7 pounds of fat in 12 weeks? One pound of fat is 3500 calories, so they were burning an extra 1500 calories per week. This equates to 200+ calories a day net loss. That's not bad for a diet by any means, but we also have to remember these are fat people! They were already eating excess calories (this is why they are fat).

I don't think these results are surprisingly in the least.

Trans-fats are carcinogenic? Nope, their problems are their effects on vascular disease on diabetes. Absolutely no link between trans-fats and cancer.

My problem with organic foods is how it's viewed as so black and white - people seem to think if it's not organic it is therefore genetically modified etc., which is just not true! There should be no negative stigma associated with using 99.99% likely harmless 'chemicals' (awful word) to prevent crop-eating diseases.

Also the world's most potent carcinogen is a) organic b) caused by a fungus eating crops (preventable).

EMI were a wonderful company once. They were not a mere record label, they were a leading electronics company. They developed the UK's first transistor-based computer, but arguable even more important is they helped Hounsfield develop his CAT scanner. The first CT machine was no the Siemes/General electric stuff we see today, it was an EMI. EMI have developed a machine that will probably save more lives than any drug (bar anti-biotics), for a tiny price (per scan).

How the mighty have fallen.

I understand the idea - microsoft can't push IE8 like Apple push Safari because they have a monopoly. I understand why that's good, it's not what I'm asking.

What I'm asking is this: What makes it a monopoly?

I guess Microsoft is the biggest OS retailer on computers, but what's a computer? Surely to count that we have to exclude 'computers' like Xboxes, PS3s, Wiis, and other such computers which run with different hardware and things? If we did not fudge it this way then Microsoft would not have a monopoly. But then why can we not consider Apple computers separately? Apple computers have a different sort of architecture to normal PCs - it's a huge effort to install windows on them without bootcamp for example - so surely Apple have a monopoly on Apple computers, and their pushing of Safari is a bit unethical?

But what about MP3 players? I confess I do not know the figures for sure, but when I walk down the street it seems 90% of portable music players are iPods. To use an iPod you realistically HAVE to use iTunes, they are pushing this piece of software through their hardware. And then with THAT they push Safari etc. too.

How are Apple not abusing monopoly laws with iPods? I don't understand.

Any lawyers about?

It's entirely obvious what happened... the party was reported - somebody expressed worry it was a rave, and informed the police of the facebook group, which they themselves checked. The police were not seeking out parties on facebook - it was cited and they checked it.

1) The police didn't scour facebook - locals did, saw it, and reported it as a rave.

2) The helicopter was out anyway, and they just asked the helicopter to fly over the site to really check if there was a party on its way back

It was not police scouring facebook and dispatching a helicopter.

It embarrasses and annoys me that this happened in my own country, which I do love dearly, but I wont let the usual anti-UK/US/Australia facebook crowd exaggerate it further.

Now this I do agree with - I think one thing this story may highlight is the problems of the American healthcare system. I like to tell myself that this wouldn't happen in the UK - where there is huge pressure to keep up ones skills, every doctor having annual appraisals, relationships build between the patient and his local doctor/hospital etc. - I regularly get attached to smaller peripheral hospitals and there really is a sense of community

I'm not sure if this is actually true, or just wishful thinking on my part. I don't expect the biopsy to be dealt with any better in the UK, but I like to think that we would lose fewer patients in the system, like this. As you said, there is little incentive in the US to look over old biopsy samples, whilst in the UK it would be a relatively cost-efficient investigation. Who knows?

Don't be crass. You obviously don't understand the level of investigation we're talking here. It is just not possible in a patient like this to examine every single piece of sampled tissue 100%, not unless you want to spend a day on every patient and reduce the wellbeing of the population, to eliminate an already very unlikely diagnosis. Do you know how small cells are? The sample's we're talking are many macroscopic lumps if tissue, cut in cross sections into many more slides, the granulomas we're talking about are groups of 30 or so cells. This could have been the only one. How long do you expect the doctors to look for it? It would be stupid to expect to look all over every sample.

And I find your example a bit hard to swallow - sorry the nurse shouldn't be TOLD the drugs, she should read them from the drug chart, to eliminate human error. Also, you imply that if he had used the right name then the nurse would have spotted the drug interaction? No, sorry, no nurse in the world will argue with a specialist about drug interactions - doctors and nurses are incredibly important in patient care, and they fulfil completely different roles - the nurses role is NOT to spot drug interactions, they are not taught about them, and the doctor knows best about these things. Similarly, I wouldn't expect the doctor to tell the nurse how to do aspects of her job.

I'm sorry, where's the evidence saying it took 7 years to look for Crohn's? These slides may have been taken years ago. Really you do need endoscopy with bopsy, which this girl had and unfortunately came back negative. Whilst radiographs like CTs etc. and barium enemas/swallows can show lesions, this is only really with small bowel involvement leading to strictures, which she may well not have had. There are no specific antibodies like you get with Coeliac's diseases (anti-gliadin/anti-endomysial), and whilst you might get inflammatory markers like CRP/ESR raised in the blood, or leukocytes etc. in the faeces, these aren't remotely remotely specific for Crohn's, and would be expected in most GI pathology.

Yes, I've acknowledged that - as I said the pathologist will have been presented with many many samples, turned into slides, looking for a few, if any, granulomata, which are tiny in size. I even said "Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it?" It is very hard, if not impossible, to scan every single slide in its entirity, for a granuloma. Fortunately this girl found it, when the pathologist didn't. Props to her,

She obviously just requested her own tissues, RTFA

"she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue -- slides her pathologist had said were completely normal"

In a year's time I will be a doctor, and have just spent a year learning about pathology, so I thought I'd put my view forward. The interesting thing about Crohn's disease, in contrast to the other big type of inflammatory bowel disease (Ulcerative colitis) is that it is characterised by skip lesions. The disease is not confluent over the entire gut, in fact it can be anywhere from mouth to anus, in small patches. Now do you start to see why a pathologist may miss it? They will have taken many specimens from the girl's GI tract, and if this is the only sample with a granuloma, then it's not too unforgiveable that a patch of cells only around 30 cells-wide is miss. Yes, it sucks, but pathology is actually a fairly bloody hard speciality, with an very vigorous set of examinations, at least in the UK, so don't imply that these pathologists don't know what Crohn's is. Life isn't black and white, and medicine is just the same.

Maybe you guys instantly thought Crohn's, but there are plenty of other rarer diseases it could have been. Without a positive biopsy it would have been incredibly immoral to slap a Crohn's diagnosis on this girl and medicated her for it. It would have proved interesting were she have had say tropic sprue and you were to treat her with the immunosupressants.

Since I always have my IRC client (mIRC) open then I just use that. It has a function called $calc. I just made an alias using the command:

/alias calc //echo = $calc( $1- )

And now /calc 2+3 will echo 5.