Druin Burch is a consultant physician, a former junior doctor, and the author of books on history and medicine.
NHS England, ostensibly wishing to respond to the challenge of childhood obesity, announced yesterday the introduction of ‘spy scales’ to monitor children’s weight remotely. These devices, which conceal the user’s weight, transmit data to an app that praises kids when they lose weight and offers guidance when they don’t. But NHS England is missing the
This week, Wes Streeting – defending Labour’s rise in National Insurance contributions and seeking to fend off the surging Reform party – announced an extra £102 million to improve primary care. The money, the Health Secretary explained, would be given to a thousand surgeries that were prevented from taking on new patients by not having
Saying that national generalisations have fallen out of fashion is an understatement. Stereotypes have become less common and less tolerated. But not all is unblemished improvement, and something of value has been lost. National generalisations – often misnamed racial – now veer close to thought crimes. A pity – national generalisations are a basic tool
Having long been a man whose spirits wilted if meat was not the centre of his meal, I have become almost vegetarian. It’s routinely predictable for age to lead us astray from our youthful socialism, but I find my dietary change more difficult to explain. My younger self would view my politics with horror and
The Queen’s College, Oxford, has put in a planning application to add the names of five alumni who died fighting for the Germans to its first world war memorial. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform, expressed his outrage at the plan earlier this week. ‘Where will this wokery end?’ he told the Telegraph. ‘War memorials
We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The
It looks set to be a happy April for MPs who are in line for a 2.8 per cent pay rise, lifting their salaries to £93,904. Your reaction to that figure likely depends on how much you earn. So does mine – and since I’m about to argue that MPs are underpaid, it’s only fair I
On Monday, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, told the entertaining story of being added, alongside Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance, to America’s group-chat plans to bomb Yemen. Not the most obvious stuff of comedy, perhaps. Yet the affairs of men turn farcical precisely when they’re trying to be most serious. The cast here
One in seven British adults – almost nine million people – now take antidepressants. Yet a study attached to the University of California San Francisco suggests we don’t actually know if they should. The paper from the US, led by William Ward and published last month, exposes a glaring flaw: American trials test these drugs
Experts warn that doctors like me risk a condition known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – an emotional numbness that comes from too much caring for too long. But aren’t we all on the edge? Distant hardships are now visible as they happen, and the sense that victims are everywhere becomes vividly real. Newsreaders, documentary makers, editorialists,
Why should anyone care about Sydney Smith, who died on this day in 1845? 180 years have diminished the stature of his worldly achievements. He was an Anglican cleric who campaigned for an end to slavery, against the oppression of Catholics, for moral reform in the church and democratic reform in parliament. His political arguments
The NHS is swallowing more money than ever, yet delivering worse results. Now its failings are not only hurting patients, but also weighing down the economy. Employment in healthcare, said the Bank of England in last week’s Monetary Policy Report, has surged since 2019, while productivity has dropped. The Bank downgraded its 2025 growth forecast
This Valentine’s Day, as the nation does its duty and celebrates by dining out, often in stilted discomfort, it occurs to me that many of my finest restaurant experiences have been in singular company. No offence is meant to my wife, whose conversation has remained fascinating to me over the 21 years of our relationship.
Doctor Who, which started back in 1963, is often spoken about with a curious reverence as though it were something other than trash TV of varying quality. Unhealthy infatuation is not confined to the show’s viewers, as is obvious from the BBC’s recent announcement about the show’s new writers. Pulp television can be joyful, unless
Difficult, I know, to spend your life dreaming of having gone to Oxford. This year’s offers have just been announced and Cambridge’s are imminent. I feel for those who miss out, but I have some words of comfort. My late mother told me I announced my desire to study at Oxford aged seven, visiting the
Not a winter goes past without hospitals overflowing; the situation is so predictable it deserves a better word than ‘crisis’. Yet for patients and staff the sense of crisis is real, and connoisseurs of this annual event say that this year’s is especially dire. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has spoken of his distress and shame, saying
New Year’s resolutions are famously frail, so pick one that’s achievable. Half of the year’s cookbooks are sold in December: this January, let one shine in use, not simply rust unburnished. As an inveterate buyer of well-chosen recipe books, and a victim of gifting that I’m ungrateful enough to call less discriminate, I have never
Most people shudder at the thought of working on Christmas Day. Not me. I’ve worked as a hospital doctor since 2000 and, most years, come 25 December, I’ll be doing the ward round. As a junior doctor, I didn’t have much choice about doing the Christmas Day shift. But since becoming a consultant, I have
Most of those commenting on the guilt or innocence of Lucy Letby – the nurse who is serving 15 whole-life jail terms for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others – don’t know what it’s like to work alongside a killer nurse. I do. Benjamin Geen, whom I worked with at Horton General
I have spent a quarter of a century caring for people dying from smoking. Deaths of this sort are not only premature but often horrible. My mother’s death from lung cancer was both. The puritan nature of my medical heart should, therefore, leap up at the new restrictions of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, introduced
