Experts have warned that the lives of people seriously ill with eating disorders are being put at risk because of waits of up to three years for specialist treatment on the NHS, according to a report on the front page of The Guardian this morning.
Some services are so overstretched they have to prioritise the sickest patients and those with anorexia ahead of patients with bulimia, with patients having to lose more weight before they can qualify for treatment.
Professor Ulrike Schmidt, professor of eating disorders at King’s College London, told the paper: ‘Certain services only see people when they reach a certain level of severity with their eating disorder. People might be told that their weight isn’t low enough to be seen, that they need to get sicker to get seen.’
She added: ‘It’s paradoxical. It’s horrible for patients to be told that you have to get worse before you get any specialist help.’
Elsewhere, experts are calling for an extension to cervical cancer screening programmes to older women, after report that a fifth of cases occur in women over 64, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Researchers at Keele University found that on average 20% of the roughly 3,000 new cases diagnosed each year are in women aged 65 and over – the age at which the screening programme currently ends. Women over this age also account for half of deaths from cervical cancer.
Lastly, men are suffering back pain at a much earlier stage in life these days as a result of ‘lazy lifestyles’, a report in the Daily Mail claims.
Apparently, the British Chiropractic Association says that men are starting to suffer with back pain at around age 37 – much younger than in the past.
They say offices jobs and a lack of exercise mean that men’s core muscle strength isn’t great enough to support their frames properly.
