IF YOU thought that men’s magazines serve up a diet of scantily clad women and tips on sexual performance because that’s all men are interested in, think again. According to a statement issued by the UK Guild of Health Writers, what men really want to read about is osteoporosis, breast cancer (which affects men too, the guild reminds its members) and body image.
To rectify the mismatch, the guild organised an event called “Getting inside men’s minds” at which health journalists would be offered “expert opinion on the issues that men really want to read about and how to reach them”. Sadly, and we feel sure our male readers are going to be very upset about this, it looks like these issues won’t be making the front pages any time soon. The event was cancelled due to a lack of interest from said health journalists, who presumably still labour under the delusion that men are only interested in one thing.
Advertisement
AMYOTROPHIC lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS and commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease (MND) is, as noted at , “a serious neuromuscular illness affecting approximately 30,000 people in the United States”. So Feedback is confused as to why this site is offering for sale a “live cell therapy” made from pig embryos, described as “a much less expensive alternative to stem cell therapy”. The site suggests that it is “used to support healthy cell regeneration and nerve cell function” – which Feedback translates as “it’s food, of a kind”.
It’s an expensive kind, for the desperate: it costs $850 including $55 shipping for two months’ supply, and it’s only available to customers outside the US.
“Magic Ice Stop stops ice and frost on your windscreen, but Allan Rodger is disappointed that it only “Works up to minus 15 °C”. What should he use on those annoying just-a-bit-freezing days?”
The site is in fact part of , which offers “complementary therapies” for a gamut of conditions from acidosis to vitiligo. One gem is the “Kids Chelat
Heavy Metal Chelator” suggested for children with autistic spectrum disorders. What is it? The main ingredient seems to be “a very dilute solution of Disodium EDTA (200 mg per 100 ml bottle)” along with some mineral salts and a “catalyser”. Disodium EDTA? That’ll be the additive common in everything from soft drinks to shampoo – but here it costs $46.50 a bottle.
Of course there’s small print at the foot of the home page: “Products on,” it begins incompletely, “are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.” Our lawyers wouldn’t like it if we speculated on what they are intended to do.
A FRIEND of Feedback had arranged to travel to Utrecht for a couple of days, so he thought he would look at it in Google Earth. Naturally, he typed “Utrecht” into the search window, only to be asked: “Did you mean Utrecht, Netherlands; Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands; Utrecht Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands?”
To make matters more confusing, there was a map on the page that did indeed show these various possibilities, all in different places.
AUSTRALIA’S Bureau of Meteorology clearly has a sound grasp of statistics. Melbourne’s newspaper The Age reported on 16 April that it had “cautiously predicted the drought-inducing El Niño effect might be replaced by the wetter La Niña”. Maybe. “There’s a 50-50 chance of exceeding average rainfall,” said senior forecaster Terry Ryan. Absolutely. If “average” means “median”, definitely so.
Mark Hughes, “a fully fledged Australian taxpayer”, spotted this and was “delighted that my taxes are being spent on things like supercomputers” to work out insights like this. A good thing too, we say. Four years ago things weren’t nearly so clear: “Generally across large parts of Australia there is a 50:50 chance we will get median rainfall across the summer months,” an expert from the bureau announced then (Feedback, 8 March 2003).
A LETTER from the UK’s Post Office posed a problem for James Johnson. It said: “Our records show that you have not used your card account since 14 March 2005. As you have not used your account for the last 2 years, we have now closed it in line with the account terms and conditions.
“When we closed your account, the balance was £0.00. We will look after this money for you until you claim it. You can do this by using a claim form, which you can get from any Post Office branch…”
Johnson’s problem is: should he claim?
FINALLY, the email Kelvyn Frost received from DrWeil.com exhorted: “Enrich Your Vision. If you or someone you know is getting on in years, you may want to consider supplementing your diet with lutein.”
Frost doesn’t consider himself to be getting on in years just yet, but he knows several people who are, so he is now thinking of taking the lutein.
