Dealing with disquiet over Kate’s cancer video | Letters

I’m grateful to Hilary Osborne for helping me understand why the Princess of Wales’s video left me so disquieted (Kate’s recovery is great news – but be wary of a soft-focus view of life after chemo, 11 September). I had stage 2, grade 2 invasive breast cancer last Christmas, with talk of chemotherapy after the tumour biopsy – until genomic testing gave me a reprieve. So I “got off lightly”, and need to “look on the bright side”, as some friends unhelpfully remind me.There are some silver linings, but all cancer is crap. And even without chemotherapy, I still feel greyed-out

Half of advanced melanoma patients live for 10 years with double drug treatment

More than half of people diagnosed with advanced melanoma now survive for at least 10 years when they receive a double hit of immunotherapy drugs, a trial has found.The combined treatment has transformed survival rates for a form of skin cancer that once had a grim prognosis, with some patients now living long enough that they die from other causes.Fifteen years ago, only one in 20 patients with advanced melanoma survived for five years, with many dying within six to nine months of the condition being confirmed.“The definition of cure is to return someone to their normal life expectancy for their age and state of health,” said James Larkin, a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust and a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research. “Having treated a lot of these patients over the past 10 years it seems that some are cured: they’re back to their normal lives, they’re getting on with things

Make it beautiful: seven local heroes improving communities

Whether it’s organising beach clean-ups, exploring Black heritage with ‘yarn bombs’ or trimming a hedge into a herd of elephants, some people are determined to make things betterJeremy: Taking my two kids out of school for five months and travelling the world with them opened my eyes to the environmental crisis. Seeing the state some countries were in made me want to get more involved. You learn about the dodo becoming extinct hundreds of years ago, but it’s happening to different species every day and people don’t seem concerned. When we came back to the UK, I volunteered and worked in the green sector.In 2020, Katy and I set up EcoDewi, a community group focused on environmental issues across the entire St David’s Peninsula – 40 people came to our first meeting

We’re living in the age of rage. I’m a psychoanalyst – here’s what we need to do to calm down

Anger has come to define the public mood – felt in the posts of social media warriors and harnessed by populist agitators such as Trump and Farage. But why are we so mad, and how can we learn to redirect our feelings?Every morning, my inbox heaves with a new tranche of email alerts from Nextdoor, the social networking service for neighbourhoods where people in the area post recommendations, inquiries, requests, offers, information. The tone can be chummy, jocular, kindly, anxious, but mostly the posts are angry. They include vituperative warnings about dodgy tradesmen; outraged reports of cruelty to animals witnessed by neighbours; snatches of grainy Ring camera footage purporting to show actual or attempted burglaries; complaints of junkies splayed on park benches and of predatory lone men approaching young girls; reports of vandalism, fly-tipping, charity muggers, phone scammers, poor restaurant service and late-night noise.My heart sinks at each new set of notifications, festooned with rage emojis and opprobrium for lowlifes, SCUM, animals! Yet I’ve never been tempted to unsubscribe – and not only because the service is also a surprising showcase for human solidarity, reuniting desperate owners with their cats and wallets, offering help and advice to the hungry and infirm

Charities demand to meet UK ministers as 1.6m disabled OAPs set to lose winter fuel payments

Groups representing disabled people are demanding urgent meetings with ministers after it was revealed that 1.6 million pensioners with disabilities will lose their winter fuel payments because of government cuts.The figures were released by the Department for Work and Pensions on Friday evening, in answer to a freedom of information request, despite the government having said it had done no official impact assessment on the policy. The internal DWP analysis also suggested that nine in 10 pensioners aged between 66 and 79, and eight out of 10 over-80s would lose their allowance.Since those over 80 receive a higher payment – £300 as opposed to £200 – they would take the greatest financial hit, the document said

NHS cannot embrace AI until its basic IT systems are up to scratch

The NHS will struggle to embrace technological advances in areas such as AI because its basic systems are too slow and “devastatingly user-unfriendly”, according to one of the UK’s leading scientists.Prof Sir Martin Landray, the co-founder of the UK Recovery trial that saved thousands of lives during the Covid pandemic, said it was “deeply frustrating” that the health service was so far behind other industries such as banking and entertainment in its use of data and technology.The use of technology in the health service was an important part of Ara Darzi’s review of the NHS last week, which will be the foundations of Labour’s 10-year reform plans. Lord Darzi said the NHS was far less productive than it could be, and one part of the solution would be a “tilt towards technology” by investing in IT systems, particularly in community services rather than acute hospitals.“Lord Darzi quite rightly points to the opportunities for increased productivity and quality of care,” Landray said last week