead.

I used to think of tea and coffee as equivalent water vehicles, but I now realise that they are not. Maybe you too consider that a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of fruit juice/drink or a coke, etc counts as water intake? - Sorry: that's not so. - Water - the drink on which our species evolved - has got to be the drink most suited and healthy for our bodies and our brains.

You may like to try drinking more water yourself. - You may find as I have done that it helps when you have a headache or if you are feeling stressed. It's good for the digestion too. And helps you to think more clearly. Let's discover together what other health benefits come to us...(o:

Study finds Pay-for-Performance does not benefit patient health

"As news outlets throughout Europe and the U.S. report on the plummeting health of Western adults and children, there is no shortage of culprits. One villain often bandied about is the "fee for service" system of incentives for physicians. Clearly, if doctors are financially rewarded for simply performing more procedures, costs will soar at the expense of patient health."

But, as physorg.com reports, Pay-for-Performance, an emerging movement in which physicians are rewarded not for what they do, but for quality of care and patient outcomes, has also not been found to benefit patients with hypertension, despite enormous administrative costs. - Andrew Lansley: please note!

My take on this is that until the healthcare industry acknowledges and promotes evidence-based facts about the causes of the continued rise in obesity and its related degenerative diseases, patient health can only continue to go from bad to worse. The 'prescribe more and more and more drugs' culture embraced by most doctors is harming patients; the falsely-named 'healthy eating' advice given by healthcare agencies and promoted by the Food Industry and the Dieting Industry that profit by it, the salt-laden processed food that crams the shelves of the supermarkets, are disabling and truncating more and more lives.

We need to revert to eating more natural food, without added salt, free of synthetic added chemicals that do not exist in real food, free of cloying sweetness that perverts the taste: food that is naturally nutritious, not with added this and added that to pretend that it is nutritious. We need to curb the pharmaceutical industry's excesses and put legal limits on what and how much doctors are allowed to prescribe - especially to children.

Good nutrition is the foundation for good health. 'A pill for every ill' is a damaging delusion.

On Radio 4's Thought for the Day this morning, the speaker was James Jones, Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. His talk was a paean of praise for the NHS.

On Radio 4's Thought For The Day this morning, the speaker was James Jones, Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. His talk was a paean of praise for the NHS.

I wonder how many hundreds of listeners were, like me, profoundly distressed by his message today. Bishop James praised the NHS and was especially commendatory of the fact that its services are 'free' - 'free' at the point of need. (They are not free, of course. They are extremely expensive, but are paid for out of taxation, rather than directly by the patients to the providers.) He roundly condemns the system in some other countries, of requiring the patient's credit card (to ensure payment) before providing treatment, but disregards the doctrinaire processes demanded by the NHS before NHS treatment is provided, e.g. here - or not provided, as is the sad experience, too often, of too many patients, including victims of medical negligence, and that includes me.

I challenge Bishop James to read of my long, cruel, shocking treatment at the hands of the NHS abusing its power and see if he finds that praiseworthy. How can he praise an NHS for providing 'free' treatment, when that free treatment includes the callous disregard that led to so much suffering and so many ghastly deaths at that Staffordshire Hospital? See here, here, here. How does a man of the cloth live with the treatment of hundreds of innocent children in NHS 'care' at the hands of Dr Andrew Holden? - See here and here. Why does Bishop James disregard the dark, evil side of the NHS? Why does he champion the powerful, rather than champion their victims? The NHS does not need his advocacy; its suffering victims do.

I have tried in past years to obtain the help of Bishops to bring about reform of the cruel system, and I have failed. - David Lunn, when he was Bishop of Sheffield, promised me that he would help, but he let me down shamefully. Similarly David Jenkins, when he was Bishop of Durham, said he would help, but did not. Other prominent, influential religious leaders I have approached have also passed by on the other side, allowing NHS cruelty and victimisation to continue unchallenged. Where are the Good Samaritans in the churches, with the courage and the compassion to do right by the NHS's victims and to work to reform a system that is rotten at its core?

I challenge Bishop James to come and spend some hours with me, that I can tell him more about the callous, careless NHS system that is my own experience, and that of thousands of his fellow citizens.

Monsanto’s Roundup Endangers Human and Animal Health

The following article reveals the devastating and unprecedented impact that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is having on the health of our soil, plants, animals, and human population.
Read article by Jeffrey Smith on the Institute for Responsible Technology website (USA)

I've had my vitamin D level tested and have received the result

As some of my readers will know, I have been taking Vitamin D3 supplements since last Spring, and have greatly benefited from them: feeling stronger, finding it much easier to get up from a chair, steadier on my feet so less likely to fall, etc. - Well last Wednesday I had a dental appointment. This entailed climbing steps. - Suddenly I found this sooo much easier! I didn't need to hold onto the handrail. - My leg muscles managed on their own.

So the benefits of my vitamin D3 supplements are continuing to increase. And I've not had a cold or flu or any other respiratory infection since I started seriously supplementing with this vitamin. - It's my favourite vitamin now...(o: It has helped me so much.

I recently sent off for a home testing kit to get my vitamin D level measured and I received the results a week or two ago. I am informed that most experts consider the optimal level for health to be 50-70ng/nl, and mine was found to be 52ng/ml, so that's fine. - I reckon it shows clearly that I certainly needed the supplementation! I shall continue supplementing. I feel so much stronger.

There is a great deal of research these days that shows vitamin D deficiency to be common, especially in people who cannot get out into the sunshine in the summer to build up their stores of the sunshine vitamin. Maybe you too could benefit from taking vitamin D3 tablets. Especially if you are unsteady on your feet as I was, or have had a fracture from a fall, or find it difficult to rise from a chair or to climb stairs, or you repeatedly catch colds - maybe your doctor would consider it a good idea to arrange for you to have your vit D level checked and then take it from there. - It's worth checking, don't you think, for the sake of your health? There's more information about vitamin D on my Fat Retention webpage.

Painkillers linked to increased risk of heart problems

Commonly used painkillers for treating inflammation can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, according to an analysis of the evidence published in the British Medical Journal. The drugs include traditional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) as well as new generation anti-inflammatory drugs, known as COX-2 inhibitors.
Read article at physorg.com

Rumsfeld accused of torture

A US rights group has filed a lawsuit charging former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with involvement in torturing former prisoners in American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read article on the Centre for Research on Globalization website

Statins: further criticisms

See Dr Briffa's article about statins and this other of his articles that mentions statins. And here is another blogger's article which contains strong criticisms of statins, the companies that produce them and the professionals who prescribe them.

If you want to improve the health of your heart - and indeed improve the health of all the organs of your body - your best course of action is to eat less salt and salty food. See Information about Sodium in Foods. There are no adverse side-effects from doing this: it is entirely safe and entirely beneficial. Avoid pharmaceutical drugs as far as you can. They do far more harm than good for most people.

Discover fast, safe, effective tips for weight loss without using drugs, counting calories or going hungry

The fastest way to lose excess weight is to cut down on salt/sodium. This reduces water weight/fluid retention.

Other tips include 1) increasing calcium intake, which reduces fluid retention AND fat retention and 2) lowering carbs and increasing intake of healthy saturated fats.

3) Avoid prescribed pharmaceutical drugs as far as you can because they are a major, and increasing, cause of fluid retention/salt sensitivity. See weight gain from amitriptyline and other antidepressants and also weight gain from prescribed steroids, HRT and other prescription drugs.

4) Cut down on bread and processed food. Cook fresh foods instead.

5) Avoid artifical sweeteners, including aspartame, saccharine, sucralose, diet drinks and low calorie drinks.

Only a snowball's chance in Hell remains for civil cases against pharmaceutical companies in England and Wales to obtain legal aid from the government

Only a snowball's chance in Hell remains for litigants in civil cases against pharmaceutical companies in England and Wales to obtain legal aid from the government in order to pursue a case of clinical negligence or personal injury, as investigated by Radio 4's File on Four this evening.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to AVOID taking prescribed pharmaceutical drugs if you possibly can! The drug companies have long histories of criminal negligence, corruption and giving misleading information about their drug products. They have teams of highly-paid corporate lawyers well-versed in all the technical dodges to secure a favourable outcome for their shady clients.

The programme will be repeated on Sun 23 Jan 2011 at 17:00 on BBC Radio 4.

Dangerous practices and details of gross negligence at the Cidra pharmaceutical plant, run by one of GlaxoSmithKline's subsidiaries.

Dangerous practices and details of gross negligence at the Cidra pharmaceutical plant, run by one of GlaxoSmithKline's subsidiaries. - Read Dr Mercola's article about this. Do you agree with me that the top people of drug companies that are guilty of such negligence should personally have to be answerable to criminal charges in court and receive severe punishments, like prison sentences, in order to discourage repetition of the offences? - What if you or your loved ones are the next patients to suffer from Big Pharma's dangerous products?
If you agree with me on this, then draw these scandalous details to the notice of your friends, family and colleagues.

All Cows Eat Grass: Discuss.

When I was learning to play the piano, All Cows Eat Grass was the mnemonic I was taught for remembering the notes - A, C, E, G -in the spaces of the bass clef. I expect music students are still taught that. - The notes are still the same. The mnemonic still works. But is the former axiom still true? In the modern world in which agribusiness has taken the place of so much traditional farming, to get the names of the notes right, maybe we should change the mnemonic to All Cows Eat Grain.
See 'Cows Eat Grass and Other Inflammatory Statements'.

Dieting in early pregnancy risks damaging your baby's brain

If you eat too little in early pregnancy you may stunt your baby's brain development. Read physorg.com article.

Here is the safe way to avoid gaining excess weight in pregnancy.

I've ordered a jar of coconut oil

I've ordered a jar of coconut oil which I intend to eat. I understand it can be applied as skincare too. I bet it will taste good and I expect it to benefit my health. I tried eating coconut cream a few weeks ago and it was delicious. It's a great shame that for most of my life I have tended to avoid eating anything made from coconuts because they contain saturated fat. - Like most people I had been misinformed, by people supposed to be health experts, that saturated fat is bad for our health. But of course, healthy saturated fats are very good for our health. See here and here. So much of what the experts call 'healthy eating' is not healthy at all. - I do hope you're not eating margarine! - I was misled into eating margarine years ago. These days I make sure it's good pastured butter I eat - never margarine.

Coconuts, it seems, are treasuries of healthy nutrition, skincare and haircare, and a great variety of other useful products, including coir for coconut matting and the leaves for brooms. This Wikipedia article has a wealth of interesting information about coconuts.

I watched Fish Unwrapped tonight on Channel 4 Dispatches

I watched Fish Unwrapped on Channel 4's Dispatches tonight, excellently presented by Alex Thomson. The lax hygiene standards, poor adherence to regulations, and inadequate inspection that obtain in some of the fishing areas from where the UK sources its fish led me to conclude that consumers here cannot trust the safety of much of the fish on sale in supermarkets. If you and your family ever eat fish fingers I suggest you watch this programme using the link I have given. I think you may well decide not to eat them any more. And I suspect there will be fewer takers for prawns after watching the programme: the thought of eating prawns injected with dirty liquid to bulk them up in order to sell the dirty liquid at the same price as the prawns... - Yuk! - Dunno quite what to recommend except that getting out of the EU would be a start, since the EU favours big business and the food industry over mere consumers/taxpayers.

This may help with problem of inadequate sleep

The hormone, Melatonin, is one of the many factors involved in helping us to sleep. Computer screens usually emit a lot of light. Apparently the blue part of the spectrum is particularly ‘melatonin-suppressive’. Here is some free software that filters the blue light out of computer screens at dusk. I've just downloaded it and am running it and my screen is now less bright. It seems more restful for my eyes.
Note: Beta-blockers such as propranolol deplete the body of melatonin.

Review finds exercise and vitamin D help to prevent falls in older people

A systematic review of over 50 clinical trials finds that exercise and Vitamin D supplements are the best ways to reduce the risk of falling in people aged 65 and over.
Read article at physorg.com

Pharmaceutical Industry's Criminal Fraud Settlements

Between 1991-2010, there were 165 criminal and/or civil settlements by major pharmaceutical companies comprising of $19.8 billion in penalties. Four of the world's largest drug companies--GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Schering-Plough--accounted for 53% ($10.5 billion) of penalties during these two decades.
Read article on the website of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (USA)

Eat less salt and lower your risk of high blood pressure, stroke, heart attacks, kidney disease and many more health problems

Reduce your salt consumption and lower your risk of high blood pressure, stroke, heart attacks, kidney disease and many more health problems.

"The American Heart Association today issued a call to action for the public, health professionals, the food industry and the government to intensify efforts to reduce the amount of sodium (salt) Americans consume daily." See physorg.com article.

"Recently, the American Heart Association lowered their recommendation to no more than 1500 mg of sodium daily for the general public, after a report from the Centers for Disease Control found that a majority of the American population either have high blood pressure or are at high risk for developing it."

See Sodium in Foods

See Groups Vulnerable to Salt.

See Obesity and the Salt Connection.

Did you know that taking prescription drugs is a major cause of salt sensitivity? - Read about Amitriptyline and other antidepressants. And read about Prescribed Steroids, HRT and other Drugs.

Should fluoride really be added to the drinking water supply?

Should fluoride be added to the drinking water supply? It looks like we have been grossly misled for decades by the 'experts' who have encouraged us to believe that it should. Read this excellent article and discover the facts. If you click on the 'water fluoridation' label beneath this blogpost you will find quite a lot of articles critical of adding fluoride to the water supply.

Scandal of many deaths from Diabetes drug, Mediator, approved and subsidised by French health service for 33 years

Scandal of many deaths from Diabetes drug, Mediator, approved and subsidised by French health service for 33 years. "President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised "the most complete transparency" on how a drug which is now suspected to have killed up to 2,000 people was officially approved, and subsidised, for 33 years by the French health service." - Read article in The Independent.

This is what Dr Rath's website has to say about the matter: " Despite repeated warnings from scientists around the world, a deadly pharmaceutical drug, Mediator, was prescribed to 5 million French people. Successive French health ministers ignored scientific advice that the drug – produced by the French pharmaceutical giant, Servier, a company well known for its cult of secrecy and close relations with French politicians – was at best useless, and at worst highly dangerous. In all, the drug is now suspected to have killed 2,000 people. Notably, therefore, it has emerged that French President Nicolas Sarkozy – who, in 2004, coerced the marriage between French pharmaceutical dwarf Sanofi and Swiss/German drug giant Aventis/Hoechst – previously worked for Servier as a lawyer."

Here is the back story.
Read article at pharmalot.com

Avoid pharmaceutical drugs if you possibly can. Remember you cannot trust the pharmaceutical industry: it is mired in false claims and in corruption.

JB Priestley: Radio 4 "Great Lives"

If you are interested in JB Priestley then I highly recommend this programme to you, which you can listen to using the iPlayer or catch the programme repeat on Fri 14 Jan 2011 at 23:00.
"Barry Cryer nods to his Yorkshire roots in choosing JB Priestley, the Bradford born author of The Good Companions and An Inspector Calls."

It was heart-warming to listen to Barry Cryer's affectionate recollections of his meetings with the great man, whom he so greatly admired. And "Martin Wainwright, northern editor of the Guardian, presenter of last year's radio documentary about the Postscripts, also brings to life a prolific writer nearly killed in World War One." Martin Wainwright is a superb broadcaster and it is a joy to listen to him speaking about this writer he holds in such high regard.

A five star programme in my opinion.

Drug-induced osteomalacia

Saw this PubMed info about drug-induced osteomalacia.

Drug company financial inducements corrupt doctors and damage the reputations of medical schools

Read about how drug companies corrupt doctors and medical schools with inducements in cash or in freebies to get them to give talks/lectures promoting their company's drugs. And read the Comments beneath the article.

The appallingly poor treatment, including being left to starve, of thousands of elderly dementia patients in UK hospitals

See this report in the Telegraph. - Doesn't it shock you and make you feel ashamed of the NHS? Why isn't something done about it? We will all be old one day unless we die before our time. Is this the way you would be happy to be treated if you ever suffer the misfortune of developing dementia and going into one of these uncaring hospitals? Why don't staff who are maltreating patients in these ways get identified and punished? - Why are they allowed to get away with it, since this clearly encourages them to continue in the same cruel way?

Study: Ineffective, harmful antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed more and more, without good reason

Study finds that ineffective, harmful antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed more and more, without good reason, as reported here. Increasingly these powerful drugs, with their many ghastly adverse side-effects, have been prescribed 'off-label', even to children! (Off-label drugs are those prescribed by doctors for purposes not approved by the FDA.) This damnable pharmaceutical junk causes terrible physical, emotional and mental suffering and it destroys lives!

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, is chairman of the department of psychiatry at Columbia University, and was not involved in the study. But he tells us the reason for this off-label prescribing: “Off-label prescribing is an important component of practice,” Lieberman says. “The reason is that it really takes a lot of money for a drug company to jump through all the hoops to get an FDA indication. There may be good evidence that a drug is effective in a given condition, but the company doesn’t see enough of a market there to get it approved.”

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, straight from the mouth of a psychiatrist: all that prescribing of drugs that cause such great suffering to innocent patients, including children, is in order that drug companies cover the costs of jumping through "all the hoops" to get FDA approval!

But the most important hoop should be that a drug is safe. And the next most important hoop is that a drug is effective - that it 'does what it says on the tin'.

Periodically, these evil drug companies and their complicit stooges, the medically qualified prescribers of these toxic drugs, get some sort of punishment following court cases, and usually it is that the companies have to pay money - fines and/or damages. Sadly, the money they have to pay is insignificant in comparison to the huge profits they have raked in from selling the drugs, and so the punishment for their wrongdoing does not deter them from repetition of the wrongdoing.

The CEOs of the companies should be punished personally, with the full rigour of the Law. A long spell in prison is more likely to deter them from continuing to harm people for company profits. - OR - and here is a radical suggestion! - since they favour off-label prescribing for conditions not covered by their licence to use the drug - why not inflict the drug on them while they are in the prison? - I have a firm belief that by themselves suffering the adverse side-effects, they would be completely cured of encouraging off-label drug use again, provided it were to be made clear to them that they would receive the same punishment again if they re-offended.

Here is an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm.

Here's an interesting blog about Ethics, Medicine, and Pharm. It is written by a medical doctor, Howard Brody, M.D., Ph.D., who is an academic and an ethicist. Commendably, he is not ambiguous in his criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry and of their payments to greedy doctors who, for payment, compromise their integrity by lending their names and reputations to recommend drugs and medical devices unworthy of recommendation.

While at my computer desk the other evening...

The other evening I was sitting at my computer desk, holding a printed sheet to which I was referring, when the piece of paper slid from my hand, ending up on the floor under the desk, next to the wall. In the way that one does, I bent down, still sitting at the desk, stretching, stretching, stretching my arm - too far, unfortunately, and I slipped from my chair, landing painfully and awkwardly on my hands and knees on the floor. - That was fun! - As a steroid victim I have painfully thin skin and painfully delicate, swollen veins, and to get up I needed to put extra pressure on my poor painful knees and to supplement this with pressure exerted by my even more painful, delicate hands, one pushing down on the seat of the chair and one pushing down on the top of the desk, if I remember correctly. - But it was much too painful to do this...)o: - And it was also much too painful not to do it...)o: - I couldn't stay crouched like that all night, damaging the delicate skin and veins more and more.

There was a soft cushion on the floor on which I tend to place my swollen, painful feet and I struggled to pull it toward my knees so that I could put my knees on it and thereby reduce the pressure on them. Then with determination I forced myself to get up from the floor, disregarding the agony for my knees and hands. - I was exhausted. But what a relief to be up!

One good thing though was that there was no-one with me grabbing hold of my desperately painful arm, determined to 'help' me by pulling at it!!! - Ooh no, please! - Don't grab someone's arm! You stop them from being able to use that arm/hand to help themselves. - Check with them first - ask them - if they would like you to pull their arm, and don't be offended if they say no! - I think you will find that they would be delighted to accept your kind offer of help - but by you offering your arm for them to grasp and pull on to help themselves up. - Offer your strong arm; don't grab and squeeze their delicate one. - Well done! Thank you for your help!

Very low carbohydrate intake may improve your memory

See this article.

Chantix, Prescription Drugs and Acts of Violence

"For years, there were contentious debates about links between certain prescription meds, notably antidepressants, and suicidal behavior. Now, the focus is turning to violent behavior directed toward others. And a new study is linking 31 widely prescribed drugs - most notably, the Chantix anti-smoking pill - with 1,527 serious acts of violence, such as physical abuse, physical assault and homicide."
Read article at pharmalot.com

US Drinking Water contains hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen

Read AFP news report at yahoo.com

Slippery Statistics: there's something fishy about them!

I've been listening to Radio 4's More or Less programme first broadcast on Dec 31st 2010. If you go to this BBC webpage you too can listen to it using iPlayer. "Tim Harford and the More or Less team explore 2010 in numbers. Contributors include Ben Goldcare, Robert Peston, the National Statistician and the Swedish statistical guru Hans Rosling." - That should be Goldacre, btw, not Goldcare. It's a rare BBC typo...(o:

Anyway the programme includes Gordon Brown, when Prime Minister, being less than honest with statistics while speaking in the House of Commons. You will also hear of the wealth of misleading immigration figures that the British public was fed for years. And Robert Peston explains again about the crisis with the banks and their cash reserves. But the most important item in the programme in my opinion is the complaint by medical doctor and columnist, Ben Goldacre, that 74% of results of drug trials on Reboxetine, a so-called antidepressant drug manufactured by Pfizer, were not published in academic journals and were kept from doctors and patients. - Since the drug is "ineffective and worse than useless", but the actual published data claimed the opposite, Dr Goldacre describes this as "the greatest scandal of modern medicine."

You may, along with me, and along with Dr Goldacre, wonder why drug companies are allowed knowingly to mislead with fraudulent claims about their pharmaceutical junk, and why the medical journals are similarly allowed to skew the evidence by withholding trial results that show the drugs do more harm than good, and why nobody goes to prison for this fraud and for the harm that ensues to patients because of this fraud and for robbing the NHS purse and the British tax-payers by charging them for toxic trash. - The answer, as I'm sure you have worked out for yourself, is that Big Pharma's tainted profits make their way into the pockets of the venal.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, follow the money: venal politicians, slick lawyers, publishers, share-dealers, drug reps, shady doctors, shady members of drug regulation panels, etc. Which of them join in the dance of of the dodgy drugs, and rake in their shares of the ill-gotten gains?