Articles from the author

Imagine developing an extreme allergy out of the blue in adulthood. All your favourite foods become potentially lethal, and you can no longer eat at friends' or in a restaurant, nor travel on a plane without taking elaborate precautions.

A treatment that enables the bed-bound to walk again sounds too good to be true. But this spectacular outcome, known to doctors as the "Lazarus effect'', can be achieved by vertebroplasty.

A survey in Mother and Baby magazine in Britain recently revealed that of 2,000 parents questioned, only 14 per cent knew enough first aid to save their child's life in an emergency.

They are one of the world's largest minority groups, but the majority barely gives them a thought. For centuries, they have been stigmatised linguistically and culturally.

Nobody's perfect - not even David Beckham. The footballer revealed recently that his left leg is significantly shorter than his right and that this discrepancy is the likely cause of his continuing back problems.