An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Over the next few weeks parents all over the country will discover that their child has a verruca. I think its because children go bare foot more in the summer. For whatever the reason we always have a blip of verrucas in August. Now verrucas are difficult. They are basically nothing more than a wart on the foot, but because we walk on our feet the wart gets pushed in by our weight and ends up sore and painful. Over the centuries all kinds of treatments have been tried, often involving the odd part of a frog’s anatomy. More recently “science” has tried burning them off with red hot cautery, freezing them off with liquid nitrogen or use various acids. These do work to an extent but there is now something new and really effective, something new and really effective and scientifically proven to cure 85% of all verrucas in just 2 months. 85% cure: that, I can tell you in the wart and verruca world is brilliant. So, you ask, what is this amazing new scientific breakthrough? Some kind of pil...

A quiet Saturday paddle down from Wallingford to Goring. Quiet, nothing on the Thames but grebe and goose.

Are we overloading our children’s immune system? I apologise right from the start: this month’s diary is going to be a bit techy! It is a concern for many of us parents. 100 years ago children had just one vaccination (smallpox), in the 1960s there were 13 and now over 20. To seemingly make matters worse all the jabs seem to be crammed into an ever-shorter period. Surely this must overload or damage the immune system? The answer is simply no. Immunologists from the USA have calculated it would take over 10,000 vaccinations all on the same day to get close to overloading a baby’s immune system. Some of us are concerned that it is the nature of giving all the vaccines together that seems unnatural: spreading them out would somehow feel better. Yet it is very natural for the body to be bombarded continuously. Within a few hours of being born a baby’s bowel is filling up with about five different types of bacteria, in there millions. We are all in daily contact with any number of bacteri...

She gives me a big smile and asks me in “Its good to see you” she says as she leads me into her lounge. We talk about the weather and her family and the coloured black and white photo of her departed husband on the wall. Edna is well dressed and amiable and we could continue our social chat all day, but Edna has dementia. Just scratching the surface of her sociable façade reveals that she has no idea what time of the year it is, what she had for breakfast and even who I am. Dementia is as common as diabetes yet until recently was a forgotten illness with the sufferers often being described as “silly old women” or “stubborn old men”.But dementia is not just about short-term memory loss. Dementia effects memory, intelligence and personality. All three are lost such that the person becomes less able to cope with their day-to-day living and becomes slowly but surely less of the person they were. This is often just as distressing for the person and their loved ones as the memory loss. Indee...

Whilst many doctors seem to be talking about how quickly they can retire from the NHS there is one famous surgeon who has bent the rules as much as he can to stay working for the NHS. He has carried out more heart transplants than anyone else in the world and is one of my heroes. Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub was born in Egypt 65 years ago. At the age of 7 his aunt died of a heart condition that was eminently curable and so he embarked on a journey to become a cardio-thoracic surgeon. He came to the UK in 1962 and by 1969 was working at the Harefield Hospital in North London. Over his long career he has developed pioneering surgical techniques and been an inspiration to many. A book has even been written of one domino transplant he undertook on a pathologist who had been working with him, and who had ignored the signs of heart disease thinking them just to be asthma. The pathologist received new heart and lungs whilst donating her heart on to another patient, hence the term “domino”. Juli...

FEET One of the less attractive parts of the human body is the foot. Particularly when it has been trapped in a shoe and sock all summer day and then displayed in an evening surgery. Yet the poor humble foot is the most over worked part of your body. If there was ever a part that needed union representation, it is the foot. It was originally designed to be a team of four and then, blow me if hands disappear off to more exciting things. Worse, our gait changes and we start living for twice as long. As a result the poor old foot spends the day lifting huge weights using joints that are hardly bigger than a thumbs. Have you ever sat and wondered how it is that we need our hip joints replaced all the time when the humble big toe joint struggles on with just the odd bunion problem? So this is a little ode to humble feet. Look after them well. They do not require much from you. A good pair of shoes with soft soles and shaped insole would be nice. A good clean in the bath from time to time (p...