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Telegraph
10 minutes ago
- Health
- Telegraph
Cancer patients warned not to use weight-loss jabs
Cancer patients should not take 'quick fix' weight-loss jabs unless under specialist care, experts have warned. Macmillan Cancer Support said there had been a surge in people asking about the drugs, such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, but that there was not enough evidence about how they might affect cancer treatment. It said there was already evidence the injections may affect how other medicines are absorbed by the body, and that this could include cancer drugs. The manufacturers acknowledge the weight-loss jabs may affect the absorption of other drugs. The contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) are among treatments experts have said are affected when taken orally. It is thought the mechanism by which the drugs make a person feel fuller and reduce their appetite – called delayed gastric emptying – also slows down the rate at which medicines are absorbed by the gut. Dr Owen Carter, national clinical adviser at Macmillan Cancer Support, said there had been 'a noticeable increase in calls to Macmillan's free support line and a flurry of messages on our peer-to-peer online community about weight-loss drugs'. 'We know that cancer affects everybody differently and it's understandable that lots of people are interested in new drugs which accelerate weight loss, particularly if they want to manage their weight before or after treatment for cancer,' he said. 'While 'quick fixes' may seem attractive, we simply do not know enough about the long-term impact of these weight-loss medications to recommend them if they're not prescribed by a specialist.' He also said that 'certain weight-loss medications carry warnings about a potential link with thyroid cancer'. He added that 'eating well and staying as active as possible are proven to help people feel better, increase their energy levels and strengthen their immune systems, which can help them to manage their weight and cope better with cancer treatment'. Weight-loss drugs have been available on the NHS to a select few patients via specialist weight management clinics. The majority of the estimated 1.5 million people taking the drugs in the UK are accessing them privately for around £200 a month, often from online pharmacies. Later this month, GPs will be able to prescribe one of the drugs, Mounjaro, to obese patients. Last week, Prof Sir Stephen Powis, the NHS England national medical director, said they could be as transformative as statins.
Telegraph
25 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The anti-woke brigade won't like it, but this ‘inclusive' museum is actually rather good
Past mountainous warehouses, down a listless canal, and into the quiet academic quarter with its beige halls soaring into skies that never seem to cease to rain, stands Manchester Museum. With the institution freshly glistening with ' European Museum of the Year 2025 ' status, I ventured in to see if this superlative accolade is justified, immersing myself in ancient earrings, psychedelic rickshaws and the tooth of an 80-million-year-old shark, the mellow rain of Manchester pattering on the roof. The museum's purpose is written in the atrium: 'To build understanding between cultures and a more sustainable world.' This isn't really a museum about Manchester, more of artefacts, animals and artworks that have ended up in the museum's collection, and a mosaic of perspectives from ethnic minority communities living in, studying at, or in some way associated with Manchester. It strives to be 'the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you'll ever visit'. Essentially, the museum is about belonging. It is this bold curatorial line that gives it a distinctive flavour, with each of the four main galleries contributing to the central theme in interesting and surprising ways. I first entered Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging, a gallery of ancient and medieval artefacts from Anatolian earrings to marvellously-preserved Roman playing pieces, ancient Egyptian cat idols to hoards of delicate medieval silver coins. The rooms are a little over-stuffed, and some of the information plaques positioned so low that all the stooping became exhausting. I had to be economical in what I examined, but this made me worry that I was overlooking some gems, sometimes quite literally. Despite these gripes – entrance is free, anyhow, so you can always come back – a strong flavour of displacement emerged, a synergy between the migration of ancient historical objects and of people. More topical than ever at a time when George Osborne is reportedly negotiating a 'reciprocal, long-term loan' which would send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece, it was hard to peruse the collection without wondering how on earth so many of these rare finds ended up in Manchester and the answers, one suspects, are not always savoury. You're encouraged to consider the human stories of migration, the sometimes traumatic tales of persecution, forced upheaval and dreams of a better life that help to explain how a Mesopotamian hair-pin fetched up in front of you. Many museums now engage in this kind of soul-searching, but here it is taken a step further. Manchester University students of migrant heritage have been invited to respond. The juxtaposition of an 'official' plaque next to a personal response presents a person's lived experience as an echo of the narrative. On paper, this is fraught with risk, threatening to debase the whole thing into mawkish amateurishness. But many of the responses are in fact profoundly moving, making the galleries feel less lofty and academic than their equivalents in, say, the Ashmolean or the British Museum. The next gallery focuses on animals that belong – or should belong, if we weren't doing so much to make the earth uninhabitable. Cinematically lit, with a veritable menagerie of taxidermy and lifelike models, this is an emporium of wonder, at times a cacophony of delighted children's wails. It was exhilarating to stare into the eyes of an African hunting dog, a North American woodchuck, or Maude the tigon – a cross between a male tiger and a lioness, once a beloved feature of Manchester's Belle Vue Zoo – finally on display after 70 long years existing as a rolled-up skin in a storage vault. Stuck on one glass panel, in stark red letters, is the word 'Decolonise!' – signalling its inclusion in the museum's Decolonise! Trail. Of course, this will make some people groan. But the manner in which it is done, at least, is original. It feels like a Just Stop Oil-style organisation has placed it here; a performative act of self-sabotage. It's just one act of curatorial dandyism. Elsewhere, an empty glass box commemorates species that became extinct. In another display, the stuffed heads of tigers and lions loom like phantoms of guilt over black-and-white photographs of hunters. It's only when the curatorial voice slips from posing questions to telling you the answers that the device galls. I felt this peering into a surrealist reconstruction of a curator's office, eerily frozen in time since the 1920s, all mahogany desks and exotic bric-a-brac. It is, we are told, 'like a glimpse of our colonial unconscious' – yet all I could think about was how cosy and charming it looked compared with soulless modern offices. The South Asia Gallery – bright, airy, perfectly spaced – casts a spotlight on the experiences of British Asian communities. Scenes of oppression, violence and starvation under the East India Company and the Raj are included, as one might expect, appearing as incongruously beautiful panels in the atrium. Objects that were 'violently plundered', were are told, have not been included. One of the most poignant parts of this gallery are the displays that bring to life 'hidden' voices within British-Asian communities. The prejudice historically felt by mixed-race Asians is rendered palpable and real. The exhibition on LGBT people of British Asian heritage is particularly moving: their feelings of loneliness, confusion and self-loathing, as well as hope, are all conjured from cuttings from 1990s magazines, help forum notices and leaflets. A final gallery attempts the same thing (slightly less successfully) from an East Asian perspective. I was fascinated to learn that Manchester has a higher proportion of Chinese émigrés than any other city in Europe. It's one of the few revelations we get about Manchester itself. I hankered for more on how this great industrial behemoth came to be, and its later metamorphosis into a modern city of culture. Many, no doubt, would find the emphasis upon displacement, multicultural identity and preserving the environment preachy and over-rehearsed. Some might even declare the whole thing a Trojan's Horse of woke tosh (when I'd read that the museum has 'safe spaces' for anyone who finds the exhibitions traumatising, I did cringe). But Manchester Museum nails its colours to the mast. And it's only fair to judge something by what it is trying to achieve. Does it succeed on its own terms? Overwhelmingly, yes.
Telegraph
25 minutes ago
- Health
- Telegraph
‘Thanks to two years on the NHS waiting list, I'm now an inch shorter'
In March 2022, Jason Foster tripped over his dog, fell down the stairs, and broke his back. The pain was harrowing. Even worse, he says, it was matched by the agony he faced during his 20-month wait for surgery on his T12 wedge fracture, owing to the inefficiency of the NHS. 'For almost two years, I survived on stoicism and morphine,' says Foster. Following the accident, which occurred while he was renovating his late mother's house near Taunton, copy-editor Foster, 55, was referred back to a hospital in south London, near his Surrey home. 'I had an X-ray, and was told I'd need to have an operation,' he says. 'They then sent me on my way with pain relief, a walking stick, and a spinal brace to stop me going 'full Jenga'. No-one told me how long I would have to wait.' Over the next few months, the hospital made three appointments for him, which it then cancelled before the allotted times. 'I turned up on another morning, and it was the doctor's day off,' says Foster. 'When I asked one receptionist some hard questions, she called her senior colleague who said I had 'hurt her feelings'.' In August 2022, to his great relief, Foster was finally called in for surgery, but the consultant on the rota that day didn't agree that an operation was the best course of action, so Foster was sent home again. 'Meanwhile, I had a hole in my back and was getting shorter by the day, because my vertebrae were crushing into one another,' he says. The question of 'urgency' Cancelled appointments, lost paperwork, a black hole of communication – anyone who uses the NHS will be used to this catalogue of failures. Perhaps the most concerning thing is that these delays don't just affect routine appointments, but those also deemed ' urgent '. According to a King's Fund report released in May last year, the NHS declares that 92 per cent of people waiting for elective (non-urgent) treatment, such as cataract surgery or a knee replacement, should wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to their first treatment. 'This standard was last met in September 2015,' the King's Fund said at the time. 'Since then, performance has declined steadily, until the Covid-19 pandemic, when it deteriorated rapidly.'
Telegraph
25 minutes ago
- Health
- Telegraph
‘I'm living proof why assisted dying Bill is wrong'
On Thursday, Ailidh Musgrave, 28, was discharged from mental health services. Just six years ago, the picture was very different. In 2019, Ms Musgrave was so sick with anorexia that she is sure she would have not only met the criteria for assisted dying, as set out in the Bill MPs are debating on Friday, but she would have jumped at the chance for medical assistance to end her life. 'If I'd known that there was a Bill out there like this, I would have done my absolute best to access it in order to take my life, because I couldn't see a way out,' she told The Telegraph. The potential impact of Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater's assisted dying Bill on people with severe eating disorders is one of the key concerns that could see MPs reject the plans. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, under which terminally ill adults expected to die within six months would be able to seek medical assistance to end their lives, initially passed by 55 votes in November. It could become law if enough MPs back it in an historic vote on Friday. However, the vote is said to be on a 'knife edge' after a series of controversies, including on issues relating to conditions like anorexia. Ms Leadbeater has claimed the so-called 'anorexia loophole' – a gap in safeguards that means sufferers could qualify for assisted dying on the basis of life-threatening malnutrition – has been closed. At a press conference on Thursday, the MP for Spen Valley told The Telegraph she believed her support for an amendment from MP Naz Shah, which would ban eligibility based solely on a voluntary refusal to eat or drink, addressed the concerns. 'In terms of amendment 14, my understanding was that that was why it was tabled, so that's why I supported it,' she said. But in the final 24 hours before the vote, experts said this claim was incorrect. Dr Annabel Price, the lead for assisted dying in England and Wales at the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych), told The Telegraph: 'If the Bill were to proceed, it is essential that it excludes the physical effects of mental disorder as the basis for eligibility. 'Malnutrition caused by anorexia nervosa, for example, has been deemed as a terminal illness under similar pieces of legislation in other jurisdictions.' The RCPsych, along with eating disorder charity Beat, has for months urged Ms Leadbeater to back an amendment that would prevent patients from qualifying on the basis of life-threatening physical complications stemming from a mental illness. But she has refused to do so. On Thursday night, Tom Quinn, director of external affairs at Beat, told The Telegraph: 'Eating disorders should never be treated as terminal – without changes to this Bill, there's a danger that they will be. 'While we acknowledge that the Bill is not intended for the use of patients with eating disorders, there is a risk that some patients with eating disorders may qualify as being terminally ill based on physical symptoms of malnutrition such as kidney and heart failure.' Mr Quinn said that unless a clear amendment was passed to exclude eligibility based on the physical consequences of mental illness, 'the anorexia loophole is not closed', and the charity remained 'very concerned about the risks the Bill would present to those with eating disorders and urge MPs to oppose it.' Ms Musgrave, who is autistic, began suffering from a severe eating disorder aged 13. In 2019, she had also just been diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder, which made it harder for her body to digest food, and had given up hope of recovering. By this point, she had been in and out of hospital for years and was now struggling to access further treatment. 'I think 26 hospital placements rejected me in the 20 weeks that my team was looking for a bed because my needs were 'too complicated'. I think that the interaction of physical health, the eating disorder and the autistic diagnosis, it's a lot of people to untangle and manage. I think with what I was living off, I would not have, I would certainly not have lasted six months to live,' she said. Ms Musgrave, from Birmingham, was finally admitted to a general psychiatric unit which could not provide specialist eating disorder treatment, and in May of that year moved to a general hospital ward where she continued to lose weight. 'I'll be honest, I think it's down to my mother coming in every day to try and encourage me to eat what little that I would, that actually kept me alive, but barely kept me alive. I had a very low BMI,' she said. 'My mum knew I was desperate to die' The combination of her physical condition – Ehlers-Danlos syndrome – and over a decade of suffering from anorexia, left her feeling hopeless, and she is sure that if Ms Leadbeater's bill had been an option, she would have gone for it. 'It was my ninth admission. I didn't have any qualifications, I had no friends, I was fully dependent on my mum, and I was very, very high risk to myself, and just did not see the purpose of life, if it was this torturous,' she said. Ms Musgrave added: 'My mum said to me later in recovery, that she actually could understand why I was desperate to die, seeing me in the condition I was in, the state that I was, she understood that it would have been kinder and less painful than living every day as I was, and that must have been so hard for my mum to say after having fought for my life and my care for so many years.' She is speaking out now in the hope of reaching undecided MPs who may not be aware that the Bill could make it legal for people suffering from severe anorexia, as she was, to be given lethal drugs by doctors to end their lives. In June 2019, Ms Musgrave was eventually transferred to a London specialist unit where she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, meaning her treatment was mandated by doctors. She stayed there until May 2023. 'I think the only reason I'm alive is because, actually, they never gave up. I didn't always get the right support,' she said. 'Reasonable adjustments weren't made, but the fact is that they obviously saw something in me that showed them there was hope, and so they didn't let me go. They weren't going to give up, they weren't going to discharge me. They weren't going to say: 'You're hopeless, you're too complicated'. They stuck by me until I walked out of those doors two years and two months ago, and today [Thursday], actually, it's a very emotional day. I've just been discharged from my psychiatric team.' Tearfully, she added: 'I'm proof that you don't need to give up on someone, and that if you sit with them, that they can have a life that they never imagined that they could have. And I have that, I have a life I never thought possible. 'I never could believe it, but it's real and it's true and it's happening, and it's so sad that people may never get that chance because they are so under the control of anorexia that they feel the only option is to legally access assisted suicide.' 'The law was our daughter's only protection' Lesley and Neal Davison, from Cheshunt, Waltham Cross, can be more sure than most parents of eating disorder patients that their child would have tried to make use of Ms Leadbeater's Bill. The couple lost their daughter Megan to suicide in August 2017. She suffered from a dangerous combination of Type 1 diabetes and a serious eating disorder. This condition, previously referred to as diabulimia, and now known as T1DE, sees sufferers intentionally restrict the insulin they have to self-administer in order to control their weight. Just days before she took her own life, their 27-year-old daughter asked her care team for help getting a referral to Dignitas, the euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. The response she got back, her parents claim, was not that it was wrong because her condition was treatable, but that her care team would not be able to do it because they would be breaking the law. Her parents are adamant that the only thing protecting their daughter from accessing assisted dying was healthcare providers' fear that they could face prosecution, and are speaking out now to warn MPs of the dangers inherent in this law change. 'There is absolutely no doubt in our mind that if she had had the option of taking assisted dying, she would have taken it,' Mrs Davsion told The Telegraph. 'In fact, when she was asking her therapist: 'Can you put me together a dossier so I can go to Dignitas?' The answer was, 'You know I can't Megan, it's illegal'.' She added: 'That was her only protection – no exploring why she felt the need to make such a request. So if this Bill is passed would that request be granted, with the same lack of investigation?' Ms Davison was an articulate, intelligent woman who obtained a degree in psychology and wanted to be a teacher. Her father told The Telegraph: 'Megan asked us, in a suicide letter, to help the people that were dealing with this condition she was leaving behind, and in our retirement, that's become our job.' Ms Leadbeater argued during Thursday's press conference that other safeguards in her Bill would make it 'virtually impossible' for eating disorder patients to qualify for an assisted death – or if they did, that they would die before the process was complete. 'I just think that is not going to happen. There is no world where that is going to happen. And tragically that person will also die before she goes through that process [of approval for an assisted death],' she told reporters. That assurance will not be a comfort for families like the Davisons – and it may not be enough to persuade MPs.
Telegraph
25 minutes ago
- Health
- Telegraph
The nine reasons why MPs might reject assisted dying bill
On Friday, MPs will vote on whether the controversial assisted dying bill brought by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater should become law. The outcome is too close to call. The slim 55-vote majority Ms Leadbeater secured at the bill's Second Reading is narrowing by the hour. A growing number of MPs who previously backed it or abstained last November are now coming out against it. With the clock ticking, The Telegraph sets out nine serious flaws in the legislation that remain unresolved. Critics of Ms Leadbeater's bill hope these unaddressed issues will be enough to persuade wavering MPs to oppose the bill, shifting the balance and stopping the law change in its tracks. 1. People with anorexia could qualify Doctors and lawyers have warned that the bill leaves the door open for patients with severe eating disorders to access assisted dying. If their condition is deemed terminal and they are judged to have mental capacity, they could qualify. In a significant intervention on Wednesday, Dr Annabel Price, lead for assisted dying at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warned: 'We are particularly concerned about the possible inclusion of people whose mental disorders have physical impacts that can lead to death, such as kidney failure from anorexia. 'We have seen people with eating disorders be considered terminally ill and therefore eligible for assisted dying/assisted suicide in other countries.' 2. Financial strain on the NHS A government impact assessment last month estimated that setting up and running the service could cost up to £13.6 million a year. Critics argue that while some savings may come from reduced treatment and care, these are finite, while the cost of running the scheme is not. Civil servants were unable to put a total figure on costs because the draft legislation contains no plan for how the service will be run. On Tuesday, Dame Siobhain McDonagh warned the bill could 'rob our stretched NHS of much-needed resources', urging Labour MPs to vote against it. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, also confirmed there was 'no money allocated' for the service. 3. Sign-off inadequate Final approval by a High Court judge, a key safeguard previously cited by dozens of MPs at the last major Parliamentary vote, has been removed from the bill. Instead, final approval will be taken by three-member panels of a lawyer, psychiatrist and social worker. Sir James Munby, former head of the Family Division of the High Court, said he remained 'deeply troubled' by the lack of rigour these panels would afford. Proposals to ensure these panels were independently appointed and had further investigative powers were not selected by the Speaker and cannot now be reinstated before the vote. 4. Not enough psychiatrists The Royal College of Psychiatrists has warned there are not enough specialists to meet current demand, let alone the new requirement for every sign-off panel to have a psychiatrist on it. Dr Price said: 'There is a practical issue of not having enough psychiatrists to meet current and escalating demand. Even now, we simply do not have the resource to be able to give each person the careful attention they deserve.' 5. Oversight issues Ms Leadbeater's bill includes the option for doctors who carry out the initial assessments for an assisted death to refer to a psychiatrist for further review. However, in most cases, the first time that a psychiatrist will be involved in assessing an application, will be when it gets sent to the three-member panel for final sign-off. Ms Leadbeater claims the inclusion of psychiatrists on panels, which would be expected to process two cases a day, ensures proper oversight. But the royal college disagrees. Dr Price said the bill gives psychiatrists too little time and space for a full assessment and reduces them to rubber-stamping decisions made by others. She said: 'The idea that we could be involved on a panel only to check decisions made by others, rather than to conduct the full evaluations we are trained to do, is deeply troubling. A psychiatrist's role should be to ascertain whether a mental disorder is influencing a person's wish to die, and to offer treatment when this is the case.' 6. Hospices risk losing funding While Ms Leadbeater conceded an amendment allowing individual staff from care homes and hospices to opt out from any involvement in administering assisted deaths, a wider amendment protecting hospices and care homes from being forced to participate was not selected for separate decision on Friday. It comes after MPs have already rejected a proposal by Rachael Maskell that would have meant care homes and hospices were not obligated to participate. As a result, hospices could face pressure to comply or risk losing funding. 7. Private companies could profit The bill does not prevent private companies from offering assisted dying services or profiting from them. Danny Kruger MP said this created scope for private providers to run the process from referral to death. In response, Labour's Lewis Atkinson said it would be 'inconceivable' that the Health Secretary would commission services in this way and accused him of 'scaremongering'. However, an amendment to ban for-profit provision was not selected, meaning MPs must vote on a bill with no restrictions in place. 8. Mental capacity concerns The bill relies on the Mental Capacity Act test, meaning doctors or panels need only be 'satisfied' on the balance of probabilities that a patient is acting voluntarily and meets the criteria before approving an assisted death request. Amendments to raise the threshold to 'beyond reasonable doubt' were rejected, despite critics of the bill, including Daniel Francis MP, whose daughter has a learning disability, warning that patients were vulnerable to errors or subtle coercion. 9. Auto-commencement clause Despite major outstanding concerns over training, infrastructure and NHS readiness, the bill includes an auto-commencement clause forcing it to come into effect in October 2029, four years after it would become law. This deadline stands regardless of whether the necessary work has been completed or whether the NHS and palliative care sector were prepared, raising the prospect of a legally operational service without proper safeguards.
