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No, that heading is not the result of me swallowing an antique style guide. It's the title of an advert from 1910, marking the fact we've just racked up at least 100 years of obesity blather in the media. It's from a magazine called ‘The Quiver’, about Antipon which "removes all excess of subcutaneous fat" and any need "to put up with any hardships in the way of dietary restrictions".

The main text starts:

Ralph is a dentist in West London. He showed me round one of the ‘machines that go beep’ in his surgery. He has a Wand plus (no sniggering at the back, please) - an American made computer controlled local anesthetic delivery system which he uses with some of his anxious patients.

We’re all familiar with machines that go beep. In TV medicine 'machines that go beep' play central roles, joggling for space around plot critical death beds or cosying up to the characters engaged in heroic struggles for life. EastEnders, Casualty, Holby have all had them.

Any number of health, medicine and science documentaries also feature machines that go beep so they aren’t confined only to the world of emergencies and drama. These machines are familiar medical and ‘tech’ metaphor.

Cancer Research UK’s ‘Race for Life’ is apparently the largest women-only fundraising event in the UK. The description of their premier mass participation event goes on to say that “since 1994, women of all ages and fitness levels across the UK have come together at these inspiring events to walk, jog or run 5k to help beat cancer.” Sounds great fun. I sometimes run, though I prefer a 10k.

Information that resonates because of your gender is not the same as its significance to you as a person.

For each and every fact about prostate cancer there is a equal and opposite fact. This means 'sound bite' prostate cancer awareness is impossible, though no one considers they should stop trying. Campaigns about prostate cancer have to stretch meanings or abbreviate them, to make them fit. March is the next prostate cancer awareness month and this year's key messages will soon be around so we can see what they are. 

There are three things to keep in the back of your mind when reading this. They are a) over one third of new cancer diagnoses are in men and women who are aged 75 years and older b) over half of all cancer related deaths are in men and women who are aged 75 years and older and c) recent scandals involving death or neglect in the NHS have been almost exclusively concerned with failings in the care of older people.

Overheard outside Westfield shopping centre on Saturday. Three men, employees of London Transport, chatting. First one "That's Buddhists. It's Buddhists". Second one. "No, Catholics." Third one "Yes, right. It's definitely Catholics."

I didn't hear any more. Puzzled. What could it possibly have been?

Considering the number of cancer awareness days, weeks and months, and the ubiquity of human interest cancer case studies in the popular press, you’d think the public would be filled up to here with comprehensive knowledge about cancer. Not so.

A letter in a recent (January 5  2010) Annals of Internal Medicine, by Brian Wansink and Koert van Ittersum has shown kitchen spoons can get tricky. Taking cold medicine with ordinary domestic spoons resulted in underdosing by 8.4% using a medium-sized spoon, and overdosing by 11.6% using a larger spoon.