For the last 100 weeks, Global Comment has published a selection of our social media heroes of the week every Monday. Now we are launching our exciting new series to replace our weekly heroes.
We understand that everybody is overwhelmed with the information, recommendations and content that blasts out from social media every day. So we want to distil the best of the web by recommending just three links every week that you absolutely must see. No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads. Here are this week’s recommendations:
1. Sixty years ago, scientists let a farm field rewild – here’s what happened (Richard K Broughton, Positive News)
Allowing the land to naturally regenerate sounds exciting, but planners and ecologists need to know where this approach is likely to work best. How abandoned land turns into woodland is rarely documented, as it usually happens where people have walked away.
The Monks Wood Wilderness fills in this gap in our knowledge as an example of planned natural regeneration that has been monitored over decades, with a second two-hectare field (named the New Wilderness) added in 1996 to expand the experiment.
2. First patient in UK gets ‘vaccine’ for cancer that should help immune system ward off cancer permanently (Michiel Willems, City AM)
A Merseyside man has become the first in the UK to receive a ‘vaccine’ that is hoped will stop his recurring head and neck cancer from returning, in a clinical research trial which may help bring further ground-breaking treatments for the disease.
The clinical research team at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre has given patient Graham Booth an injection of a therapy tailor-made to his personal DNA and designed to help his own immune system ward off cancer permanently.
3. Alcoholism and me: ‘I was an addicted doctor, the worst kind of patient’ (Carl Erik Fisher, The Guardian)
It was four years before my breakdown, and I was in the middle of the third year of medical school – the dreaded “clinical year”, when students rotate through different specialties as part of the teams directly caring for patients – and it was wearing on me. That man seemed to embody everything wrong with modern medicine: not our inability to cure the cancer, but how easily patients could be left by the wayside. The churn of the system was demoralising. We’d patch up acute conditions and dump people back into nursing homes or even on to the streets, with little opportunity for working with the human problems so often at the root of unhealthy behaviour. As the winter rolled on, I got tired of waking up at 4am just to tackle checklists of tasks that didn’t seem to be helping anyone.
I started drinking more – much more. I started crying unexpectedly. I met with a bushy-bearded psychoanalyst in a cramped cinder-block office at the medical centre, though at first I hid the extent of my distress behind safe, professional language, claiming I was there because I wanted to develop as a future psychiatrist and learn about myself.
Image credit: distant land green grass