The government is doing away with Co-proxamol because of it's role in suicide. It is second only to tricyclics (anti-depressants) as the favoured prescribed drug of choice for suicide.

There is also an increased risk of accidental overdose, because one of the ingredients is dangerous in small doses, also if you take alcohol with it (as most suicide attempts do), then the drug is made more toxic.

There has been no proof that Co-Proxamol is any more effective than normal paracetamol in the relief of pain.

There are between 400-500 deaths per year due to Co-Proxamol poisoning. Approximately one fifth of these are due to accidental overdoses.

The Royal Colleges (doctors and the like) were all unanimous in asking for it's removal, while the patients who were asked, were all against it being removed.

And yet...

There are a lot of people who I know, for which Co-Proxamol is an effective painkiller.

More people kill themselves via paracetamol than any other drug (and it is often a much longer, painful death).

If people are going to kill themselves, then they will find a way to do it.

The MHRA recommendation for pain relief suggests the prescription of tricyclics for more severe pain relief - you may recognise 'tricyclics', it's the most popular prescribed drug or overdosing.

I'm guessing (for I haven't seen the report) that many of the accidental overdoses, are actually people who have taken an overdose and then changed their minds about it - or that they haven't realised quite how dangerous these drugs can be.

At the end of the day, any drug can be misused, but a lot of people now feel that the authorities are trying to 'nanny' us. I can only hope that this will mean that GP's will be better trained in pain management. Unfortunately I doubt it.

Please note IANAP (I Am Not A Pharmacist)

I'm saddened by the news that Ivan Noble has died. Ivan was a journalist for the BBC who had been writing about coping with a brain tumour for the past two years. I think that he touched a lot of people with his honest, heartfelt writing. A collection of his diaries will be published later this year, with the proceeds going to charity.

The rota that I'm working currently gives me one week off, twice every ten weeks, and while this is nice, unfortunately it means that I don't have any stories of exciting derring-do to thrill and entertain you with. My muse has therefore taken the opportunity to bugger off on holiday to Barbados for the rest of the week.

So my options are limited, do I traipse around London and find out about local history or interesting little spots like Diamond Geezer? Shall I comment on the 'Blogosphere', and computing in general like Tom Coates (although without the gayness)? How about posting some pictures on Flickr? Perhaps I'll write about Agenda for Change, if only so I can try to understand it myself.

Or shall I hibernate, play some video games and fly around Paragon City or Norrath?

So the choice is yours - if you want me to write about something, leave a comment telling me what it is, and I'll do my best to fulfill your wishes.

How long until the MPAA/RIAA/BPI/BFI try suing Google for helping people find DRM breaking software, or for indexing sites that provide copyrighted material?

Can anyone put me in touch with the people who think that Mal-ware is a good idea, specifically the people who created "Windows AdTools", then can you recommend a way that I can crash their computers for a couple of hours.

Either that, or provide me with a plane ticket and a baseball bat with a nail through it...

...because there is nothing I enjoy doing more than spending some of my valuable time off getting my computer working again after these bastards have left their crap all over my hard disk.

Part of our job involves using a radio to talk to Control, so part of our training is in the use of the radio. The training is about three hours long, and you spend it pretending to talk on a radio passing jobs back and forth (this is before the computer terminals were introduced).

One of the things we are taught is the Phonetic alphabet, which I am sure you have all seen in film and TV. Normally it sounds something like "Foxtrot Alpha Sierra Tango Charlie Alpha Romeo", and is designed to make the spelling out of words over an unreliable radio transmission clearer, and less likely to have errors.

One other thing that you should be aware of, is that our radio has an open broadcast - this means that everyone in the sector can hear you talking on it. You can recognise your friend's voices, and this radio chatter gives you a general idea at what they are doing. Of course, this means that should you make a mistake - everyone knows about it.

Why was it, when spelling out a name I suddenly forgot the phonetic for 'M' (Mike), and instead, in a moment of panic, decided that the new phonetic for 'M' would be...

...Mango?

It's not as if I have mangoes on the mind - I can't remember the last time I ate one, but for some reason it was the first thing that came into my mind.

I bless the radio operator for not bursting into laughter and calling me a twit.

Work was fairly light today, I had one blue call, which was an eight year old who was having an asthma attack. When we got on scene, the child was having real trouble breathing, his lips had a worryingly purple tinge and he was using the whole of his chest to suck air into his lungs. I don't think the mother realised quite how serious her child's condition was.

We gave him a dose of a Salbutamol nebulizer (a medicine for opening the airways of the lungs, making it easier for the child to breath), and 'blued' him into hospital. I carried him into the resuscitation room to be met by a couple of doctors and nurses. By now the child was looking a lot better, and the consultant didn't look too impressed with my bluing the child in. The consultant didn't say anything, but I sensed a definite 'vibe', that he thought we were overreacting. However, once I explained how the child looked when we first saw him, the consultant was more understanding of my decision. The child stayed in the resuscitation room for some time, so they can't have been that unconcerned.

I have a rule at work - if I'm considering bluing in a patient, then I should just blue them in and have done with it. It's more embarrassing to turn up with a dead patient after driving slowly, than to have a live patient turn up quickly. No-one ever lost their job for bluing in a patient.

Sometimes you just know that a patient is seriously ill, even if everything else says otherwise. It's good to listen to your intuition.

I suppose that it can be hard to understand why the ambulance crew has blued a patient in if they look quite healthy when we roll them in through the door. Sometimes it's because the patient has improved, sometimes it's because the patient has a medical history that explains symptoms that would be otherwise frightening and that the patient hasn't told us about them.

And of course, sometimes, just sometimes, patients fake serious illness.

The server problems that have plagued the Bloggies have been resolved, so now would be a good time to go there and vote for your favourite sites. Feel free to vote for whomever you like (at least in the categories that I'm not mentioned in...). There are some great sites mentioned, and in a lot of the sections I was torn which way to vote.

All I can say about the people in the 'Tagline' category, is that you shouldn't vote for Scaryduck, if only because he regularly makes me soil myself with laughter - and I don't think that increasing my laundry workload should be rewarded.

Oh, and can I just say that Jane Perrone is a very nice person, she was the first person to interview me.

Joey made me very welcome in Canada last year - and was also one of the reasons why I got into this blogging lark in the first place.

And my final 'for consideration' should go to Real E Fun, who is just a bloody excellent writer, and shows me up for the hack that I am.

Don't ask me who to vote for in the 'Best British or Irish Weblog'. I don't know myself.

Mum, get Brother to show you how to vote...

For those that are interested, I've joined the team at Heardsaid. It's a blog that contains little posts that are like one-two punches. Things that we have heard that are probably true, never proven, but always interesting.

...They could literally be about anything or anyone but the really compelling and dangerous aspect is that corroboration isn't necessary. We'll present this stuff just as we heard it and it's up to the reader to decide whether it's true or not. The only basic rule is that we can't just make things up ourselves and that generally there isn't a structure. That's what encyclopedias are for -- its chatty and conversational -- like a personal weblog about answering questions which haven't been asked yet.

This reminds me, I need to write more for Lingual Nerve (the other writers are much better than me).

I also need to work out how to get paid for all this writing...