Hospital infections, nutrition, gout, gluten, Shockwave, tennis elbow
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr Mark Porter demystifies the health issues that perplex us and separates the facts from the fiction. He brings clarity to conflicting health advice, explores new medical research and tackles the big health issue of the moment revealing the inner workings of the medical profession and the daily dilemmas doctors face.
This week Mark examines the protocols for visitors to hospitals and asks whether there's any evidence that they help control the spread of infection - is there any science behind using the hand gels provided? Why do some hospitals ban flowers - and should you be able to sit on the hospital bed of your loved one?
Martin Kiernan - Nurse Consultant in prevention and control of infection - helps to clear up the confusion.
Inside Health discovers that gout - a condition associated with older portly men caricatured in cartoons and literature - is on the increase and striking much younger. And while it has been the butt of many a joke, it has never been a laughing matter - at least for those afflicted.
And after the longest grand slam final in history just over a week ago, Mark Porter investigates a new treatment for Tennis Elbow that is used by the top players, Olympic athletes, and is available to mere mortals on the NHS in a handful of places. Plus Dr Max Pemberton investigates whether the explosion in the use of tablets, such as the i-Pad, has caused a similar elbow injury.
An Margaret McCartney scrutinises new research suggesting that people with coeliac disease are not the only ones who can develop symptoms if they eat gluten containing foods. Gluten is a component of wheat, barley and rye, and responsible for triggering coeliac disease in around 1% of the UK population, causing problems that include bloating, diarrhoea, weight loss and fatigue. But there now appears to be another group of people with milder symptoms caused by gluten sensitivity - or gluten intolerance - the terms are interchangeable - but how do you identify them? Well certainly not with fancy High Street tests.
Producer: Erika Wright.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and been very quickly knocked down. |
| 0:23.1 | And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Ria Elena. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm excited. |
| 0:27.6 | You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. |
| 0:31.0 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.5 | This is a download from the BBC. |
| 0:35.7 | To find out more, visit BBC.com.ukuk slash radio 4. |
| 0:41.1 | Hello and welcome to Inside Health on today's program, Gout. It's on the increase and affecting younger people, and I'll be discovering why that is no laughing matter. |
| 0:49.8 | The rise of the gluten-free diet. I'll be finding out why high street tests for gluten-related problems may not be all they're cracked up to be, and how technology can be bad for your health. Well, for my elbow anyway. We'll just have a look at your elbow. If I just ask you to bend, it's slightly and rest. I've had tennis album in the past. I've had a lot of sport, but since buying an iPad six months ago when holding it with my palm up and pinching it like that, I've got terrible pain. I haven't heard of iPad elbow yet, but maybe you're the first to describe this. More on both iPad and tennis elbow later. But first, do you remember this? Prime Minister David Cameron's entourage getting a ticking off. Excuse me, I'm the senior old pig say this department. Why is it that we're all told to walk around like this? And these people... You come and talk to me now? No. Why don't we... I'm still in? No, no, I agree. We'll come back. We'll have all taken our ties on. We'll come back. I'm not having it. Now, out! A film crew following the Prime Minister being shouted out by a surgeon for not adhering to the bear below the elbows dress code |
| 1:49.7 | that medical and nursing staff now follow in an attempt to reduce the spread of hospital-acquired infections. |
| 1:54.6 | A subject we touched upon last week in a report on the hospital superbug pseudomonas. |
| 1:59.2 | Well, we've had a couple of emails from listeners about protocols for visitors to hospital. |
| 2:03.3 | Is there any science behind using the handgels provided? |
| 2:06.1 | Why do some hospitals ban flowers and so on? |
| 2:08.8 | Well, to help clear up any confusion, Martin Keenan is a nurse consultant |
| 2:12.3 | in prevention and control of infection at Southport and Ormskirk NHS Trust. |
| 2:17.0 | Visitors are often, I feel, |
| 2:18.5 | unfairly labelled with transmitting infections around hospitals, but there are things that they |
| 2:23.3 | can do to help minimise the risk. I suppose the most important thing they can do is wash their |
| 2:28.3 | hands when they first come into the hospitals, and I'm not talking about gel down the corridor. |
| 2:32.9 | I'm talking about when they actually get close to the patient. |
| 2:36.4 | The second thing they can do is please not to visit while they're actually ill themselves. |
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