Calories on menus won’t end obesity
‘Matt Hancock could salvage his reputation by doing something useful’
There has been no shortage of government-inspired “health initiatives” in recent years, but none more pathetic than the proposal to combat childhood obesity by legislating for calorie-counting menus in restaurants – described in the correspondence column as variously “insane”, “daft” and, my favourite, “half-baked”.
Dr Dee Dawson, specialist in eating disorders, pointed out that food consumed in restaurants contributes only a small proportion of calories, compared to crisps, biscuits and other snacks that already feature this type of information on their packaging, to no good effect. There can’t be many people who know what a calorie is, let alone how many they should be eating: 1,000 a day? 5,000 a day?
Soon after endorsing this nonsense, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, writing in this paper, described the NHS’S Information Technology (IT) systems as “downright dangerous”, and vowed to “bring them into the 21st century”.
Such claims have been made before. Those with longish memories may recall the “National Programme for IT”, launched with great publicity in 2001, the costs of which subsequently escalated to £12billion before being scuppered a decade later as “unworkable”. So how does Mr Hancock intend to do things differently this time? “We will impose open standards for the interoperability of systems,” he claimed, while “increasing the in-house capacity to buy the right technology and manage it better”.
No one could conceivably know what this means, other than it will involve spending more taxpayers’ money to no good purpose.
From this, one might reasonably infer the new Health Secretary is just as foolish as his predecessor. He could still salvage his reputation by doing something useful – abolishing, for example, the bureaucratic requirements for family doctors to spend a day a week ticking boxes or prohibiting his department from issuing any more “insane” nannying injunctions. Dream on.
Magnetic mayhem
The misfortune of the professor with a stainless-steel spinal implant incapacitated by back pain following an MRI scan has prompted some interesting, if technical, observations.
While the magnetic fields generated by these devices can interfere with some types of implant (pacemakers, prosthetic heart valves, etc), most joint replacements and spinal rods are made of non-ferromagnetic metals and are, thus, Mri-safe. None the less, there may still be some interaction as metals can absorb the radio frequency energy of these scanners, resulting in over-heating and expansion with potentially damaging effects to tissues in close proximity. It would seem sensible for those with any type of implant to inquire about such possible hazards.
Cough remedies
Finally, further to the comments in this column on the possible causes of chronic cough in adults, my thanks to a couple of readers for passing on their experiences. Following a nasty sore throat, a woman reports being “in despair and dread” of a tickle, always in the same place, that would induce paroxysms of uncontrollable coughing. “I had to abandon the marital bed so my husband could get some sleep,” she writes.
Her family doctor suggested the infection might have damaged a sensory nerve and advised she take a small dose of amitriptyline. “After three doses, the cough disappeared. I have never been so grateful for anything.” This is the condition know as cough hypersensitivity syndrome for which this type of drug can be highly effective.
Next, a reader writes to commend the unusual-sounding salt-cave therapy very popular in Eastern Europe that goes back to the 19th century, when Polish physician Feliks Boczkowski was struck by how rarely workers in salt mines were troubled by respiratory illnesses. After three months of a catarrhal cough she contacted one of the commercial salt caves in Britain. After the first session, she felt “substantially better”, though it took three more for her chest to clear completely.