Articles

Antibiotics were the drugs -that were going to take the human race into the next millennium. Now, more than 60 years after the discovery of penicillin, we find ourselves back to the future. It may as well be 1930 again, because many of the strains of bacteria we sought to eliminate, and indeed for a […]

We have all become the unknowing guinea pigs of an uncontrolled experiment with the food we eat. Today, through biotechnology, scientists are mixing and matching bits of DNA cutting a gene from one kind of organism and splicing it into another species hoping to make an improved plant or animal; corn genes in rice, chicken […]

Multiple sclerosis (MS) often follows a highly individual and unpredictable course, sometimes leading to chronic and occasionally devastating disability. MS is one of the most common diseases of the central nervous system and it can affect any part o MS occurs because of damage to the myelin sheath the thin protective layer of fatty membrane […]

Forty years ago, if you were diagnosed as having lupus, otherwise known as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the prognosis would not have been good. Odds were that you would have a 50/50 chance of dying within five years. Today doctors are most likely to tell you that, thanks to modern medicine, to greater awareness among […]

Every year in Britain 20,000 people are on the receiving end of 100,000 treatments. In the US 100,000 patients get more than half a million treatments a year. It’s not a new drug or revolutionary type of surgery but, amazingly, electroconvulsive therapy or ECT. In these days of holistic medicine, and particularly when the efficacy […]

Few disorders are as devastating and frightening for an individual as stroke. Often without warning, life can be torn apart by the sudden loss of basic physical or mental skills. Equally, no disorder is more confounding to medical science since stroke cannot be pinned down to one single, treatable cause. Instead, it is influenced by […]

Question: When is an operation not an operation? Answer: When it’s a section. It’s only recently that caesarean operations (known inexplicably as “sections”) have become commonplace. Earlier this century, caesareans were used as a last ditch attempt to save the baby usually after the mother had died. Fifty years ago mothers were likely to die […]

There is a joke among medical practitioners confronted with a woman suffering from gynecological problems. The diagnosis: she is suffering from CPU or Chronic Persistent Uterus. The solution: Hysterectomy. In fact, hysterectomy, or more correctly female castration, is now one of the most widely applied surgeries for women, second in some countries only to the […]

Photographs transmitted all over the world of prisoner ‘Annette’, from the notorious Holloway Prison in London, labouring in chains have caused us all to take stock of the penal system’s treatment of pregnant women Photographs transmitted all over the world of prisoner ‘Annette’, from the notorious Holloway Prison in London, labouring in chains have caused […]

What do mothers want from midwives? Over the years, I have been privileged to listen to many mothersWhat do mothers want from midwives? Over the years, I have been privileged to listen to many mothers. No matter what their age or experience most want the same thing the woman they have read about in books. […]