Morphine and the heart, antibiotics and the appendix, sick notes, blood tests, painkillers
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr Mark Porter goes on a weekly quest to demystify the health issues that perplex us.
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, discusses with Mark new research that suggests that giving heart attack victims drugs to ease their chest pain could hamper the heart's ability to heal itself.
The standard approach to appendicitis is to remove the inflamed organ. But a new review argues that antibiotics could be an alternative to surgery in some cases. Dileep Lobo, Professor of Gastrointestinal Surgery at the University of Nottingham, explains his team's findings.
GP Margaret McCartney is on her soapbox about sick notes, following regulatory pressure from Europe that could allow people who fall ill on holiday getting compensatory time off work.
Dr Kamran Abbasi, Editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, looks into the evidence that the change from sick notes to fit notes two years ago has had an impact on people returning to work.
Mark visits the pathology laboratories at St Thomas' Hospital in London to find out from Senior Biomedical Scientist Diane Murley how blood is analysed.
And Dr Andrew Moore from the Pain Research Unit at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford talks about which over the counter painkillers are likely to work best for acute pain.
Producer: Deborah Cohen.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I am Ed Gamble, host of another BBC |
| 0:04.6 | podcast, The Traitors Uncloaked. But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like |
| 0:09.9 | Ellis and John's Saturday bonus episodes, the Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Rylen, |
| 0:15.0 | and comedy specials from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffel and Romesh Ranganathan. |
| 0:19.9 | However, and maybe I'm biased, it's really all about the traitors uncloked. |
| 0:24.3 | So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, listen only on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.4 | This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit BBC.com.ukuk slash radio four. |
| 0:37.2 | Hello and welcome to Inside Health in today's program, a new treatment for appendicitis, drugs rather than surgery. |
| 0:44.7 | Sick notes. If you were unlucky enough to fall ill over the Easter break, then you probably support proposed changes, allowing people to claim extra time off if they're sick on holiday. |
| 0:53.9 | Our resident skeptic, GP Margaret McCartney, explains why she's... allowing people to claim extra time off if they're sick on holiday. |
| 0:56.8 | Our resident skeptic, GP Margaret McCartney, |
| 0:59.3 | explains why she's not so keen. |
| 1:02.8 | And I'll be discovering why age-old advice to manage a headache by taking two paracetamol, two aspirin, or a couple of ibuprofen |
| 1:06.7 | may not be the best way to get rid of the pain. |
| 1:09.9 | Well, what I'd be taking right now is one tablet, |
| 1:13.1 | 500 milligrams of paracetamol, |
| 1:15.3 | one tablet, 200 milligrams of ibuprofen, |
| 1:19.1 | and a nice strong cup of coffee. |
| 1:20.7 | In fact, it's what I did before I left the house this morning |
| 1:23.1 | because I had a headache, and it worked. |
| 1:25.7 | And as we'll be revealing a bit later, |
| 1:27.6 | there's more to the coffee than something simply to wash the pills down. |
... |
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