Hospital doctors talk as if patients are not there, headlines the Daily Mail this morning.
The newspaper reports on the CQC-commissioned annual patient survey for hospitals, in which a quarter of patients made the claim, while a further third of patients did not understand what the doctor told them and a fifth of patients did not trust the doctor treating them.
However the survey did show that care had improved on the whole since the previous year.
Over at the Daily Telegraph, experts are claiming that almost half of potentially fatal prostate cancer cases could be detected by screening men in their late forties, giving them the opportunity to have early treatment.
Doctors routinely test men for warning signs of prostate cancer by monitoring levels of a protein known as prostate specific antigen (PSA) which is often an early sign of the disease, although the use of the tests remains controversial because it does not directly detect cancer, and can lead to patients receiving unnecessary treatment.
But now experts claim that testing men in their late forties can identify almost half of all deadly cases of the disease, while minimising the number of ‘false positive’ results.
More good news in today’s news crop will be of interest to pregnant women, as the BBC reports that a drink or two will not harm their baby’s behavioural or mental development in later childhood.
The abilities of 10,534 UK seven-year-olds, whose mothers had either abstained from alcohol or drank lightly while pregnant, were analysed in a study with little difference found between the two groups.
The news supports UK government guidelines to pregnant women which says they should abstain from alcohol, and if they drink, to consume no more than two units a week.
Experts have been particularly studious this morning and The Daily Telegraph brings us a bonus tidbit of research.
Scientists have claimed that sex makes us happier, but only as long as we think we’re having more than our neighbours.
Research suggests that sex is like salaries, in that people are generally happy if they keep up with the Joneses and are even happier if they get ahead.
Those who had sex at least two to three times a month were 33% more likely to report a higher level of happiness than those who had no sex during the previous 12 months.
