Latest news with #university
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
North Texas professor in Thailand reunited with family
Paul Chambers, a U.S. political science professor, was arrested in April while teaching at a university in Thailand, when he was accused of insulting the Thai monarchy. Now, the case has been dropped, and he is on his way home.
The Guardian
a day ago
- General
- The Guardian
I found myself Googling: can brain cancer cause hiccups? How I fell into a hypochondriac rabbit hole
Throughout my adolescence and into my mid-20s, I spent a lot of time trying to understand my body. I was unwell, that much was certain. The question of exactly what was wrong with me was one to which I applied myself studiously. I had theories, of course. Looking back, these tended to change quite frequently, and yet the fear was always the same: in short, that I was dying, that I had some dreadful and no doubt painful disease that, for all my worrying, I had carelessly allowed to reach the point at which it had become incurable. This started at university, when I developed a headache that didn't go away. The pain wasn't severe, but it was constant – accompanied by a strange feeling of belatedness that told me it had already been going on for some time. How long, exactly, I couldn't say – weeks, definitely. Maybe it had been years. After about a month, I visited the doctor. She had an earnest, warbling, confident way of speaking, which, in spite of her evident commitment to the tenets of mainstream medicine, gave her the air of an alternative healer. She explained that what I was experiencing were tension headaches, a common ailment among students, and during exam season practically universal. I said that I didn't feel very tense. The doctor asked whether the pain felt like a tightness across both sides of the head. A kind of squeezing? Like an elastic band being pulled tight? Like a fist clenching around your skull? I said that it did not feel like these things. Yes, she said, nodding meaningfully. Every person experiences tension differently. The doctor asked me what medication I'd been using to manage the pain. I was thrown by this question; the thought had not occurred to me. This was, in many ways, quite surprising, since I consider my tolerance of pain to be less developed than the average. In the case of this headache, however, my attitude was edging closer to that of Franz Kafka. A century earlier, the writer told his fiancee, Felice Bauer, that he never took aspirin because doing so, he said, created 'a sense of artificiality' far worse than any 'natural affliction'. As Kafka explained to Bauer, if you had a headache, you had to undergo the experience of pain and treat it as a sign, before examining your entire life, right down to its most minute detail, 'so as to understand where the origins of your headaches are hidden'. The idea of taking painkillers struck me as irresponsible, even reckless, like disconnecting the fire alarm because it has interrupted your sleep. Like Kafka, I wanted to understand the headache. I wanted to know what it meant. The doctor told me to come back in a few weeks if things hadn't got better, sooner if they got worse. I left the practice holding a bottle of aspirin, which I promptly deposited in the bin. In the months that followed, I began using Google to research what was wrong with me. The thinking here was not unreasonable: I wanted to know what was causing the headache, so it made sense to go searching for information. The problem was that these online searches often produce a sense of disproportion: the list of 10 things that cause headaches might fail to mention that certain items account for the vast majority of cases, while others vanishingly few. And for those of us looking for trouble, our eyes tend to pass over the more prosaic – and plausible – explanations (eyestrain, dehydration or indeed tension). Only the worst will satisfy us. As the critic and Nobel laureate Elias Canetti once wrote, hypochondria is a form of angst that 'seeks names and finds them'. Predictably, I arrived at the conclusion that I had a brain tumour – an interpretation for which my Googling provided abundant evidence. As I trawled through lists of symptoms, more and more aspects of experience came to fall under my conscious scrutiny. Soon I was noticing lots of other little anomalies. I became forgetful; words kept escaping me. At the same time, I seemed to be walking around in a continual state of deja vu. I developed a twitch in my left eye. One pupil became slightly larger than the other, and coffee started tasting weird and metallic. I developed a mild but persistent case of the hiccups; just one, two, maybe three solitary little hiccups each day. 'Can hiccups be caused by brain cancer?' I asked Google. Yes, it answered – if it is advanced. Sometime later I started to smell things that didn't seem to have any external source. Burning, usually. Other times an astringent, chemical smell. One morning I woke up and my nostrils were filled with the indescribable scent of the villa in Spain where as a child I spent my long, dull, lovely summers. My eyesight, which had always been perfect, began to flare at the edges, as though there were always something flickering just outside my field of vision. I would turn suddenly, trying to catch it, at which point it would cease, recommencing as soon as I turned back around. I started keeping a list of all these things as they arose, on a loose sheet of paper headed 'symptoms'. Reading back over that list, it seemed to resemble the descriptions of illnesses that I browsed online. The doctor, however, took a different view – and the greater my fear that I was seriously unwell, the more she became convinced that my headache was being caused by 'tension'. In her recent book The Invisible Kingdom, Meghan O'Rourke writes about suffering from an undiagnosed autoimmune illness, an experience she describes as 'living at the edge of medical knowledge'. She writes: 'What really terrified me was the conviction that … I would never have partners in my search for answers – and treatments. How could I get better if no one thought I was sick?' O'Rourke is pointing out that diagnosis starts with a conversation between a patient and their doctor. There are important questions here about privilege: about who is and isn't deemed to be a reliable narrator of their own experience. Studies have shown that women are less likely to be believed by their doctors than men, and black women are less likely to be believed than white women. But, for everyone, conversations with the doctor are constrained by the need to appear credible – and if you are hoping to get a referral for medical testing, this might mean being careful to avoid seeming too anxious. In a desire to economise on my trips to the doctor, I would sometimes seek alternative paths to diagnosis. On several occasions, I visited the optician, because I knew they would use an ophthalmoscope to examine my optic nerve, which, I had learned online, might be inflamed due to the increased pressure inside my skull if I did have a tumour. (In the end, this did result in a diagnosis – one that, come to think of it, was rather apt: myopia.) On the occasions when I did visit the doctor, I was always very careful to limit what I said, not wishing to appear like one of those 'knowledgable' patients, a hypochondriac, who turns up requesting a second opinion on a diagnosis that they themselves have made. 'The position of hypochondria is still suspended in darkness,' declared Sigmund Freud in 1909. His colleagues wanted to make a publication celebrating the achievements of their new science, but Freud was cool, arguing they would have to be honest about what he called 'the limits of our knowledge'. For millennia, hypochondria has confounded patients and doctors alike. It first appears in the writings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, and then in those of the Roman physician Galen. According to these accounts, hypochondria was a subspecies of melancholy, which was caused by an excess of one of the four humours, black bile. This meant it was a physical disease, seated in the abdomen, though it could cause an array of mental symptoms such as fear and sorrow. This view remained more or less unchallenged for many centuries. Then, in the 18th century – with the waning authority of humoral medicine – hypochondria was redescribed as a nervous illness with a set of symptoms that spanned mind and body. It was often considered to be a peculiarly male disease: a counterpart to the hysteria that was said to affect women. Having long been considered a 'scholar's disease', it became a fashionable ailment among an urban literati, with eminent sufferers including Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. During this period, several books such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768) warned of the consequences of reckless and excessive reading. This trend accelerated in the 19th century with the emergence of a genre of popular medical manuals. A Victorian physician was expressing the view of his profession when he decried the spread of 'pernicious books of 'popular medicine'', adding that there is 'no doubt that the reading of this kind of literature has often resulted in an attack of hypochondriasis'. As more and more people were reading about health and sickness, hypochondria settled into its current meaning: a fear of illness that is also a form of illness. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion By the time I came to worry about my health, attention had been turned towards the internet, with some doctors speaking about the rise of a worrying new scourge: 'cyberchondria'. And for anyone who fears they may be suffering from this disorder, Dr Google promises to step in to help: '5 Ways to Tell If You Have Cyberchondria' (Psychology Today); '15 Signs You're a Cyberchondriac' (Yahoo). (One sign is 'you assume that the first result is the most plausible explanation'; another is 'you trust the internet more than your doctor'.) At the heart of hypochondria is the fact that it's impossible to really know what's going on inside your body. A person can 'feel well … but he can never know that he is healthy', Immanuel Kant wrote in 1798. Today, medical websites, with their lists of the seemingly innocuous 'warning signs' of serious illness, have grown into multimillion-dollar businesses by publicising this potential gap between reality and perception – between how well you might feel, and how sick you might be. More than a year after the headache started, I was referred to a neurologist. The referral was made reluctantly, with a mixture of sympathy and contempt. The neurologist sent me for an MRI. A few weeks later a letter arrived. In its entirety, it read: 'Dear Mr Rees, your brain is reported as normal.' Over time the other symptoms started to disappear. But that was not the end of things. Up late one night, I found myself looking into error rates within radiology. Across all areas, it's about 3-5%. This was not that bad, I thought. Then I Googled the number of annual radiology scans in the UK; that year it was about 40m. If 4% of those were wrong, this amounted to 1.6m incorrect scans – a number, I reasoned, that was certainly large enough to include me. In a study of those diagnosed with a lung carcinoma, the lesion could retrospectively be found in 90% of 'negative' scans. After a brief, ecstatic period of reprieve, my fears came back. At some point I forgot my headaches and directed my attention towards the lymph nodes in my neck, which I nervously fingered as though they were rosary beads. Once again, I was sure there was something seriously wrong with me – and, as I sought to get to the bottom of things, I found myself trapped in the same cycle of recovery and relapse. If hypochondria is a need to know, then no test is likely to offer a definitive cure. Ultimately, one has to learn to make peace with uncertainty. Perhaps this is what Freud meant when he said that hypochondria exposes the limits of our knowledge. Not simply a gap that could be filled with new information, but a more categorical deficiency: the failure of knowledge to ever bring about the states of health and happiness or even certainty we desire. I'm not really sure how I came to stop worrying so much about my health. After nearly a decade of anxiety, in my mid-20s I simply ceased to give it much thought. It is probably fair to say I've overcorrected. A couple of years ago, when I woke up in a state of extreme allergic response (shortness of breath, dizziness, eyes swollen shut), I took a hay fever tablet and tried go to work. Luckily, my partner convinced me to go to A&E, where I was immediately given a shot of steroids. The poet Anne Boyer has written about what she calls 'reverse hypochondria', and I suppose I have joined these ranks. I think writing about hypochondria helped. Reading about the fears of others – writers such as Kafka, Marcel Proust with his extreme sensitivity, and Alice James with her wavering and debilitating symptoms – was strangely comforting and helped to keep my own fears under control. Besides, researching and writing a book is a sort of apprenticeship in uncertainty: finishing it required me to give up my fantasies of fully understanding the topic. The NHS's standard treatment for health anxiety consists of cognitive behavioural therapy. Some people report being helped by CBT, but it's never really interested me. By the time I started psychoanalysis at the age of 30, my fears had been more or less put to rest. But I think it would have been helpful back at the height of my hypochondria. One thing I enjoy about conversations with my analyst is how they generally make me less certain about my version of events – the way they loosen me, in an undramatic and indefinitive way, from my attachment to my own narratives. And so I can't help but feel this would have been good then, back when I only had one story to tell: the story of my illness. Hypochondria by Will Rees is out now, published by Coach House Books at £12.99. To order a copy, go to Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Harvard Has Trained So Many Chinese Communist Officials, They Call It Their ‘Party School'
The university's Kennedy School of Government has long been favored by party cadres seeking career boosts.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Health
- Telegraph
At 20 I was told I had a brain tumour. A clinical trial changed everything
Of all the things I thought might happen when I went off to university, being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness wasn't one of them. You don't consider the prospect of getting seriously ill when you're a healthy man in your early 20s. It's something that happens to other people, ones that you'll never meet, who surely aren't much like you at all. But there I was in the doctor's office in 2019, aged 20, being told that I had a brain tumour. To be precise, it was a grade one pilocytic astrocytoma, a slow-growing lump the size of a walnut where my head meets my spine. I'd never heard of it before, despite the fact that young adults like me are more likely to get a tumour of this sort than any other. Just the sound of it, the long, complicated medical term that made everything 10 times scarier, was more serious than anything I was equipped to deal with at that age. When the news came, my mum stared at me, clearly in shock and looking for anything to say that would make it better. My dad burst into tears. I had never seen him sob like that before. I coped with humour. 'Well, isn't that a shocker?' I said to the doctor. I took a photo that I thought was funny and sent it to all of my friends, with the caption: 'Guess who has a brain tumour'. It was only when I got home the following night that the bad news sunk in. Alone in my room, with no one to put on a brave face for, I cried and cried for hours, thinking that my life was completely over. I took another photo, knowing that it would be my lowest moment. I didn't show that to anyone. I'd always been fit and healthy. I was into skiing and snowboarding, but what I really loved was football. I was well-liked at university, making a huge group of friends that I'd play friendlies and go on nights out with. But then I started to get this strange 'fuzzy' feeling, first in my arm and then in my lower body. It took more effort to kick a ball about, as if my leg had become too heavy to lift. I studied product design at Nottingham Trent, so I was working with my hands most of the time, and a few weeks after that, I found that I was struggling to move my fingers, too. At the time I was training for a marathon with some of my sporty friends, doing long runs multiple times a week, so I put it all down to fatigue. Then one day, as I was working, my hands started to shake uncontrollably. I phoned my mum straight away, and that's when she told me that I should go to the doctor, just to check that everything was fine. At my initial appointment I was actually told that I 'definitely have multiple sclerosis'. I went to my brother's birthday party straight afterwards, and my mum said that that couldn't be right, and that I should get a scan to see what the problem really was. It was a relief: she's always right when it comes to health issues, and most people who have MS aren't diagnosed until their 30s. That's how I ended up in the doctor's office receiving my diagnosis, after a brain scan. The tumour in my head had been growing for years, and it was just starting to reveal itself, leaking fluid and pushing on the nerves that send signals to my arms and legs and causing the 'fuzziness' I felt. Survival rates for this kind of tumour are high, at over 90 per cent, but that statistic hides just how debilitating it is to have a massive growth in your head. So does the fact that tumours like mine are 'benign', or non-cancerous. It wasn't necessarily good news. This only means that chemotherapy doesn't work, 'so we have to operate,' said the doctor. It would be a major surgery that required weeks of recovery, but that was meant to be fairly low-risk. This is where my problems really started. A week after my diagnosis, I was introduced to the oncology team (who deal with benign tumours too) at Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, and the following month I had my operation. It was a planned two-hour surgery to remove the fluid that had leaked out, and then the tumour itself. When the doctors went to tackle the growth, though, my brain collapsed in on itself and I suffered a major stroke. When I woke up, I couldn't walk. I had lost most of my ability to speak, too. All I could say was 'yes' and 'go away'. I'd been told by my surgeons that this could happen, but that the risk was 'less than 1 per cent'. Again, I thought that the unlucky person in every hundred would be someone else, and I'd soon be able to go back to my normal life. So I was unlucky twice, and left with little chance of ever walking or speaking normally again. It took a lot of rehab, speech therapy, and proton beam therapy (a kind of radiotherapy to incinerate and shrink the tumour since it can't be removed) for me to get back on my feet. I can speak normally now, but I still don't have movement in my right hand, and my right leg lags behind me when I walk. So much for football. My life was far from normal. I was left with headaches and a massive amount of fatigue, but worst of all were my seizures. I had seven in as many months, and when each came, I was convinced that I was dying. I saw flashes of light, colours and patterns. Thankfully my mum is a nurse, and my sister is a paramedic, so there was always help to hand. I remember once coming around and seeing my mum and three of her friends – all nurses – standing over me. It was July 2020, and they'd been on a WhatsApp call when my seizure started. We live in a tiny village, so they all rushed over to help. Outside there were three ambulances and a paramedic car. It made me feel so ill and so helpless. I was pretty much resigned to being ill forever. I was already on anti-seizure medication, and yet they kept coming. But my mum didn't give up hope: she and my oncologist, Dr Helen Benghiat, searched dozens of websites for clinical trials, and finally Dr Benghiat found a trial that I might have been eligible for in the United States, via the Sarah Cannon Research Institute UK (part of HCA Healthcare UK), for a new drug that could potentially shrink brain tumours. I haven't had a seizure since starting the trial in 2021, and my tumour has shrunk slightly. It certainly isn't growing, which means that I can get on with my recovery in a way that I couldn't before. Being on a clinical trial changed my life in other ways, too. It gave me the chance to feel that I was making a real difference when my life had changed hugely, and I didn't know what the future would hold. I was surrounded by people on other trials for different types of cancers and there was a sense that we were all in it together. It also meant that I had access to regular check-ups and brain scans to monitor my progress, something I wouldn't have had on the NHS. The reassurance that all is going well has allowed me to move on in a way I never could have otherwise. At 26, I still live at home with my parents, which isn't how I thought my life would be. I'm making progress, but I'm not the popular, care-free young man I was. One of the hardest and most shocking things about becoming seriously ill was seeing my friends disappear. I was well and truly 'ghosted': people I thought I was close with, and would have stuck with through anything, vanished completely. I imagine they just didn't want to think about the dark side of life that what happened to me had thrown up. On the other hand, I've had support from places I never would have imagined. I started doing coffee mornings for The Brain Tumour Charity, which some of my old friends from school turned out to. One of those people was my girlfriend, Lucy. Six months ago she messaged me on Facebook asking for the details to come along. At the event itself, we clicked instantly, and we've been together ever since. It's hard to picture the future when you have a serious illness. Not long ago, I thought I'd never get married or have kids – why burden someone else with a problem like this? But Lucy has changed all of that for me. I keep telling her that I won't blame her if this all becomes too much and she needs to leave, but she keeps telling me that she wants to be with me and to help me as I recover. I'm back at work, with a part-time job managing mobile phone contracts for the NHS. Everyone I work with is incredibly understanding, giving me time off for appointments and fatigue when I just can't make it in. I finished my product design degree in three years despite my brain tumour. As part of my coursework I made a discreet seizure protection hat. At the time I was being told that I needed to wear a seizure helmet in case I hurt myself, but they're just so ugly and obvious. I couldn't imagine myself wearing one on a night out, and I knew lots of other people my age must have felt the same. I'd love to roll the cap out to other people. I wear it myself for now, just in case my seizures come back. Now I'm a young ambassador for The Brain Tumour Charity. There were 21 of us in total when I joined, but now there are just 18. It's something that I do feel guilty about. As the first person in Britain to join the clinical trial that has let me lead a close-to-normal life, there's a cloud hanging over me, the sense that I was lucky when others weren't. That really hit home at the funeral for one of my best friends Harry Thompson, another ambassador, who died at the end of November last year. He was only 23.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Ireland has good news because education is the fastest and most dependable way out of poverty
This week two global reports underscored the extraordinary education revolution that has taken place in Ireland. We are now the most educated country on the planet, above Singapore and Switzerland with 54 per cent of us holding a bachelor's degree or higher , according to Visual Capitalist – a phenomenal achievement and one that should be celebrated. But another report on Ireland 's educational performance, also published this week, might be even more consequential. The OECD released fascinating research about who is doing well in universities across the globe. Traditionally, it is assumed that students from well-to-do families – even lazy ones – do better and are more likely to finish college than those from poorer backgrounds. The idea hinges on what is called 'kitchen table capital', meaning the conversations, role models, networks and aspirations that middle-class children observe while growing up. These factors mean that - around the world - even work-shy rich kids are more likely than their poorer counterparts to finish university. Depressingly, environment matters more than effort. In most countries, poorer students are more likely to drop out, take a job and do what their mates are doing, going to work and earning money, rather than persevering with education. Many don't see the point in foregoing cash today for potentially more cash – and status – tomorrow. In contrast, wealthier children, who can afford to forego working today and look forward to a more lucrative future, often remain on the parental 'payroll'. An interesting way to look at relative opportunity is through this prism of time frames. Middle-class people have longer time frames. Poorer people, worried about paying the bills today, have shorter time frames. They can't afford to plan because poverty obliterates the future. Getting through today is more urgent than thinking about tomorrow or next year. The result of this is that the class system persists. Students from less well off families are more likely to drop out as they can't fall back on family money to tide them over for those critical early-20s years. READ MORE This notion makes so much practical or common sense that it is assumed to be a fact, yet the latest comparative data suggests reasons for optimism, in Ireland at least. The OECD claims that – in contrast to the norm all over the world – Irish students from working-class backgrounds are doing well. More than 75 per cent of poorer students finish college, compared with 70 per cent of their richer counterparts. Meanwhile, in the US, 87 per cent of rich kids finish college, while only 70 per cent of students from poor backgrounds matriculate. After the Netherlands, Ireland is the country in Europe where most poor students who get into university complete their courses. This is good news because education is the fastest and most dependable avenue out of poverty. It has ever been thus. The 'where would you be without your education?' quip from generations of Irish mammies is accurate. Countries that invest in mass education, no matter how many anomalies and inefficiencies in the system, are rewarded with upward social mobility. The historic role of education in allowing millions of Irish people to live better lives is unambiguous, even if current economic realities are making that harder. The corollary is also the case. Countries and regimes that attack the education system, such as the Trump administration, will be punished with more, not less, 'left-behinds' in years to come. Given that the 'left-behinds' are a critical Maga constituency, the de-education of America might well be a cynical electoral strategy. For all its faults – and the Leaving Cert is obviously problematic – Ireland ranks fourth globally among OECD countries for college education attainment among 25-34 year olds at 63.4 per cent . This represents a dramatic transformation – a 33-percentage-point increase from just 30 per cent in 2000 – and nearly a doubling of the OECD average growth rate . Ireland also holds the second-highest third-level attainment rate in the EU 27 for the 30-34 age cohort and has one of the lowest early school-leaving rates across Europe . The comparison with Northern Ireland, which has a serious education attainment problem, is quite shocking. Comparing the North and the South is like a social laboratory test: same island, same people, different priorities, contrasting results. In education, the Irish State tries much harder. While many complain that we have far too many graduates at the expense of tradespeople, we should not forget the main point: education is the best way out of poverty. Education today is an investment in tomorrow. We can regard the surge in third-level education in this country as the second part of an intergenerational process which was kicked off with free second-level education in 1967. The ensuing transformation of the Irish class system is likely to be repeated again, this time through the prism of college education. While it is not yet clear who will benefit most from mass third-level education, previous generations offer a blueprint. The greatest beneficiaries of the introduction of free second-level education were not the urban working classes, but the descendants of smallholding farmers from the remote reaches of the country. In 1950, after 30 years of independence, Ireland was more dependent on agriculture than it had been in 1870. But the small farmers – or, more accurately, their rural Irish mammies – saw this dead-end coming and concluded that the only way out for the children who didn't get the farm was either emigration or the public service. A wonderful piece of research by two UCG sociologists, Damien Hannan & Patrick Commins , found that the single most important determinant of a county's educational achievement in the 1960s and 1970s was the number of small farmers. The more small farmers in a county, the better educated the children (boys and girls) and the better they did in their Leaving Cert. They even found that the single most successful subsection of the Irish population was the children of small farmers in east Galway. Compared to their urban, working-class counterparts, 30 per cent more children of small farmers did the Leaving Cert than working-class Dubs and 50 per cent more went on to third-level education. The authors concluded: ' Not only have the smallholders succeeded in retaining their property and relative income position, but they have also succeeded in capturing a significant proportion of local off-farm employment. They have been more effective than working-class families in utilising the education system to gain access to off-farm opportunities for their children .' The sons and daughters of small farmers became the new middle classes – the 'CAO Class' – of the Celtic Tiger era and now their kids constitute Ireland's professional class, moving on socially from where their parents left off, much richer and more educated than their grandparents could have ever imagined. This upward mobility is why the latest OECD data on Irish college dropout rates is so encouraging. Of course, it is only one data point and should not be overstated but, if this becomes a trend, a new social class might be emerging from poorer urban areas of Ireland. Such guarded optimism flies in the face of the relentless negativity about the 'left-behinds' and the 'atrophying' of Ireland's social fabric. Being among the best-educated populations in the world, and having more poor kids – once they get to college – graduating, can only benefit the country in the years ahead. An educated country is a more equal country. No one can deny the persisting class-based bias in our elite universities, but Ireland is going in the right direction. University access schemes such as HEAR (Higher Education Access Route), which offers places for those with fewer Leaving Cert points and extra support for high-ability students from deprived backgrounds, are essential and should be expanded. It takes time, but every poor kid who finishes college is a role model for others and society makes progress one mortar board at a time. That's what social mobility looks like. Let's frame it.
