Can you trust your doctor?

Maybe, like me, you missed this investigative programme on Channel 4 last week. If so, you may like to view it here, as I have done tonight. "GPs are among the most trusted and respected of all professions. They are our first port of call for most NHS treatment with 800,000 people visiting surgeries every day. But Dispatches reveals that failing doctors routinely slip through the system."

The programme shows very clearly that many GPs lack basic diagnostic competence, even with potentially very serious conditions like bowel cancer, breast cancer and angina. Although they are very highly paid and are accorded high status in our country, there are examples of doctors not following diagnostic guidelines in cases in which prompt diagnosis can mean the difference between life and premature death. Britain has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in Europe.

Even when two health professionals, a practice nurse and a doctor, turned whistleblowers about a GP who had fallen well behind with important patient results - blood tests and the like - the PCT (Primary Care Trust) concerned did not properly inform the patients concerned. The PCT's concern was clearly not patient safety.

Nor was the GMC's concern patient safety. (The GMC is the General Medical Council.) But then when is patient safety ever the GMC's concern? Regular readers of this blog will know that the GMC is a worse-than-useless 'regulator' and that in my opinion we would be better served by abolishing it than by attempting to reform such a travesty of a regulator. I think Trading Standards or Consumer Protection would be more appropriate, since these bodies have some concern for public safety, while the GMC is only concerned about the safety of doctors. If you click on the label GMC beneath this post, you will hopefully find on your screen a clutch of blogposts I have written over the years disparaging the GMC.

However serious the incidents of professional negligence, however many patients suffer and die before their time because of lousy doctors, nothing ever improves. I sometimes think of this as the proud motto of the NHS: We will never willingly improve. - Why don't you try to get something done about our flawed healthcare system and what is, effectively, the unaccountability of doctors? - After all, you, or someone you love, could be the next victim...

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.

C4's 'My Big Fat Diet Show' was better tonight because the dieters ate less salty food

Well Channel 4's My Big Fat Diet Show was better tonight - better in that the dieters had their intake of salty snacks restricted. The previous programme scarcely mentioned salt as an ingredient to avoid. Because of the lowered salt intake this time it was to be expected that there would be significant weight loss, as there was, because of the water loss resulting from sodium reduction. The dieter who didn't lose weight this time despite sodium reduction was the one who drank a lot of alcohol, and of course alcohol also causes fluid retention (ascites, in the abdomen) in people who are sensitive to salt. - Details about sodium in food and about alcohol on this page: Sodium in foods

The best and safest way to lose excess weight is to cut down on salt/sodium and salty food. - If you do this gradually you will lose weight gradually; if you do it more rapidly you will lose weight very fast indeed, especially if you make sure that you eat plenty of fruit and (unsalted) vegetables as well, because fruit and veg are rich in potassium, and potassium displaces some of the sodium in your body, thus enabling you to excrete more of the excess fluid from your body. Reducing salt intake is safe and we are advised to eat less salt. Most of us eat too much salt.

It is DIETING - by which I mean eating fewer calories than your body requires - that is harmful. Calorie counting and advice about increasing exercise and reducing fat intake to reduce obesity are ineffective, counter-productive and often damaging. - See the article in the British Medical Journal of November 2003 http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7423/1085 for actual research on what happens when this advice is followed! - Over 800 obese adults were put on energy deficit diets, given diet sheets and plenty of instruction and help from trained staff, and apparently, visited fortnightly for a year, at the end of which they had GAINED weight! This mirrors the real experience of obese people, viz. - dieting makes you fatter.

If you have fat retention as well as fluid retention, you will find that the fat retention is also reduced by cutting down on salt. - Fat retention is not caused by eating too much fat and is not cured by eating meals low in fat. - Read about fat retention here: FAT RETENTION

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Channel 4's 'My Big Fat Diet Show' last night gave the usual bad advice to people wanting to lose excess weight.

Channel 4's 'My Big Fat Diet Show' last night gave the usual bad advice to people wanting to lose excess weight. The overweight women dieters featured on the show were told they must cut down on calories to lose weight, and that for this diet they must eat only 1200 calories a day - i.e. fewer calories than their bodies need.

For the purposes of the programme there was a gimmick of providing 100 calorie portions of different foods, e.g. a quarter of a cup cake was a 100 calorie portion and one very large egg was a 100 calorie portion. Fresh vegetables obviously provided a lot of food for 100 calories, compared with the junk processed food that seemed to be the major element of the food usually eaten by the women.

At the weigh-in after a few days, most of the women had lost weight, and one, who had lost several pounds, was congratulated warmly and told excitedly that that was proof that reducing calorie intake reduces overweight. - This was despite the fact that another one of the women had gained 2 pounds! - The woman who had gained 2 pounds was very distressed because, presumably, she had put a lot of effort into reducing her calorie intake. - But she was not told that gaining weight was proof that eating fewer calories increases overweight! - No, of course she wasn't. She was told not to worry, that weight gain sometimes happens, but that she would lose weight if she continued with the calorie reduction.

It's all such nonsense. The women victims chosen for the show are all serial dieters and therefore should know from experience that dieting almost always results ultimately in weight gain to a heavier weight than before the diet.

If only programme-makers could abandon their misplaced obsession with calories and dieting, and instead think of outcomes for the subjects in their programmes. All overweight people are sensitive to salt and that is why they are overweight. And so the safe, fast, effective way to lose excess weight and reduce obesity is to cut down on salt/sodium and salty food, and eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and plenty of real food, instead of salt-laden processed junk.

And no need at all for that pointless exercise, struggling up and down stairs to 'use up calories'...)o: - What a waste of life that is!

If those women had cut down on their salt intake instead of cutting down on calories they would ALL have lost several pounds, without any hunger and without damaging their health. And then we could have stopped having these silly TV dieting programmes cluttering up the schedules and harming people's health.

How to lose weight

Sodium in foods

I've been watching "Jamie Saves Our Bacon" on Channel 4 - a powerful programme

I've been watching Jamie on Channel 4 - http://www.channel4.com/food/on-tv/jamie-oliver/jamie-saves-our-bacon/index.html - This was a powerful plea for pigs to be farmed more compassionately. Currently many pigs in Europe, particularly the sows, endure very long periods of cruel restriction, unnaturally confined in uncomfortable pens.

If you click on the link and learn more about the matter, I feel sure you will be moved to do what you can to ameliorate the lives of the pigs. Jamie is asking us to buy British pork, because pig welfare standards here are higher, and he is asking us to buy shoulder of pork, belly of pork and pork neck fillet, because buying these cuts, which at present are less popular cuts, will help hard-pressed British pig farmers. There are recipes for these cuts on the Channel 4 website.

He is also pressing the powers that be to put better labelling on packs of pork so that consumers can be sure about the country of origin of the pork and in particular, the bacon.

(He also showed us a distasteful practice of some pork dealers - that of injecting water and phosphates into pig meat, so that you could be buying a pack of pork that is 89% pork and 11% water and phosphates...)o: - Include me out of pork like that!)

Did you see last night on Channel 4 that tiny, tiny baby kangaroo/joey emerge from its mother and make its difficult way to the teat in her pouch?

Extraordinary Animals in the Womb

As I write, there are 30 days in which you can catch up with viewing it here - http://www.channel4.com/video/brandless-catchup.jsp?vodBrand=extraordinary-animals-in-the-womb

More details of the programme are here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/15/nosplit/bvtvanimalwomb15.xml and here:

http://forums.digiguide.com/topic.asp?id=27454&subject=Extraordinary+Animals+in+The+Womb+showing+on+Channel+4

and on many other webpages.

Extract:

""In Extraordinary Animals in the Womb, the embryonic journeys of four very remarkable animals are brought to life as they develop from conception to birth. The shark, whose cannibalistic embryos will eat their own siblings to survive; the emperor penguin, whose egg-bound chicks must battle the coldest weather on the planet; the kangaroo, whose underdeveloped foetus will undergo an exceptionally premature birth; and the parasitic wasp - whose larvae must hijack and exploit the body of another creature.

Filming across three continents, and making use of the latest HD camera technology, the Animals in the Womb team swam with pregnant sharks and witnessed up close the torment of parasitised caterpillars. Groundbreaking photography takes us inside the pouch of a kangaroo, and remarkable scans and special effects reveal 14 half-metre young inside the womb of a wild shark."

The miniscule joey interested me the most - blind, so tiny, so red, so delicate, so vulnerable and dependent. - You may wonder why it is red. - This is because its skin is extremely thin and what you are really seeing is its blood vessels through the transparent window of the ultra-thin skin. - It so obviously needs a safe place in which to feed and grow (the mother's pouch with the teat) till its skin, etc are strong enough to be exposed to the 'outside' world and its hazards and stresses.

There are some similarities, you may be surprised to learn, between the joey and a morbidly obese steroid victim! - The fatter anyone becomes, the thinner their skin becomes and so the closer to the surface are the blood vessels and so the redder their skin appears - red face, red hands, red arms, red-skinned legs, red or purple feet, etc - swollen with distended veins, swollen with pain, vulnerable to knocks, harmed by pressure, easily bruised and further damaged...

But unlike the joey, obese people have no chance of building up the strength and thickness/firmness of their skin: - once depleted, the skin's thickness cannot return. - These problems are worsened by dieting. - Dieting, by which I mean eating less food/fewer calories than the body requires in the mistaken belief that this will reduce obesity, is EXTREMELY HARMFUL. - The skin gets very much thinner very much faster, and the blood vessel walls get very much thinner very much faster too. - This obviously causes the blood vessel walls to be overstretched and stressed and much weaker, which results in them becoming distended (fluid retention) with extra fluid, so causing WEIGHT GAIN, NOT WEIGHT LOSS.

To reduce excess weight you need to reduce the fluid retention that has caused the weight gain. - So you need to avoid dieting/'slimming' and instead concentrate on avoiding salt and salty food, because that extra fluid in the veins is extra sodium and water, and to lose some of it you need to reduce your sodium intake.

When people whose blood vessels are weaker than the norm eat salt, the result is weight gain and obesity (because of excess sodium and water held in the blood vessels and elsewhere). This condition is also known as sodium retention, water retention, fluid retention, salt sensitivity or oedema. If these people reduce their salt intake they lose some of the excess sodium and water, and so lose weight, and if they eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables they lose weight faster, because the potassium in the fruit and vegetables displaces some of the excess sodium from the body.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Children and Obesity

And see Sodium in foods and

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers

Associated health conditions

and FAT RETENTION

I've just been watching the River Cottage programme featuring autumn food on Channel 4 TV

http://www.channel4.com/food/on-tv/river-cottage/
On this webpage there are links to the recipes of some of the dishes featured in the programme.

In this programme Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall makes some unusual dishes using beetroot, cooks a lot of beans, catches and eats some small crabs, organises a Duck Fair, shows us sausages being made, and produces his version of a Chinese duck dish.

It's always worth watching his River Cottage programmes. - He goes in for cooking delicious, healthy food from scratch, not heating up processed junk and pretending it's real food. If you want a healthy body, feed it real food, not junk.

In case you do not already know, processed ready meals are usually extremely high in salt and low in good nutrition, so they tend to make a lot of people fat.

Obesity is caused by salt sensitivity leading to fluid retention and thus to excess weight. There are various causes of salt sensitivity, the most dangerous of which is the reckless prescribing of certain groups of drugs by doctors who have not familiarised themselves with the side-effects of some of the powerful drugs they prescribe - drugs like steroids, ant-depressants and anti-psychotics and certain pain-killers and other drugs.

Giving up dieting, reducing salt intake and eating plenty of good food including plenty of fruit and (unsalted) vegetables and dairy calcium in milk and/or yoghurt (not cheese, because it's salty) will ensure safe loss of excess weight.

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

prescribed steroids and HRT

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

See FAT RETENTION

This evening I watched the Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme about Dana, the 8 year old who is described as an anorexic.

Much was made, and rightly so, of the fact that younger and younger children are getting caught up in the dieting lunacy that looms so large in the thoughts of so many people, particularly young females, these days.

See http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/cutting_edge/dana/index.html

Efforts were made to pin down just what had turned Dana from being a healthy little girl into one obsessed with the determination to lose weight, come what might. Her mother thought it was probably several factors that came together, and mentioned one as being that Dana had taken to watching a weight loss channel on TV.

It's easy to think of other likely factors - the witless obsession with dieting in most glossy magazines, the unnaturally slim/thin models pictured in the magazines, the dieting junk that comprises a lot of the 'food' sold in supermarkets and elsewhere.

It's all deplorable: that healthy children and young people (and older people) spend so much of their waking hours consumed with thoughts about how to avoid eating, when they should be getting on with living their lives...

This evening I've been watching Ten Years Younger on Channel 4.

In case you've never seen the programme I'll explain that the format is that a person (usually it's a woman) who looks older than her real age is helped by several professionals to look younger, and the aim is for the person to look at least ten years younger.

The woman this evening had had all her teeth out at the early age of 18, and this had made her look much older - her cheeks sunken, her mouth sunken in despite her false teeth, her lips thin, her chin too prominent. She had also lost a lot of hair and this hair loss was what distressed her most.

Her loss of confidence had led to her giving up the effort to look her best using make-up, and clothes-wise. But she wants now to become a teacher and so felt the need to improve her looks and applied to the programme for help to do so.

It must be quite an ordeal and must take a lot of courage to be the subject of the programme, because we the viewers see the subject at her worst - sans teeth, sans hair, sans make-up, etc.

However, we also see the wonderful transformation as it takes place...(o:

This woman was operated upon by an excellent surgeon. He gave her face a chemical peel and a face lift. He reduced her nose and her chin and I think he also did something to the skin around her eyes. It all made a big difference.

A cosmetic dentist made her some (larger) cosmetic dentures and these looked very nice and filled out her face more.

The show's presenter, Nicky Hambleton-Jones, coaxed her into more up-to-date and flattering clothes, and a make-up expert gave her instruction in how to use make-up.

What I had never seen before was the fantastic work of a team of people who made her hair look fuller/thicker. - A net was put onto her hair and her hair was pulled through and additional human hair (not her own) was added, particularly at the front of her head, where the hair was very thin indeed. She also had her hair coloured in an attractive way.

She certainly did look younger - and happier, and more confident - as a result of the work done on her and it was nice to see her happiness and the pleasure of her family and friends.

If, Dear Reader, you happen to be very overweight/obese, and tired and fed up of looking fat and trying - and failing - to lose weight by dieting, I can tell you how to look ten years younger, how to improve the condition of your skin and your hair, how to improve your health and happiness, without the help of the Channel 4 programme and without surgery or dentistry or dieting or expense!

Here is what to do:

Overweight and obesity are initiated by fluid retention, and occur in people who are sensitive to salt/sodium. - To lose excess weight it is necessary to cut down on salt and salty food. - So instead of eating ready meals you need to cook a meal from fresh ingredients and use little or no salt to flavour it. - You could try using pepper or herbs instead of salt, or if you feel you cannot yet give up salt, then use one of the low sodium salt substitutes, e.g. LoSalt, Solo Low Sodium Sea Salt or AlsoSalt, instead of ordinary salt.

Lose weight by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

If you need my help, I can be contacted from my website. - My help is free.

A skin cream which costs just £1.89 from Aldi, a budget supermarket, is just as good as one which costs more than £50, a survey claims.

Aldi skin cream 'as good as designer'

Extract from the Telegraph:

"Women seeking the best beauty treatments are set to clear the shelves at Aldi after its Siana Skin Kind Nourishing Anti-Wrinkle Night Cream was voted the joint best skincare product, alongside Lancome's designer night cream, which costs £51 a pot.

In a study for the Channel 4 programme How To Look Good Naked, which is hosted by fashion consultant Gok Wan, 100 women were given a blind test of a selection of popular skin creams.

Based on smell, texture and hydration, Aldi's anti-wrinkle cream was voted just as popular as the Lancome night cream, which is 27 times as expensive."

"The cream contains a retinol complex to stimulate cell growth and chemicals such as co-enzyme Q10, which helps to regenerate Vitamin E in the skin.

Last year, BBC2's Horizon programme sparked a stampede of women buying Boots' No.7 Protect and Perfect Beauty Serum by claiming the cream could actually repair damaged skin."

You can prevent/reduce acne and rosacea (a reddening of the facial skin, caused by dilation of capillaries) by avoiding salt and salty food. - See Associated health conditions and Sodium in foods

I watched Jamie Oliver's Channel 4 show: "Eat to Save Your Life" last night and found it, like the curate's egg, 'good in parts'...

I admire Jamie Oliver's campaigning, and in this programme he was right to draw attention to the poor quality and undesirable ingredients of much processed food and ready meals, and right to urge people to eat wholefoods and to cook from fresh ingredients.

But the nutritionist on the programme gave the usual misinformation that reducing calorie intake is the way to reduce or prevent obesity. - There is not a shred of evidence to support this claim. - It is categorically untrue. - As far as food intake is concerned, to reduce or prevent obesity it is chiefly necessary to minimise sodium/salt intake and to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. This is because obesity is caused by fluid retention, not by overeating. It is also necessary to avoid dieting; dieting is a major cause of weight gain and ill-health...)o:

Prescription drugs were not mentioned at all in the programme, and yet they are overwhelmingly the cause of the most severe cases of morbid obesity. - People need to be warned to avoid prescription drugs as far as they possibly can. They cause far more harm than good...)o:

You can read about fluid retention, and about fat retention, and about pharmaceutical junk and the harm it does, and about salt sensitivity and the groups of people vulnerable to salt - and much more - on my website. - And I'm not selling anything...(o:

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

Wider implications of the flawed theory that excess calorie intake causes obesity

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

I watched Channel 4's Dispatches: The Truth About Your Food programme last night and it contained the usual untrue claims about food calories...)o;

The format of the programme was mainly about how when people eat in restaurants and the like, they eat more calories than they think, and the high calorie intake was blamed for the increase in obesity in the UK. Assertions like these are untrue and are not supported by any evidence. - All the evidence, in fact, is to the contrary, viz: for overweight/obese people, dieting (i.e. eating fewer calories than the body requires, in order to lose excess weight) almost always results in weight GAIN, not weight loss. - This is because obesity is caused not by overeating, but by fluid retention.

Overweight/obese people can easily and swiftly lose weight by giving up dieting and instead concentrating on avoiding salt and salty food. This reduces the fluid retention.

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

Wider implications of the flawed theory that excess calorie intake causes obesity

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

TV chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, begin a campaign against the cruelty of intensive chicken production

The shameful price of cheap food

Extract from the Telegraph:

"We are living in the era of cheap food, when you can pick up a chicken in the supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. But there is a hidden cost: of the 850 million birds reared in Britain every year, only five per cent have had anything approaching a comfortable life. The vast majority are intensively reared, in prison-camp environments.

Now two of our most celebrated campaigning chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, are about to try to change our minds, and to ensure that the 25 kilos of chicken meat we each consume a year have come from birds that were decently treated.

Starting next week, Channel 4 is devoting a season of programmes to the nation's eating habits. There will be a one-off Oliver special - Jamie's Fowl Dinners - in which he demonstrates the realities of industrial chicken production, while Fearnley-Whittingstall's aptly titled Hugh's Chicken Run will follow his attempts to set up an intensive farm - in the course of which he is reduced to tears.

The way chickens are reared provides an insight into the intensive techniques used to satisfy our demand for cut-price meat and vegetables. In this world, a bird that will feed a family of five can be raised in a mere 39 days, when before the Second World War it would have needed around 20 weeks to reach the same weight. Modern methods see 40,000 birds packed into one artificially lit barn, reeking to such an extent that if the ventilation system failed they would be gassed by their own droppings. Each bird inhabits a space smaller than a piece of A4 paper, and most will have been de-clawed and de-beaked to prevent them damaging their neighbours. To encourage them to feed continuously, they are given only one hour of darkness in each day. They will never experience natural light or see a blade of grass.

These birds are meant to fatten quickly, so exercise is undesirable. Low light levels keep them drowsy, but as they grow they become so densely packed in as to find movement impossible. Even if they had the notion to try to make it to an open door, they grow so fat that their legs often become useless. During the process of catching and transportation, tens of thousands may die, as they are packed together even more tightly than in their sheds. (Chickens need three times as much air as human beings for their size: in a lorry, they may get almost none.)"

Toxic make-up? Toxic shampoo? toothpaste? window sprays? etc. - Channel 4 programme.

http://www.channel4.com/health/microsites/T/toxic/ - I watched this Channel 4 programme - presented by Sarah Beeny - on Thurs Oct 11th evening and found it interesting. - A lot of iffy chemicals are being absorbed into the bodies of users of make-up and of commonly-used household products. And when pregnant women use these products the babies growing inside them can be harmed by the chemicals. Also breast-feeding mothers can transfer the chemicals to their babies in their breast milk.

I've been watching a Channel 4 programme (Bodyshock) about an Egyptian baby girl, Manar Maged, born with two heads.

I've been watching a Channel 4 Bodyshock programme about an Egyptian baby girl, Manar Maged, born 30 March 2004, in Aghur, Egypt - born with two heads. So strange, so rare. She was expertly cared for in hospital and then the time came when it was judged imperative to separate the 'parasitic' head from the girl because she was suffering by her body having to supply the other head's needs as well as her own needs.

A neurosurgeon said he would operate for free. He and the doctor in charge of the baby's hospital care spoke of their care and concern for the baby girl and clearly did care about her welfare. The staff also spoke with honesty about their desire that the world should see that they could perform this intricate, rare surgery successfully. The surgeon also explored his ethical and religious scruples with us, since the operation would inevitably cause the death of the parasitic head. He consulted the foremost religious leader in the country and was assured that to do the operation was the right course of action. He also spoke with colleagues in the profession who had performed similar surgery so that he might learn what he could of so rare a procedure.

The operation lasted 13 hours. It was even more difficult than they had expected, and the bleeding was a big problem, but the girl survived the operation. She took up a great deal of staff to look after her in hospital until she was well enough to be looked after at home by her mother.

Then she and her mother and the surgical and medical team travelled to America to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show. - This was to obtain publicity and funding for the hospital, because the operation had cost the hospital a big chunk of its yearly allocation of money and they needed to try to recoup some of that money in order to treat other babies.

And then, unfortunately, we were told at the end of the programme, she was found to have a problem with water on the brain, which had been causing her to have fits and meant further surgery. But she was still alive.

Sadly, Manar died in March 2006 from a severe brain infection, 13 months after her operation.

Half of hospitals in England delay surgery to save money

Half of hospitals delay surgery to save cash

Extracts:

"Almost half of NHS hospitals across England are now deliberately delaying operations to save money.

"Minimum waiting times" have been imposed by at least 43 per cent of Acute NHS Trusts, a survey for Channel 4's Dispatches programme found. Treatments are often postponed for more than 20 weeks, despite staff and equipment being available.

Patricia Hewitt, the beleaguered Health Secretary, has vowed to resign if the NHS fails to balance its books by the end of the financial year.

Her Tory shadow, Andrew Lansley, said: "Staff are being paid to do nothing in the current quarter because Patricia Hewitt needs to get the NHS back into the black by April to save her job. Labour's NHS mismanagement has reached crisis proportions.""

"In an interview for Dispatches, Mrs Hewitt described minimum waiting times as "unfortunate and frustrating but necessary"."