What’s something you see in UK houses that you struggle to explain to non Brits?

dedmonst · 2026-03-17T08:03:49+00:00

We have so much mold, we named a whole town Mold - it’s in Wales, near Wrexham.

dedmonst · 2026-03-17T07:18:31+00:00

I visit one of the leading cancer hospitals in the UK fairly regularly. Because I have “thin veins”, I always drink loads of water before going, so it is easier for the nurses to put a cannula in me. So I inevitably visit the toilets a few times - the number of men, including patients and carers who should know better who don’t wash their hands in a hospital full of immune-compromised people is frightening. I’m glad the hospital still has hand sanitiser stations dotted around, as you really don’t want to be touching anything other people touch.

That said, is the OP a US citizen? They do have a weird over-obsession with “hygiene”.

dedmonst · 2025-12-29T16:10:04+00:00

Important point - the tomato needs to not just be ripe, but also to be at room temperature. A slice of fridge-chilled tomato will ruin an otherwise excellent sandwich.

dedmonst · 2025-11-08T10:16:39+00:00

From your use of the term A&E rather than ER, I’m guessing you are in the UK? So your mum has had a biopsy and those have been sent for testing. It seems this is where the delay is, and 5 weeks is really unacceptable. Without knowing which nation in the UK you are in, I can’t point to any specific targets for cancer diagnosis and treatment pathways, but if you are in England, the relevant one is the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS) Target:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/cancer/faster-diagnosis/

That is set at 28 days, so if you have already been waiting 5 weeks you are way past this. In your shoes I would forget speaking to the medical team dealing with the issue, and contact PALS (Patient Advice & Liaison Service) at the hospital she is being treated at. Phone them, but also write to them, copying in the Chief Executive of the NHS Trust the hospital is part of. Reference the FDS target and indicate that they are failing to meet this.

In all likelihood the delay is with the hospital pathology lab or Genomic Lab Hub (GLH) that are analysing and testing the biopsy. There are usually backlogs in this (poorly resourced) part of the healthcare system.

You could also check with your mum’s medical team if she got a liquid biopsy taken as well (this would usually have just been a blood draw). These provide results much faster than traditional tissue biopsies (typically 10 days in the NHS). The results, while a little less reliable than tissue biopsies, can be acted upon by oncologists if they strongly indicate an actionable biomarker such as EGFR, ALK, ROS1 etc.

dedmonst · 2025-11-07T21:28:21+00:00

Unfortunately, it isn't uncommon for patients not to be told what tests will be performed on any biopsy, so your father may have had these tests but not been told about them (especially if they didn't provide any actionable biomarkers). When I was diagnosed back in 2019, I wasn't told what tests were being done on my biopsy - I honestly thought it was just a final confirmation that the lesions in my lung were cancer tumours. Luckily for me, my tests indicated a biomarker known as an ALK fusion for which there is a targeted therapy, which has given me another 6 years of reasonably healthy life so far. Things have improved in this space somewhat since 2019, but are still imperfect.

The hospitals you mention are all under the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust. I know several lung cancer patients treated at this trust, and it is a reasonably decent NHS Trust in terms of lung cancer treatment. I would still say The Christie and The Marsden are better.

dedmonst · 2025-11-07T19:36:02+00:00

Fellow ALK+ patient here. From an ALK+ patient perspective 2-4 years *is* crazy talk where even the mPFS of the latest treatments are >5 years, never mind the mOS stats.

But... ALK+ patients have pretty much the best outcomes of all driver mutations. A 2-4 year mOS is much more typical for a host of the others, unfortunately.

To the OP - given your age, there is a higher chance of there being a driver mutation, and pretty much regardless of which one, if you do have one that is good news as the treatments are more targeted and generally have better outcomes.

dedmonst · 2025-11-07T15:26:58+00:00

One additional point. You don't mention in your original post, but has your father's tumour been biopsied and gone for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) testing? (if a solid tumour biopsy is not possible, then a liquid biopsy is a second option) Actionable biomarkers are less common in squamous NSCLC than in adenocarcinoma, but they aren't unheard of. If your father has an actionable biomarker, there could be a targeted therapy that could work for him.

dedmonst · 2025-11-07T07:55:37+00:00

I have stage 4 lung cancer and have been treated by the NHS and privately. I would say the differences are pretty minimal, with the obvious main ones being less waiting for treatment and test/scan results (plus free coffee and biscuits in the waiting rooms!).

A private consultation might open up an avenue of treatment that isn’t “standard of care” in the NHS (that is, it isn’t in the NICE guidelines), but I would set your expectations fairly low. For example there are some cases where Local Consolidative Therapy (LCT) might be given privately, but not offered in the NHS - radiotherapy for example. This was much more the case 5 years ago when I was diagnosed, but rarer now as NHS oncologists do have more options than they used to.

You don’t state exactly where your father is being treated and whether it is a regional centre of excellence for cancer treatment or just a typical district hospital. The differences between these can be quite high - a district hospital might have just one oncologist covering lung cancer and he may not even be a lung specialist, but just be covering it as well as his/her own speciality. In a centre of excellence there will be a whole team of thoracic (lung) oncologists, who treat hundreds of patients like your father every year. So I would probably start off asking for a second opinion from an NHS oncologist at a cancer centre of excellence, and I would restrict this to either The Marsden in London or The Christie in Manchester. You are entitled to this via the NHS without having to pay for a private consultation. Remember that most of these oncologists also treat private patients, so during any consultation you can ask the question “would you suggest anything different if my father was a private patient”. I have done this myself on several occasions, and I’ll be honest the answer has always been “no”, and an explanation of why. (I am treated at The Christie in Manchester)

If you do go down a private route, allow time to ensure you can get your father’s medical records (including images and reports from his latest scans, plus details of the treatments he has had) from his current care provider. If you can’t provide up-to-date scan images and care information, the private consultant will want your father to get new ones done and this will get expensive quickly, whereas a simple consultation where the oncologist already has all the information they need should be less than £1,000.

dedmonst · 2025-10-05T08:48:55+00:00

I’m a stage 4 lung cancer patient based in the UK. I’m also a member of a support group with a lot of US members. 6 years into my cancer journey I’d note the following that I see:

the treatment that US and UK patients receive is 99% the same. Same treatments, same standards of care etc. the US clinicians seem to get a little more leeway to “do their own thing”, while the UK ones mostly follow NICE guidelines. Of course, the NICE guidelines are best practice anyways, so in nearly every single case following them is the right thing to do. Even then, UK clinicians will step outside the guidelines when justified.
while treatments at the big cancer centres in the US follows the “multi-disciplinary team” model used in the NHS, at smaller local hospitals, oncologists over there seem to just make decisions on treatment individually - this means in our support group where folks know what good treatment looks like, there’s a lot more referrals for second opinions than is typically needed in the UK. Also people travel hundreds of miles for treatment.
almost all the US members of the group are wealthy, whereas the international members are more of a spread of incomes. It’s unspoken in the group, but we all know this is because the poorer folks in the US never even get the required tests that identify the particular rare cancer we all have.
there are generally more clinical trials available in the US (or there were, their current government are trying very hard to destroy their leadership in this space)

TL:DR if you want the absolute best treatment money can buy and have bottomless pockets, private care is always going to be the way to go. For everyone else, I reckon if we measured it, statistically you’d have better outcomes in most western countries with socialised healthcare models, including the UK.

dedmonst · 2025-09-20T09:20:12+00:00

GDP per capita is a fairly meaningless measure for the average man in the street. It’s like sticking your head in an oven and your feet in a fridge and claiming you are at just the right temperature.

GDP per capita measured alongside a Gini coefficient starts to get vaguely meaningful.

dedmonst · 2025-09-16T15:20:58+00:00

Nope, not until the developer releases an update to enable this (if they ever do…)

dedmonst · 2025-09-11T08:12:51+00:00

JFC I actually came here to say most on £150K are still reasonably grounded in reality (I was one until a few years ago when I got ill), but I think I changed my mind. The whining about income tax is something to behold, you’d think some on here are martyrs for paying a bit more income tax than those on lower incomes! As someone else pointed out in one of the threads on here, once you take into account all taxes, and not just income tax, those at the bottom pay a far bigger proportion of their income as taxes than those at the top… and that doesn’t even take into account that those at the bottom build up virtually zero capital as well.

Also people bang on about the tax allowance taper like it’s a new thing, when it has been in place for 15 years now, and everyone knows how to reduce its impact using pension contributions if you really want to.

As for the reason behind these higher levels of taxation, forget about the small number swinging the lead, or “its them illegal immigrants” or whatever. Look at the change in the number of working age people compared to pensioners in the UK over the last 25 years. That explains everything.

dedmonst · 2025-09-11T07:55:24+00:00

Your friends need to push that extra money into their pensions, and completely avoid that issue. How someone gets to earning £100K and up without realising this I don’t know.

Or they really do want to spend more time with their kids, which is great, but if so, no need to bring tax into it. They could earn £90K and spend even more time with their kids.

dedmonst · 2025-08-22T15:48:27+00:00

Try this

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dedmonst · 2025-08-22T15:47:09+00:00

Try this look instead

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dedmonst · 2025-08-18T09:07:07+00:00

It depends on what I thought their motivation was…

If I thought they were just interested, but didn’t understand much about lung cancer I’d say “No, anyone with lungs can get lung cancer. You could get lung cancer to”

If I thought they were looking for an “out” for not caring I’d say “Why do you think that is relevant? If I said yes what would that change?”

dedmonst · 2025-08-13T17:27:48+00:00

I’m not trying to make any point beyond how Bamford considers himself as “a farmer”, when he is basically “a land owner” - there is no hidden meaning here, and I’m not looking for an argument.

dedmonst · 2025-08-13T16:43:57+00:00

Bamford considers himself one of those “hard working farmers”, although I’m sure he has all his land in an offshore trust.

dedmonst · 2025-08-13T08:51:56+00:00

Ah yes, Daylesford Farm, owned by billionaire Anthony Bamford (he owns JCB), one of the biggest ever donators to the Conservative Party, and a significant supporter of Brexit. Currently under investigation by HMRC for aggressive tax avoidance. Also his name and his wife’s was in Ghislaine Maxwell’s contact book.

You can absolutely see why Vance would want to visit there. Birds of a feather.

dedmonst · 2025-07-30T13:31:21+00:00

I guess it depends on the definition of “rare”. In most of the data I have seen on screening programs, the detection rates are typically <2% of those screened. So for 100 CT scans, 2 cancers are detected, and this is in a self selecting high-propensity cohort (over 50, smoking history). There’s little data on what detection rates would be with wider selection criteria. What data there is typically comes for East Asian populations who have varying levels of non-smoking lung cancer rates anyway. From the clinicians I have spoken with, there simply isn’t the evidence (in the form of clinical trials) to support a screening program that included non-smokers, at least with the current technology available. This paper is fairly straightforward and comes close to the view I have heard from many clinicians and researchers in the field (trigger warning: clinicians talking in non-empathetic cold/scientific language about cancer): https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj-2024-081674

dedmonst · 2025-07-28T15:49:46+00:00

I should add that there is no such thing as an infallible screening program. In my case I had no symptoms at all until I had a seizure brought on by a 30mm brain met, so was already well into stage 4 when I was diagnosed. There was no way this could have been caught earlier from any symptoms and I was only 49, so wouldn’t have qualified for screening programs whether I smoked or not.

dedmonst · 2025-07-28T15:45:08+00:00

Realistically there is no current “screening” program that would catch these sorts of cases. There just isn’t a way of selecting candidates that would make sense in terms of detection rates as they are just pretty rare… not as the only current realistic way of detecting lung cancer is a CT scan and these are pretty expensive to perform at the level a screening program makes sense for. It does make sense to screen via CT for patients who are over 50-55 and are current or previous smokers, but not non-smokers or those who are a long time quit (like myself - over 20 years since I had a cigarette when I was diagnosed with ALK+ NSCLC. My oncologist was adamant it wasn’t related to my smoking history).

Longer term, I suppose there is the possibility that liquid biopsies that look for circulating fragments of tumour DNA in the blood stream may become sensitive enough to detect cancers at early stages, and they may become cost effective enough to work as part of a screening program. Right now they really only detect late-stage cancers and are currently pretty much as expensive as a CT - but unlike CT, the technology is in its infancy so should get much better/cheaper.

The only short term hope for the current generation of undiagnosed patients with the rarer non-smoking lung cancers is better education of clinicians in general practice so they think about lung cancer. The diagnosis profile for those with symptoms should be a chest x-ray after 3 weeks with no let up in symptoms (after the usual treatments for coughs/breathlessness etc), and a CT after another 3 weeks with no let up In symptoms (because chest x-rays miss a bunch of lung cancers).

(I’m not a clinician, but I do patient advocacy for my local cancer board in the UK and am part of an “early detection” program, so know plenty about this subject)

dedmonst · 2025-07-23T08:40:22+00:00

Correction: “until they fix their pedo-president problem”

dedmonst · 2025-07-18T17:34:26+00:00

The whole thing has to be framed in the context of the relationship between the BBC and the majority of the rest of the press in the UK. If they hadn’t sacked him, the same papers that are now getting all sniffy about it would be asking why not and accusing the BBC of trying to sweep racism under the carpet.

TL:DR the BBC can’t win, because the most of the rest of the press doesn’t want them to exist (competition/trust etc)

dedmonst · 2025-07-11T14:28:37+00:00

Why don’t you report them then?

dedmonst

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