Dr Christian Busch has had a lucky life. He narrowly escaped a catastrophic car accident at the age of 18. The car was wrecked but he walked away without a scratch. It was just the wake-up call he needed. “I turned my life around. Before that I’d been a reckless teenager who lived in the moment, having fun. The [...]

When I was young, I used to go on holiday with a friend so terrified of flying that she’d have to take her airline ticket to the GP and get a valium for each flight. Then she’d neck it, and spend four hours feeling no less terrified, but much less alert. Once, I got bored and took a pill she had left over. I fell [...]

“Like having a brick thrown at you,” is how Belinda* describes the days following her sudden redundancy. “You have a certain view of yourself, and that sense of worth is tied to the job that you [...]

Pregnant women in hospital with coronavirus are less likely to show symptoms and may have a greater risk risk of being admitted to an intensive care unit than non-pregnant women of similar age, a study has [...]

How Covid-19 is impacting people’s dreams is the subject of a study being run by a cross-disciplinary team of academics from Australia, the UK and [...]

In a world of radical inequalities and bitter partisan divides, one thing apparently still unites us: nobody can focus. Recent events (“gestures broadly at everything”, to quote the internet meme) seem to have turned everyone’s brains to mush. “We can proofread and check things,” the art historian Susan [...]

Some reading, and actually listening to my wife, has led me to the theory that many of my problems stem from not drinking enough water. I made that sound as if we had an intellectual to and fro about it, but in truth I came to bed one night and told her I’d just done a wee that looked like Lucozade and she commented [...]

am lying on my back in the den I made, my book perched like a little tent on my stomach. I stare at my bamboo roof and listen to a tapping sound – a carpenter bee nesting inside one of the canes, I decide. I’ve been lost in thought, and realise it’s late in the day – the last hour before the sun dips into the [...]

We need pain. It seems contradictory to say it, particularly now that we have so many ways of dealing with it and switching it off. Pain not only tells us something is wrong, it also protects us. If you slam the car door on your hand, it’s going to hurt. You will have damaged the soft tissue; all the muscles and [...]

“To the outside, it would look ugly,” chuckles Sarah Garner, an infectious disease specialist. “It’s yelling, screaming, pulling faces, sometimes clawing at my skin. Making jerky random movements. Lots of pummelling of [...]