The Pink Patch

So this story was in the news a few months ago, but the issue is still apparent. So called 'miracle' pills or patches which claim to aid you in losing weight. This particular product, The Pink Patch, was advertised on websites, including the social networking site, Facebook. This is what people were particularly up in arms about; that young women were being put under further pressure to reach an unattainable image. Looking at one of the Facebook groups about The Pink Patch shows some of the issues it raises.
Now I don't know about you, but I'm actually a bit sick of hearing the whole 'the media makes young girls have eating disorders' malarkey, because I didn't consider much comparing myself to celebrities until they kept banging on about it. So I can imagine the whole fuss that has been made about it may have created more of a problem that existed in the first place. But however it began, I have found that, unfortunately, some people are obsessed with losing weight in whatever way is possible. Just a look on the (rather dull) drugs and medications section of the Yahoo health message boards, shows that there isn't a more popular topic that 'slimming pills'. (Although Viagra comes a close second but that's another topic altogether).
So why do people do it? Why is it so important to some to be skinny? And why are people going to the extremes of tampering with their natural self to feel like they fit in in society?

Cot death confusion

So another day and another cryptic health story in the press.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/10October/Pages/Cotdeathriskandfanuse.aspx

So the news is that having a fan on when a baby sleeps could dramatically cut the risk of cot death. Great, all well and good. But then you read/watched/listened on to discover that: there was a 94% reduction of cot death with a fan in rooms over 21°C, and little or no difference in deaths with a fan in rooms under 21°C. Eh??? So are they are saying if you keep the room cool to limit the risk of cot death? If so why have they made it so statistical? Why does the story have to be so complicated? People could interpret this story with all these statistics and arguments in different ways, therefore absorbing the wrong information.
For those of you who are parents of young children out there, I can imagine when first hearing this story it sounded like a simple way of hopefully keeping your children safe, but then you learn the full story and it has all these 'ifs', 'buts' and 'howevers', it would distress you even more to think you may be doing the wrong thing for your child than if you had just never heard this story at all.
So if a health study doesn't conclusively prove anything at all is it really news? It seems to me stories like this create this hypochondriac culture. If people took all the health stories in the news into account, which some protective mums do especially well, there would be so many contradictions that it would be impossible to know what to believe. For example, I have heard many contradictory stories about having one or two glasses of wine a day. And, lo-and-behold, if you type 'one glass of wine a day' into a search engine, you get a story like this, and a story like this, amongst others.
So are health stories really for our own good? Or to scare and bamboozle us?

One of the worst A and E's in the country

So, the Central Lancashire primary care trust has been highlighted by the Healthcare Commission as having a very poor Accident and Emergency department.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/health/health/article1735735.ece

And if Royal Preston Hospital is anything to go by, I'm not surprised. The hospital has just completed a new children's only A and E department, which is all well and good, but while this work has been going on a traumatic trip to A and E has been made even more traumatic by having to sit in a pile of rubble whilst waiting to be seen. OK, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration but people I have spoken to who have visited recently have been less than impressed by the uncleanliness of the emergency department. There are other problems too - see what some people think of Royal Preston Hospital:

http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/Hospital.aspx?id=RXN02&page=1&v=4

The personal highlight of the hospital feedback for me is from Mr Lister, who visited the hospital last month when the aforementioned work was going on, and said: "It's how I imagine a hospital would be in third world country."

The irony is that the hospital say they have done this building work, which has left the A and E an unclean one, to improve the overall quality of the department. But that still doesn't help those who have had to experience a dirty department in this in between stage. Who, if they haven't caught MSRA, will have even more of a negative view of this country's healthcare system.