Weighing six stone and on the brink of organ failure, Charlotte Chapman-Hart is admitted to hospital in excruciating pain. It's assumed the former model and dancer has an eating disorder. But Charlotte, who repeatedly denies she's starving herself, has a rare disease. She's been prescribed a new pain relief medication, which should have been monitored by her GP and wasn't. A side effect is rapid weight loss - but it's been overlooked by those treating her. Charlotte's experience over the next three months would leave her adding post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the list of her symptoms. She now fears the care that she needs to stay alive.
Charlotte is unlucky enough to have a genuine issue, and not the type of mental illness that doctors would be falling over each other to verify and agree with…
"I think the hardest thing I've ever had to face is trying to convince people that I am of sound mind, and that what I'm telling you is the absolute truth," says Charlotte, sitting in the garden of her home in Cuckney in Nottinghamshire. "I told them that I've never had an issue with eating. I'm just not hungry. Things don't taste the same. "But rather than think differently, I was put into a diagnosis box that was wrong."
It’s a pretty common thing that doctors don’t believe patients, except of course for those who are flavour of the month. If she'd simply told doctors she was really a man, they'd have had no hesitation believing her.
At the age of 21, in 2014, Charlotte was diagnosed with chiari malformation type 1 - a condition in which part of the brain pushes down into the spinal canal - and syringomyelia, a rare neurological disorder.
And now she’s turning it into a crusade:
This year, Charlotte became an ambassador for the charity Medics4RareDiseases, and is helping to raise awareness among health professionals."What people are asking for over and over again is to be listened to, is to be believed, is to be involved in their healthcare," says Dr McKay. "If technology, fast diagnosis and treatment alone were going to improve the lives of people with rare conditions, then we would already be fine." According to Medics4RareDisease, more than 3.5 million people in the UK live with rare conditions and often face the burden of constantly explaining themselves.
Just like people with non-rare diseases. It’s just what the NHS does.
More than £300m given to English councils to help Ukrainian refugees into accommodation has not been spent, while thousands of them face homelessness. Freedom of information requests to 150 councils in England, shared with the Guardian, identified that £327m – about a third of the £1bn budget – was still sitting in council bank accounts more than three years after Russia invaded Ukraine.
So get it back - Rachel Thieves needs every penny she can get her clumsy hands on, doesn’t she?
Most of the funds councils have spent have been used to pay staff and partner organisations. Only £22m has been spent on temporary accommodation for Ukrainians and £15m to help them into private rented accommodation.
So the councils are just sitting on the cash? Why? Do they get to spend the interest earned on other things?
Baljeet Nijjhar of UKrainian Refugee Help, who obtained and collated the FoI data, said: “Local councils are allocated thousands of pounds per Ukrainian arrival, yet the guests we support seem to struggle to access this directly when in need. “The most common issue is inability to rent privately and people often don’t know anyone in the UK who could act as a guarantor, so it’s the local council that they must rely on here to solve this problem. “Our research shows that many councils have significant levels of funds left, but have helped very few people to rent, whereas others have demonstrated a ‘can do’, proactive approach and have helped significantly more.”
Is this just usual local council incompetence or are they benefiting from this in some way?
Dr Krish Kandiah, the director of the Sanctuary Foundation, which provides support for Ukrainian refugees, praised the British public for their hospitality. “It is now vital that the UK builds on that generosity by ensuring that every Ukrainian has the security and dignity of their own front door,” he said.
Personally, I think it’s vital that they ensure that every Brit has that before we look at providing it for foreigners.
18 million COVID-JABBED Japanese folks shown to have significantly higher death rates during first year after injection with mRNA clot shots | https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-08-22-18-million-covid-jabbed-japanese-shown-to-have-significantly-higher-death-rates.html
CDC faces lawsuit over unstudied childhood vaccine schedule as COVID-19 shots added without parental consent | https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-08-21-cdc-faces-lawsuit-unstudied-childhood-vaccine-schedule.html
We could go anecdotal as well … case by case … just ask our third member here, Grandpa, about his dear wife … then again, best let the memory rest. Any number of case studies on X. One of my friends was speaking of his mum who decided to have the jabs … yes, you know what I was going to conclude this with. RIP.
Driver yesterday, one I know, been away six months, footballer, first spoke of some League player who just collapsed … same pattern. Common factor … jabs.
Then we get to something more provable, as if that were not:
This summer the technology secretary, Peter Kyle, announced he was considering a two-hour “screen time” cap on children’s use of social media apps – a proposal that is not just insufficient, it’s outdated.
It's also doomed to failure, as most parents will simply pay no notice. It is, indeed, like most of Labour's grand ideas, utterly unenforceable.
We should indeed be thinking about moderating time on screens, but the proposed cap addresses only the quantity of consumption, not the quality. Fortunately, as someone who lectures on digital literacy (and is a mother), I can tell you there are some ways to push back and create healthier habits for children this summer – even if the government doesn’t seem to have caught up with them yet.
And here’s some Karen from HR to give you some tips on how to manage your child’s browsing habits. Aren’t you just so lucky?
Limiting screen time has been the dominant digital guidance used by parents, educators – and all of us really – over the past decade. This advice emerged after studies indicated that increasing screen time could be a risk factor for being overweight/obesity in children and adolescents. This was, and is, good guidance to promote physical health. However, it didn’t include robust discussion about how the quality or nature of content online might be affecting mental health.
You mean, quality not quantity is most important? Gosh! What a revelation!
For example, in following this guidance, you could have one child watching CBeebies with their family in a communal space, engaging in discussion; and another child wearing headphones and watching algorithmically driven YouTube shorts. Under “screen time” guidance, these two forms of viewing would be considered equal. But, of course, they are qualitatively very different. In this scenario, one child is engaged in interactive, collective viewing with a parent that might be a jumping-off point for discussion and connection. The other child’s viewing is isolated and fragmented; they are consuming short-form content, probably with little focus on meaningful storylines or characters, on a platform that is still, by comparison, unregulated.
I can’t wait to see what other pearls of wisdom drop in this article…
If it helps, here are some of the things I’ll be doing with my kids during the summer holidays.
- For younger children, time off screens is generally better than on. However, when we do use screens, I encourage my own children to watch live TV on platforms such as CBeebies and CBBC, as this provides a diversity of content curated by a children’s programmer. Lots of time and advocacy has gone into producing it.(Ed: not to mention licensepayer’s money)
- Prioritise active and engaged viewing over passive viewing. This means content that encourages creativity and discussion. This supports active brain engagement, learning and communication skills. It’s often better to opt for collective over solitary viewing, which can act as a springboard for discussion and build critical thinking and social engagement skills.(Ed: collectives don’t promote the creativity you seem to desire, quite the opposite in fact!)
- Begin seeding critical thinking about digital content from an early age. You can input questionable images into platforms such as Sightengine, and they will tell you how likely each image is to be fake. This is a great way to start conversations about disinformation online.(Ed: start with BBC verify)
- Speak to older children about what they want their digital diet to look like. Together, dedicate half an hour a week to training the machine learning by actively searching for positive content – content that they are passionate about or that makes them feel good. Don’t watch uninteresting, uninspiring content or content that makes them (or you) feel bad. (Ed: who continues to watch stuff that they don’t enjoy?) Quickly move past it.
- And teach them not to like, share things or comment on things that they don’t like. Even commenting on something you don’t like counts as engagement, meaning you may get more of it.(Ed: who shares things they don’t think are worth sharing?)
- As a family, do an “uninspiring” clean. If it no longer inspires or educates you, unfollow it. This includes exes, TV personalities and brands. Do this regularly to clean up your feed and narrow in on what you do want to see.(Ed:Place your hopes on the algorithm you've decided is the root of all evil?)
- To combat targeted advertising, there are some Google alternatives you might want to look at as a family. DuckDuckGo or Firefox Focus are search engines that do not track you to serve targeted ads. You could also look at Startpage, which allows you to use Google without tracking your digital footprint.(Ed:Deliberately cripple the main functionality of the tool you use, because you can't handle what it does? )
Governments may not be properly regulating this technology, but as parents, there are still things we can do.
Yes, but that takes time and effort and actually interacting with your offspring, and so many modern parents don't want to do that. In fact, so many modern parents seem to be little more than children themselves.
Speaking personally, I tried to explain to people that outside the isles, our flag for international purposes, is the union flag (not jack) … inside our borders, it’s our home country flag, in my case the CofStG. The home country flags are easier to paint on.
Now, I saw some England fans say no … no union flag, as it is Empire. Sorry … what about our Scottish, Welsh, NI loyalists to what we are, what we are about? The person who first retweeted me was Subrosa, who is Scottish but feels part of all natives to these islands. I for one am not going to reject my home country friends. Nor the Gurkhas.
Now, what about Ben? Still thinking about this:
So, what do we say to Ben? Think we have to think all this through. What I can say though is the flag-upping is grand, it is raising consciousness in a nice way.
