Latest news with #medicalstudent
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
‘I almost had my leg amputated because of medical malpractice'
When Grace Ofori-Attah was a teenager, she was a keen netball player with a big group of friends. She was involved in student film, and she loved to write, having her first novel picked up by an agent when she was just 20. Then, as she was studying for her final exams at the University of Cambridge, she became 'increasingly out of breath', with pain in her legs and across her hips so severe it prevented her from sleeping at night. As a medical student, she respected the judgement of the GP she consulted, who wrote her symptoms off as stress, anxiety, asthma, sciatica, and then just 'that I wasn't healthy'. But 'you know when your body is dying,' she says, 20 years on. 'I was very, very ill, but these doctors were telling me that there was nothing wrong.' Eventually Ofori-Attah was left unable to walk, and was given a wheelchair by her college. The day before her medical exams began, 'my next door neighbour, who was this wonderful mathematician who I'd never spoken to, carried me with another student to the GP'. This time she was seen by a different doctor. 'He said, 'You have to go straight to the hospital. You can't sit your exams.'' It was deep vein thrombosis (DVT). There were clots all over her body, a 'huge one' near her heart. 'As someone who's a real geek, I just started crying. He said, 'If you don't go to the hospital now, you probably won't live to the end of the week.'' Today, Ofori-Attah know s that what happened to her as a student was medical malpractice. Her college doctor's negligence could have cost her a limb, or even her life. For a time, doctors at the hospital she was treated in 'thought I had lung cancer, because the clots were so extensive,' she says. 'They were also unsure whether or not they were going to have to amputate the leg.' Her parents had cause to sue, but the family took no action, and accepted the practice's apology. 'They're both very Christian. Eventually they just said to me, 'Look, you're going to be a doctor, and you're going to make mistakes too.'' Ofori-Attah recovered, without losing her leg, and she did go on to qualify as a doctor. She moved to the University of Oxford to finish her medical degree and eventually became a consultant psychiatrist, specialising in addiction. Experiencing malpractice herself, 'really did inform how I felt about medicine going forward, and how I saw the medical education I'd had,' she says. She decided to leave the profession five years ago. There was no dramatic exit. She became a doctor for the same reason that she is now a full-time screenwriter: that she was 'always interested in people, and why they do the things they do,' she says. Her most successful drama, ITV's Malpractice, is directly inspired by what she saw over the course of her medical career. At the start of the hit series, a man walks into the reception of West Yorkshire Royal Hospital with a gun. Angry and covered in blood, he demands that main character, Dr Lucinda Edwards, immediately treats a man who lies motionless on the floor next to him, with a bullet hole in his chest. It sounds far-fetched, but when Ofori-Attah was in Dr Edwards' shoes as a junior doctor working in A&E, 'there were two bodies, not one', she says. She declines to go into specifics, out of doctorly respect for her former patients' privacy, 'but whatever you see in Malpractice, the truth is probably worse.' The crisis leads to the death of a young woman under Dr Edwards' care who has had a drug overdose, leading the doctor to be investigated for malpractice, despite her impossible position. Ofori-Attah's parents were right: under the pressure of acute disasters, or just the day-to-day churn of patients who desperately need help, real-life doctors do make mistakes. It has only become more frequent since their daughter left university. Between 2023 and 2024, the NHS received 13,784 new clinical negligence claims and reports of incidents, compared with the 11,945 cases reported in the year up to 2014. Serious mistakes are common. Research suggests that one in twenty hospital deaths are avoidable, and are therefore a result of malpractice. Doctors have called for the General Medical Council (GMC), which investigates complaints about practitioners, to be scrapped. The British Medical Association (BMA) – the union that represents two-thirds of doctors in Britain – has pushed for the overhaul as it believes that the GMC is 'failing to protect patients'. At the same time, victims of malpractice often want to see doctors be held responsible publicly. The families of three people murdered in Nottingham in June 2023, have asked that the doctors who approved the release of killer Valdo Calocane from a psychiatric ward be named in the press, to provide accountability for 'poor leadership and bad decision-making'. Ofori-Attah believes that doctors should not be named 'until proven guilty'. The GMC will never be scrapped, she believes, but 'the way that they investigate doctors seriously needs to be looked at'. The process 'goes on for months', she says. 'It's not uncommon for doctors to commit suicide before the end of an investigation. Often when that happens, they're found not to have committed malpractice in the first place. It is so, so stressful.' Then there is the ordeal of the coroners' courts, which most doctors must face at some point. Here, grieving family members can cross-examine doctors who give evidence. So extreme is the situation that 'people assumed I must have made it up when it happened to Dr Edwards in Malpractice,' Ofori-Attah says. She would know. While working in a psychiatric hospital, Ofori-Attah herself was criticised by the grieving family of a patient who had taken their own life following a stay in the hospital where she worked. 'It was one of those situations where the whole team had been in agreement that this patient could leave the hospital. It was my job to approve a more junior doctor's assessment,' she says. After the patient was discharged, they were admitted to a private hospital, which they later left, before they died. Their parents wrote a letter to the hospital, which 'singled out my name in the notes due to its origin,' she says. 'They queried my competence and ability to speak English, and my qualifications, having never met me, and assumed that these factors must have contributed to their relative's suicide. 'It was unusual, and hurtful, that the parents took objection to me specifically. They wrote to the trust about this 'foreign doctor', who presumably didn't have good qualifications, and they wanted to know where I'd studied. I had to go to the coroner's court to give evidence on the stand, knowing that this family was going to be there with all these presumptions about my lack of ability.' Once her patient's parents heard her speak in the stand, however, they came to her and apologised. 'Because they had now heard me speak, they knew that I was not what they had imagined, and they understood that I had done my best for their child. I was so shocked, because I was only expecting anger from them.' In the end, no claim of medical negligence was ever pursued. Her ITV drama showed viewers what she knows about malpractice: that doctors inevitably make mistakes under pressure, no matter how well-trained and experienced they may be. But she also wanted lay people to know that 'anyone can be accused of anything', including a doctor whose Old Bailey trial she sat as a juror for, before she quit the profession. 'I was sitting there listening to the evidence, and I knew that there was no physiological way that what that doctor was accused of could have happened.' The doctor had already been named in the press. 'It's so unfair that this can happen, until there's evidence to support it.' How the public sees doctors has shifted dramatically in the last few years, Ofori-Attah says. Once, she and her colleagues were put on a pedestal. Now – thanks to a combination of an increase in real failures caused by pressure on the NHS, and pay strikes by junior doctors – 'we don't have the same support any more'. It's part of why many of her Oxbridge-educated colleagues have left the profession, or have moved abroad to continue practicing. 'You're there for patients, and if patients don't trust you, then it's very difficult to do your job.' As a writer, Ofori-Attah now finds that she can speak to patients in a way that she never could as a doctor. At the end of one exhausting day early in her career, 'I went to see a short film about depression that some of my sisters' friends had made,' she recalls. 'I'd been in the hospital all day, trying to get patients to follow treatment plans, and it's a function of being a doctor that they're not often that interested in what you have to say.' Seeing how her sister and her friends could reach people through their work 'was life-changing'. She then turned her hand to writing dialogue, having never been able to finish her novel. The script she wrote in two weeks, in a 'kind of creative manic flurry', became Malpractice. Despite all of her own trials as a doctor, and as a patient, Ofori-Attah can see herself going back to medicine one day. 'Leaving in the pandemic made it easier, because everything was so awful, but I really miss speaking to so many people from different walks of life, being there with them in some of their hardest or most important moments,' she says. 'There's no way of quantifying what that feels like. It's a real privilege.'
Telegraph
02-07-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
The eight essential questions you should always ask your doctor in hospital
Spending time as a hospital inpatient is tough and, in some ways, not dissimilar to the experience of a long-haul flight (we're not talking premium economy here). Unwelcome noise can make sleep impossible. Shared bathrooms. Limited privacy. Neighbours coughing, spluttering or snoring. And, just as you are about to fall asleep, the lights come on and the food trolley arrives. Worse, you aren't awaiting an exciting business trip or relaxing holiday, but are living with the anxiety that ill-health, an operation or medical investigations can bring. Often away from loved ones and immediate familiar support, time in hospital can be scary and isolating. On the other side of the curtain, I recall with embarrassment my first ward round as a clueless medical student. It's a world of jargon, speed and uncertainty. Just getting to grips with the hospital hierarchy takes some time – even for a young doctor. But this isn't about me. It is about those on the receiving end of inpatient medical care. Those confined to a mattress designed more for practicality than comfort; those looking for answers. The following are essential questions that can ease the hospital experience, whether you find yourself, or a loved one, admitted. What is really wrong with me? Sometimes this is clear from the outset and a hospital stay is simply providing the treatment. On other occasions there is a more frustrating hunt for a diagnosis, using a combination of tests and investigations to inform the team. I once admitted a patient overnight with severe chest pain and arranged a barrage of cardiac investigations. It was not until the consultant ward round the following morning that the tell-tale blistering rash of shingles appeared across her chest. If you are unclear as to what the suspected diagnosis is then simply ask. The clinicians involved should have a working list of potential diagnoses, even if the final answer has yet to be reached. Sometimes time works well as a diagnostic tool. Why am I being constantly asked the same questions by different medics? One of the greatest frustrations patients report is the constant checking and clarifying of information during a hospital stay. Why have you come? Some are so fed up with being asked this question that they begin to wonder why they ever bothered. A&E receptionist, triage nurse, A&E doctor, senior A&E doctor, admitting junior doctor, speciality doctor, inpatient consultant, allied health professionals, the list goes on. It is not unusual to repeat your story 10 times over. Is this inefficiency or a system designed to provide so many safety-nets that hopefully little falls through? The truth is that your story matters. What you say and how you describe it – the history of the presenting complaint – is still the greatest diagnostic tool that we have. Take a pain in your chest for example: does the pain worsen with exercise and exertion? Yes. Can you press your chest wall and reproduce that pain? A 'yes' here might mean we can discharge you home after some simple safety checks with pain relief for musculoskeletal chest pain – a chest sprain, if you will. But a 'no' could point to a cardiac cause and require a series of more invasive inpatient investigations. Think of the tedious repetition therefore, as vital clarification rather than onerous interrogation. Medical decisions are based on a clinician's internal algorithm, not dissimilar to those flow charts you might have used at primary school to identify an insect. A badly placed 'yes' can lead to an incorrect diagnosis. The chart says caterpillar when, in reality, you're a bluebottle. Don't be baffled by the questions; instead, try to clarify in your own mind the exact events that have brought you here. It's not always easy. How long will I be in here for? The time you stay will vary drastically depending upon the diagnosis, the investigations required and your speed of recovery. Bed availability on specialist units, space in the scanner and emergency cases in the operating theatre can all extend hospital stays for logistical reasons. The most urgent cases usually take priority. What is going to happen today? Once admitted, the ward round, which usually happens each morning, is the key interaction of the day for medical updates and progress. A gaggle of enthusiastic healthcare professionals surround the bed, usually headed by the most senior doctor available from the team. This may be the consultant, but could also be a registrar or other junior doctor depending on staff commitments. Nursing staff and other allied health professionals often join the round too. Results are reviewed, medicines prescribed and that all-important plan for further management is created. Now is your chance for questions. The team of onlookers can feel somewhat intimidating, but do not be afraid. By involving yourself in your care you will be empowered to more clearly understand the path that lies ahead. For those unable to fully engage, it may be possible for an advocate to be present at the ward round or to arrange a meeting later in the day with a doctor from the team. Use your time wisely. Hours of boredom will no doubt ensue during your stay, so make a list of questions or concerns. This can prevent the inevitable stage fright when the team finally arrives at your bedside. Get timelines for further investigations or procedures and the working diagnosis. What tests am I having and why? Blood-pressure tests, heart-rate tests, oxygen-level tests. Tests, tests and then yet more tests. They are all part of the 'early warning scores' – a way for hospitals to identify patients who may need more immediate medical attention, which are calculated from your vital signs to determine how stable you currently are and therefore how frequently your 'observations' need to be taken. A quieter night is on the cards for those steady and stable, with closer monitoring for those more clinically unwell. Infuriating as the visits can be, do not underestimate the importance of the opportunity for a brief catch-up with the nursing team to discuss medical issues, request pain relief or simply share a joke or story. Keeping morale high helps everyone on both sides. Those staying a little longer will become overly familiar with the daily blood taking visit from the Dracula-inspired phlebotomist. These tests can provide vital clinical information for your team, but are not always essential every day. Sometimes the default position is simply to test, so if the daily ritual is becoming burdensome, check in with your doctors to establish whether such regular testing is essential. Perhaps the Count could have a day off? If I have more questions, who can I talk to? If you are uncertain or concerned about any aspect, start by discussing matters with the nurse looking after you. If they are unable to clarify things, then request a discussion with one of the doctors from the team. You will have a named consultant responsible for your overall admission to whom you should be able to speak should the need arise. For matters relating to logistics and your experience on an inpatient ward, the Ward Manager is an excellent first port of call. If you find that your concerns are still not being addressed, you can contact the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) team at the hospital, who can provide further support and information. How can I get out of here? Once a diagnosis has been reached and treatment delivered, the attention of most patients quickly turns to the quickest escape route. This can be frustratingly slow. Physiotherapists must ensure that you are safely able to mobilise. The all important 'stairs assessment', whilst sounding like a legal requirement from Building Control, is designed to ensure that those who have to negotiate stairs in their home environment can do so with minimal risk of falls. Occupational therapists may work with you to help optimise your home environment, ensuring that you can manage daily tasks such as cooking, washing and putting the kettle on. For those in need of more support, social workers may be involved in arranging a package of care to support you at home, or to help find a placement in a residential or nursing home. When the great escape seems tantalisingly close, the final hurdle, which I can liken only to the inevitable wait at the airport baggage-reclaim carousel, is for the pharmacist to deliver any medications required for discharge. Stringent checks and overstretched teams mean this can make even the most bureaucratic customs official seem efficient. If your ultimate exit is reliant upon hospital transport, I recommend a good book and patience of a saint. What happens after discharge? Accompanying you out of the door should be a 'Discharge Summary'. A copy of this will be sent to your GP for information and further action where required. It is well worth taking a photo of this in case the important document disappears in the baggage-reclaim chaos. This document should detail the events of your stay but, crucially, also any follow-up plans, including details of upcoming outpatient investigations and appointments. Any prescribed medicines are also listed on this document with instructions on when and how they should be taken, so keep this at hand to accompany that reclaimed baggage from the pharmacy team.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Tim Spector: The five health tips I'd give my 20-year-old self
I spent my 20s studying as a medical student and then working as a junior doctor. My life was what I could fit in around incredibly tough hours, often barely sleeping or having any time to think about food or exercise at all. It was the 1980s and I was hopping around hospitals in London. I would have loved for someone to tell me about the importance of diet and lifestyle, how to develop healthy habits and how much they're needed later in life. That would have been really helpful. Most people are certainly not leading balanced lives in their 20s, and yet recover because they're young and resilient. Nonetheless, it's important to start being healthy as early as you can. Around a decade ago, my son, Tom, did an experiment I was going to do myself as part of his genetics degree dissertation. The experiment involved eating McDonald's twice a day for 10 days to see how it would affect his gut health. He lost 30 per cent of his gut microbes and it took him years to recover them. So, if you abuse your health and gut microbes, even in your youth, it can take a long time for them to recover. I wish I'd known this. No one ever talked about the importance of sleep back when I was in my 20s. For those intensive years as a junior doctor, I was sleep-deprived most of the time. I was regularly working 72-hour shifts on just a few hours of sleep and then binge sleeping on the days I wasn't on the ward. I knew how to crash out at 6pm after a long shift and wake at 8am the next morning. We didn't really question it, as you knew your bosses had done the same, and you got more experience much faster by working long shifts – it was just the sacrifice you made as a doctor. But I couldn't do it again, that's for sure. Researchers recently worked out that functioning on such little sleep is equivalent to going around having drunk half a bottle of wine when you're seeing patients. So we really weren't at our best and shouldn't have been allowed near a car, but, after a few years, if you didn't make too many blunders, you had seen everything, so it did prepare us for the future. If you could do without sleep, you were seen as cool and the toughest of the junior doctors. It was a badge of honour if you could make do on only four hours a night. If you could cope well on little sleep and, importantly, fall back to sleep easily, you would often do acute or emergency work. I didn't cope with it well, so I went for a specialty where I didn't have to get up routinely at night, which was rheumatology. However, it took a long time, a lot of work, and a few sleepless nights to get there. I do try to sleep much more evenly now that I realise how important it is for our health. Our research at ZOE has found that people who don't sleep for long enough or have poor sleep quality have much larger spikes in their blood sugar levels the next day, leaving them hungry and seeking carbs. Regularly changing your sleep schedule also has an impact. As a result, I now aim to be in bed before 11pm every night, to try and keep my sleep timings as consistent as possible. I also wear earplugs and an eye mask, and I've changed my curtains to blackout. I also stop using my phone after 10 pm to get rid of anything that could disrupt my sleep and reduce its quality. This has really helped. Most of the stuff I was eating in my 20s was fairly revolting, apart from days when I'd dine out at an Italian or Indian restaurant, which was a rare treat and meant I'd have some decent food. My breakfast was cereal or toast and marmalade – croissants and pastries weren't a big thing in the 80s. Lots of my other meals were hospital food, which was absolutely appalling and probably hasn't improved much. I would often get an English breakfast or a plate of chips from the canteen, and there wasn't a vegetable in sight. Or I would pick up a tuna sandwich from the hospital cafe – I wasn't strong enough to resist the lure of the meal deal. For snacks, I had too much low-quality toast, as you could get it at any time of the day or night on the wards. It was always a nice comfort treat, but I would have been much better off munching on a large handful of nuts, or even dark chocolate, rather than bread, which spiked my blood sugar. I might have had a yogurt once a week, but it was a flavoured one and probably low-fat, which is much less healthy. Only women and kids had yogurt in those days; it wasn't a macho thing to have. I also used to love orange juice. I wish someone had told me that it was not a 'health food' and was actually bad for me. The occasional banana was about the only fruit I remember eating. I was probably fairly constipated and would have definitely benefited from more fibre. It's pretty grim when I think about what I was eating – it's amazing I'm still alive. But when you're young, you're pretty resilient. I don't really blame my old self because it was really tough. Faced with long working hours, survival was really all I was interested in. And we didn't question things back then. We had no real concept of health. I thought rice was healthy, and fat of any kind might be bad for you – so not cooking with too much olive oil, butter or lard – but that was about it. In retrospect, getting more variety would have been good. Now, I always aim for 30 plants a week, carry around some mixed nuts and seeds, and include fermented food at most meals. I also had no concept of giving my gut a rest, so I was basically eating all the time, as 'little and often' was the current dogma. Eating better would have stopped my weight from creeping up. I was pretty skinny when I started medicine, around 11st (70kg), and when I was really busy, it stayed at that level until I was 30, but then it started to increase by about a kilogram per year. Obviously, like nearly everyone, I drank too much in my 20s but that was the culture then. When we weren't working really hard, we'd be out partying. When I was based at St Bart's Hospital in central London, it was opposite Smithfield meat market, where you could always find somewhere for a drink at any hour of the day or night. There was also our own cheap student bar that was open until 3am. I drank anything I could get hold of – I wasn't very fussy. I'd have beers, wine, gin or vodka, though I didn't smoke or take drugs. My mum had put me off smoking as she was a chain smoker. These days, I aim for a maximum of 14 units a week (equivalent to seven 175ml glasses of wine or seven pints of low-strength beer). I've talked about the modest cardiac benefits of red wine, but that's not all I drink – I enjoy beer, and I'll have the occasional gin and tonic. I aim to have a couple of alcohol-free days a week, but that goes to pot on holidays. But I'm now a big fan of alcohol free beers and kombucha, which are tasty non-alcoholic options. I played cricket and rugby at school and university, but I didn't do much exercise in my 20s. I probably should have, but I wasn't aware of any of my colleagues having the time to do any either. Saying that, I'm sure we were hitting around 20,000 steps a day on the days we were working, because we were just used as slaves to do everything all over the hospital. I was running up and down really long corridors for days on end. I also would pick up running each time I had an exam, which there are lots of in medicine, even after you qualify. I didn't particularly enjoy it as exercise, but it was effective at reducing stress and clearing my mind. I remember thinking: 'Oh my god, I can't study anymore, I've got to go for a run'. It would have been great to have been introduced to yoga or pilates, as that would have helped me later in life with being more flexible because, like most people, I ended up having back pain in my early 30s. This was because my toes seemed a long way from my fingers, and I'd never stretched in my life. I got better at exercising in my 30s; I'd go to the gym once a week. They didn't really exist before that unless you were a bodybuilder, which I was not – I was quite puny. Dance classes and aerobics also took off, so I did that for a while, but never very seriously. These days, I mix it up. I do some yoga classes, I'll do some weights, and cycle for real or on my Peloton bike. In the summer, I swim most days and do mountain biking. Just as with food, a variety of exercise is good as it uses different muscles and different parts of the brain. I was dreadful at staying in touch with my family in my 20s. I left home at 17 and rarely saw my parents – maybe two or three times a year, which is completely different to how often I see my own kids now. But that was cultural – I don't think I was very different from my friends and colleagues. We all rebelled against our parents, and it was a very different scene. What's important is that you have a support group to link up with. It doesn't have to be your parents, it could be close friends or another form of community, so you don't get isolated. I wish someone had told me that when you're young, you make a lot of your best friends, who you keep with you all your life. I still see many of my school friends regularly and realise how supportive it is to have regular contact and a good dose of sarcastic teasing. Make time to catch up with old friends and your parents. It's the friends that drift off; your parents will usually be there – though they're not always, if they die early like my father did when I was 21. I regret not spending more time with him. Meeting socially is important for longevity. With my family, we do Christmas together, have an annual skiing holiday together, and, when we're in London, we have a Sunday lunch or meal out every other week. We see quite a lot of each other, but not so much that we're sick of each other and start fighting. All in all, I feel immensely grateful to be fit and well, given the way I mistreated my body in my youth. It's a testament to the resilience of life and our bodies. We can't turn back the clock, but we can start afresh today. Eating a diverse range of plants, limiting alcohol, keeping active and maintaining close relationships are all evidence-based ways to stay healthy as we age. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
01-07-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Tim Spector: The health tips I'd give my 20-year-old self
I spent my 20s studying as a medical student and then working as a junior doctor. My life was what I could fit in around incredibly tough hours, often barely sleeping or having any time to think about food or exercise at all. It was the 1980s and I was hopping around hospitals in London. I would have loved for someone to tell me about the importance of diet and lifestyle, how to develop healthy habits and how much they're needed later in life. That would have been really helpful. Most people are certainly not leading balanced lives in their 20s, and yet recover because they're young and resilient. Nonetheless, it's important to start being healthy as early as you can. Around a decade ago, my son, Tom, did an experiment I was going to do myself as part of his genetics degree dissertation. The experiment involved eating McDonald's twice a day for 10 days to see how it would affect his gut health. He lost 30 per cent of his gut microbes and it took him years to recover them. So, if you abuse your health and gut microbes, even in your youth, it can take a long time for them to recover. I wish I'd known this. 1. Sleep more consistently, when you can No one ever talked about the importance of sleep back when I was in my 20s. For those intensive years as a junior doctor, I was sleep-deprived most of the time. I was regularly working 72-hour shifts on just a few hours of sleep and then binge sleeping on the days I wasn't on the ward. I knew how to crash out at 6pm after a long shift and wake at 8am the next morning. We didn't really question it, as you knew your bosses had done the same, and you got more experience much faster by working long shifts – it was just the sacrifice you made as a doctor. But I couldn't do it again, that's for sure. Researchers recently worked out that functioning on such little sleep is equivalent to going around having drunk half a bottle of wine when you're seeing patients. So we really weren't at our best and shouldn't have been allowed near a car, but, after a few years, if you didn't make too many blunders, you had seen everything, so it did prepare us for the future. If you could do without sleep, you were seen as cool and the toughest of the junior doctors. It was a badge of honour if you could make do on only four hours a night. If you could cope well on little sleep and, importantly, fall back to sleep easily, you would often do acute or emergency work. I didn't cope with it well, so I went for a specialty where I didn't have to get up routinely at night, which was rheumatology. However, it took a long time, a lot of work, and a few sleepless nights to get there. I do try to sleep much more evenly now that I realise how important it is for our health. Our research at ZOE has found that people who don't sleep for long enough or have poor sleep quality have much larger spikes in their blood sugar levels the next day, leaving them hungry and seeking carbs. Regularly changing your sleep schedule also has an impact. As a result, I now aim to be in bed before 11pm every night, to try and keep my sleep timings as consistent as possible. I also wear earplugs and an eye mask, and I've changed my curtains to blackout. I also stop using my phone after 10 pm to get rid of anything that could disrupt my sleep and reduce its quality. This has really helped. 2. Eat less toast and more nuts Most of the stuff I was eating in my 20s was fairly revolting, apart from days when I'd dine out at an Italian or Indian restaurant, which was a rare treat and meant I'd have some decent food. My breakfast was cereal or toast and marmalade – croissants and pastries weren't a big thing in the 80s. Lots of my other meals were hospital food, which was absolutely appalling and probably hasn't improved much. I would often get an English breakfast or a plate of chips from the canteen, and there wasn't a vegetable in sight. Or I would pick up a tuna sandwich from the hospital cafe – I wasn't strong enough to resist the lure of the meal deal. For snacks, I had too much low-quality toast, as you could get it at any time of the day or night on the wards. It was always a nice comfort treat, but I would have been much better off munching on a large handful of nuts, or even dark chocolate, rather than bread, which spiked my blood sugar. I might have had a yogurt once a week, but it was a flavoured one and probably low-fat, which is much less healthy. Only women and kids had yogurt in those days; it wasn't a macho thing to have. I also used to love orange juice. I wish someone had told me that it was not a 'health food' and was actually bad for me. The occasional banana was about the only fruit I remember eating. I was probably fairly constipated and would have definitely benefited from more fibre. It's pretty grim when I think about what I was eating – it's amazing I'm still alive. But when you're young, you're pretty resilient. I don't really blame my old self because it was really tough. Faced with long working hours, survival was really all I was interested in. And we didn't question things back then. We had no real concept of health. I thought rice was healthy, and fat of any kind might be bad for you – so not cooking with too much olive oil, butter or lard – but that was about it. In retrospect, getting more variety would have been good. Now, I always aim for 30 plants a week, carry around some mixed nuts and seeds, and include fermented food at most meals. I also had no concept of giving my gut a rest, so I was basically eating all the time, as 'little and often' was the current dogma. Eating better would have stopped my weight from creeping up. I was pretty skinny when I started medicine, around 11st (70kg), and when I was really busy, it stayed at that level until I was 30, but then it started to increase by about a kilogram per year. 3. Drink less beer – and have alcohol-free days Obviously, like nearly everyone, I drank too much in my 20s but that was the culture then. When we weren't working really hard, we'd be out partying. When I was based at St Bart's Hospital in central London, it was opposite Smithfield meat market, where you could always find somewhere for a drink at any hour of the day or night. There was also our own cheap student bar that was open until 3am. I drank anything I could get hold of – I wasn't very fussy. I'd have beers, wine, gin or vodka, though I didn't smoke or take drugs. My mum had put me off smoking as she was a chain smoker. These days, I aim for a maximum of 14 units a week (equivalent to seven 175ml glasses of wine or seven pints of low-strength beer). I've talked about the modest cardiac benefits of red wine, but that's not all I drink – I enjoy beer, and I'll have the occasional gin and tonic. I aim to have a couple of alcohol-free days a week, but that goes to pot on holidays. But I'm now a big fan of alcohol free beers and kombucha, which are tasty non-alcoholic options. 4. Try different types of exercise – and do more of it I played cricket and rugby at school and university, but I didn't do much exercise in my 20s. I probably should have, but I wasn't aware of any of my colleagues having the time to do any either. Saying that, I'm sure we were hitting around 20,000 steps a day on the days we were working, because we were just used as slaves to do everything all over the hospital. I was running up and down really long corridors for days on end. I also would pick up running each time I had an exam, which there are lots of in medicine, even after you qualify. I didn't particularly enjoy it as exercise, but it was effective at reducing stress and clearing my mind. I remember thinking: 'Oh my god, I can't study anymore, I've got to go for a run'. It would have been great to have been introduced to yoga or pilates, as that would have helped me later in life with being more flexible because, like most people, I ended up having back pain in my early 30s. This was because my toes seemed a long way from my fingers, and I'd never stretched in my life. I got better at exercising in my 30s; I'd go to the gym once a week. They didn't really exist before that unless you were a bodybuilder, which I was not – I was quite puny. Dance classes and aerobics also took off, so I did that for a while, but never very seriously. These days, I mix it up. I do some yoga classes, I'll do some weights, and cycle for real or on my Peloton bike. In the summer, I swim most days and do mountain biking. Just as with food, a variety of exercise is good as it uses different muscles and different parts of the brain. 5. Spend more time with your loved ones I was dreadful at staying in touch with my family in my 20s. I left home at 17 and rarely saw my parents – maybe two or three times a year, which is completely different to how often I see my own kids now. But that was cultural – I don't think I was very different from my friends and colleagues. We all rebelled against our parents, and it was a very different scene. What's important is that you have a support group to link up with. It doesn't have to be your parents, it could be close friends or another form of community, so you don't get isolated. I wish someone had told me that when you're young, you make a lot of your best friends, who you keep with you all your life. I still see many of my school friends regularly and realise how supportive it is to have regular contact and a good dose of sarcastic teasing. Make time to catch up with old friends and your parents. It's the friends that drift off; your parents will usually be there – though they're not always, if they die early like my father did when I was 21. I regret not spending more time with him. Meeting socially is important for longevity. With my family, we do Christmas together, have an annual skiing holiday together, and, when we're in London, we have a Sunday lunch or meal out every other week. We see quite a lot of each other, but not so much that we're sick of each other and start fighting. All in all, I feel immensely grateful to be fit and well, given the way I mistreated my body in my youth. It's a testament to the resilience of life and our bodies. We can't turn back the clock, but we can start afresh today. Eating a diverse range of plants, limiting alcohol, keeping active and maintaining close relationships are all evidence-based ways to stay healthy as we age.
Daily Mail
26-06-2025
- Daily Mail
Dying dad heard howling after cocktail-fueled teen crashes into him at 87mph
A dying father could be heard crying out in pain after his car was struck by a speeding teenage joyrider, leaving his seven-year-old daughter with a broken spine. Eglin Manuel Castro Alvarez's howls were captured on bodycam footage filmed in Chicago on January 7 after Peter Swenson, 19, crashed into him. Swenson, a medical student, was filmed telling police he'd had two espresso martinis and gone for a 'joyride' to let off steam while caring for his father, who has stage four liver cancer. Swenson allegedly ran a red light in Oak Lawn while driving his father's 2022 Lincoln and crashed into Alvarez, 27, and his daughter, only slowing to 87mph upon impact. The bodycam footage, obtained earlier this week by BodyCam Edition, also picked up the screams of Alvarez's daughter, who has not been named. Neither could be seen on camera. Alvarez had just finished work and was collecting his daughter from her babysitter when he was hit while crossing the intersection at 3.08am. Officers managed to get the girl out of the vehicle and rush her to hospital, but it took half an hour for firefighters to cut off both driver's side doors to free the man. Alvarez was pronounced dead at the hospital three hours after the crash. His daughter survived with seven spinal fractures, broken ribs, and bruised lungs. Swenson who was seen in bodycam footage wearing an expensive Canada Goose jacket, told police after the crash that he was out for 'a little joyride' with his girlfriend after the stress of his father's cancer battle. In the footage his girlfriend told police that they had drank two or three espresso martinis at his house three or four hours earlier. Swenson failed a field sobriety test and refused a breathalyzer without a lawyer or his father present. Tests allegedly showed that he had a blood alcohol level of 0.154, close to twice the legal limit. A man who helped Swenson and his girlfriend out of the car told police 'he's lit, bro'. Police initially didn't know there was another car involved and were more casual and friendly when talking to the teen after being called to the crash. Swenson's red SUV came to a stop on top of another car at a vacant oil change business, while Alvarez's Toyota SUV was some distance farther up the road. Swenson explained that he tried to brake at a yellow light but 'I didn't make the light, unfortunately' and collided with another car that was coming through. Speaking to police he said: 'We were just out on a little joyride and when I was stepping on the brakes it was a little bit too late and... it was a mistake. 'I'm so sorry, I can't believe that this happened, this is genuinely unbelievable.' Swenson said his father worked at the Illinois Office Of Comptroller Chicago and was battling cancer. He said: 'He recently was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer so the only reason her and I went out was just because of... recently there was a lot of stress. 'He only has a couple of cycles left and so I just wanted to get away from it all.' Dashcam footage from a witness allegedly showed the teen's car traveling dangerously fast, and CCTV from a gas station caught it zooming through the red light. After police saw the footage of the incident and became aware of Alvarez's declining condition, their attitude towards Swenson changed. Speaking to another officer who hadn't yet seen the footage, one policeman said: 'He's flying past her (the witness), blows through the red light, smokes this guy.' Swenson said: 'It was an honest mistake, I can't believe that this happened', which caused one officer to lose his cool. Raising his voice, the officer said: 'I can believe it, I just watched how you were f**king driving.' Swenson responded by asking the man for his name and badge number, prompting the officer to walk away in disbelief. Over the course of the incident, Swenson asked several times for names and badge numbers of the officers involved, or if they would at least be included in the report. Swenson was arrested after failing the field sobriety test and refusing to be breathalyzed and was then put in the back of a police car. He was later charged with reckless homicide, aggravated driving under the influence and, driving under the influence causing death. Swenson was released on bail but banned from driving or drinking alcohol, and ordered to stay home in Palos Heights from 6pm to 6am every day. He must submit to random alcohol and drug testing, and even if he was later allowed to drive, the vehicle must have a breath alcohol ignition interlock device. Swenson's lawyer told the court that the teen studied at at Moraine Valley Community College. Speaking directly to the teen, Judge Linzie Jones said: 'Mr Swenson, this is your wake-up call.'
