The British Liverpool Care Pathway was created in the 1990s as a guide to medical staff dealing with elderly people near to death.  It’s intention was to ensure people had a dignified and comfortable death.  Unfortunately, it has been used by some as a “tick-box” checklist , and in such a way that some patients have deprived of water and food.  This can come as no surprise.  Where human beings have a set of rules you can bet some will always cut corners, misunderstand, or get irritated and  impatient.

In response, new guidelines focus on providing personalised care, good communication and shared decision-making between staff, relatives and patients.  Staff are advised to undertake daily reviews of medication and hydration and checks to see if the patient has improved.  If there is any uncertainty about the best course of action, staff must seek help from more experienced colleagues.

Dare I say that with so many foreign nursing staff in Britain, both their English and their medical training can raise legitimate questions.  It’s wonderful that there are people who are dedicated to helping the old, sometime  grumpy, monosyllabic, ungrateful or even violent elderly people.  I have personal experience of the excruciating frustration one can feel, trying to do your best. But if  you are going to recruit inexpensive and inexperienced people,  you also need to train them properly to ensure they behave competently on a ward.

If you’ve ever been to an institution occupied by elderly people near death or with dementia you know all too well what I mean. Everybody, however old and gaga, deserves to be treated with skill, kindness and respect. Hidden away behind the blank faces and hopelessness are real people with senses of humour, wisdom and often extraordinary stories. Epicureans should try to be gentle, patient and kind. One day that old person could be you.

Every culture has its old wives’ tales that are unsupported by science. American parents tell their children not to swim after eating, even though there’s no real evidence that this is dangerous. In South Korea, many older people fear that if you sleep with an electric fan in the room, you may never wake up.   The South Korean news media and scientists keep trying to debunk this notion, but it won’t go away.

In 2008, Chun Rim, a professor at the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, decided to actually test the hypothesis. He used his 11-year-old daughter, because no one else would volunteer.

“Every five minutes I checked her body temperature, blood pressure, and also the temperature of her hand,” he says.  She survived the night. Her vitals barely changed. And now, the whole family sleeps with fans blowing on them.   But seven years later, it doesn’t seem to have done much to make this persistent belief blow away.    ( 2015 NPR website)

This illustrates the comfort that human beings derive from weird beliefs of all sorts.  You can do surveys, studies, scientific analyses and so on, but a fixed belief dies hard.  I personally do not believe that walking under a ladder with a man with a pot of paint in his hand above me either brings bad luck or guarantees that I get splattered with paint.  But I very deliberately walk beneath the ladder to prove to myself that I am grown up and rational. (This latter claim is hotly disputed by my wife).

Most of these beliefs are harmless, but some are not.  The idea that if you kill yourself and others for the love of Allah you are rewarded in heaven with 72 young virgins is one of the silliest beliefs, even if it is one of the most stellar marketing claims ever for a religion (and for anything else I can think of, for that matter).  The actual translation seems to be controversial.  Some translate it as “companions of the same age”.   The number of virgins is not mentioned in the texts, and in any case many would settle for fewer than 72 anyway.  But the translation and the number of virgins doesn’t matter.  The myth persists and is the probable cause of countless useless deaths.

George Washington University in Washington, D.C. has recently announced that it will no longer require applicants to take the SAT or ACT as entrance exams. The university has concluded that reliance on these tests was excluding some high-achieving students who simply don’t test well, and low-income, minority students who don’t bother to apply because their scores are too low.

GWU will still require pre-med and home-schooled students, as well as athletes, to submit test scores, but, like many of the more than 800 other four-year colleges and universities that were already test-optional, it hopes its admissions criteria will now capture a more diverse pool of students.

Some research has found that it isn’t  clear whether performance on those tests is a reliable predictor of future academic success, and that a student’s high school academic record (their GPS and the rigor of the courses taken), is a far better predictor of college success than the SAT or ACT.

Critics of the SAT and ACT have long argued that these tests are nothing more than filters that help institutions deal with large numbers of applicants.  ( A heavily edited version of an article from NPR, July 2025).

Sounds sensible to me.  I think more credence should be given to personal assessments by the high school as as to the academic capabilities of the student and the student’s own “selling” document (hand- written), explaining why he wants to go to university, what he feels he can get out of it and what he has achieved so far in his life.