Men's health

NICE has said no to Abiraterone. Don't rail at NICE. At least, not only at them. They follow rules and those rules restrict NICE's remit.

There are several assumptions in that header. The least problematic being is there a need to increase cancer research in rare cancers?  As people are dying that’s certainly a ‘yes’ in all cancers and particularly in the subset of ‘rare’.

My wobbly human rights slant pops up at the end, rather than being the centre of the story.

The Care Quality Commission has, once again, exposed the low standards of care inflicted on far too many elderly adults in the National Health Service. 20% of sites visited were failing to ensure dignity or nutrition for their patients, or both. One in five.

Today is the start of Blue September in the UK. It's a vital initiative that might shift the public discourse on cancer onto a different, more productive track. 

Or not. But I can dream.

Overrated? Dangerous?  Sometimes, yes. Advocacy by people and patients with a personal connection to a health issue is not an unequivocal good. The public interest is not always well served by involving patients/sufferers in health lobbying.

Blue September wins. At last! Some sense in cancer awareness.

Here’s a random Prostate Cancer Awareness Month fact.

This month is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. It used to be a Week but anything breast cancer charities do, prostate cancer charities blithely copy. No-one except me and one or two others seem to consider breast cancer charities might ever be wrong on awareness. So now we've got a prostate cancer Month. 

In the west, women know, for the most part, that they are more than just tits and gynaecology. There are still excursions into the 1970’s courtesy of the brittle muscularity of, say, Sky sports presenters or macho City bankers, plus countless minor infractions every day - ‘I was only having laugh, luv’ - but the underlying principle is slowly becoming mainstream. Women are more than just boobs and hormones.

Some nice person has been searching my website for information on Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. Hello, dear reader and welcome, if that’s you. You won’t find anything much as I don’t think there is a specific Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. I'd have had a tussle with it, if there was one....