Running scared of exercise ...

By Dr James Le Fanu:

"Even though it now appears French president Nicolas Sarkozy only suffered a “vasovagal episode” when out running last week, his collapse is a salutary reminder to middle-age joggers that exercise is not necessarily good for one’s health. The exact risk is difficult to quantify, but a study in the New England Journal of Medicine a decade ago estimated (surprisingly) that perhaps as many as 40,000 deaths a year in the United States might be associated with vigorous exertion.

For this reason, the no-longer-young are advised to go running in twos so, if either keels over with a coronary, the second is on hand to raise the alarm and start resuscitation.

And to its credit, jogging has the richest repertoire of exotic ailments of any form of exercise. These include jogger’s nipple pain and inflammation from friction against the shirt in women who fail to apply a precautionary layer of petroleum jelly; jogger’s penile frostbite from venturing out insufficiently clad in sub-zero temperatures; and jogger’s infertility – the suppression of ovulation in women who run more than 20 miles a week.

Joggers are also prone to attacks from birds of prey, dogs and malicious onlookers: in one survey almost 10 per cent reported having been hit by a thrown object such as cans, bottles, ice and even a rock-filled bag.

TAMING THE GUERILLAS

It was perhaps surprising to read in this paper last week that surgeon Sarah Stapley and her colleagues at the Camp Bastion Military Hospital in Afghanistan treat members of the Taliban alongside seriously injured British soldiers. There is, however, an interesting, and military significant, precedent for this practice of treating enemy combatants, which was set during the counter-insurgency campaign against Communist guerrillas in Malaya in the Fifties.

Army medic Duncan Campbell, writing in the British Medical Journal, recalls one occasion where five wounded, “uncommunicative and resentful” Communists were admitted to the Military Hospital. He was thus rather taken aback when doing a ward round the following day to find them all engrossed in a game of pontoon with a group of wounded British soldiers.

Once recovered they were reluctant to be discharged, claiming that they would only be rearmed and ordered to fight again which “after all our kindness they did not want to do”.

There followed a progressive decline in hostilities that Dr Campbell believed was directly related to their turning “the enemy wounded into grateful patients”."


James.LeFanu@telegraph.co.uk