What is Shingles? Shingles is a painful skin rash caused by a virus. This virus is the same one that causes chickenpox. After you recover from chickenpox, the virus stays in your body but remains inactive. Years later, the virus can wake up and cause shingles. The shingles rash usually appears as a stripe of blisters on one side of your body. Before the rash shows up, you might feel pain, itching, or tingling in that area. The rash typically forms blisters that crust over within 7-10 days and usually heal within 2-4 weeks. Shingles can affect anyone who has had chickenpox, but it's more common in older adults and people with weak immune systems. Some people may experience long-lasting nerve pain, known as postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) after the rash has healed. What Causes Shingles? Shingles happens when the chickenpox virus (called varicella-zoster virus) that's been hiding in your nerve cells wakes up. Doctors aren't entirely sure why the virus wakes up in some people, but several things can increase the risk: Getting older (your immune system naturally weakens with age) Having diseases that weaken your immune system, like HIV/AIDS or cancer Taking medications that suppress your immune system Being under a lot of stress Having an injury in the area where the rash appears You can only get shingles if you've had chickenpox before. If you've never had chickenpox, you can't get shingles. However, if you're around someone with shingles, you could catch chickenpox if you've never had it. Can You Get Shingles More Than Once? Yes, you can get shingles more than once, although it doesn't happen very often. Most people who have had shingles won't get it again. About 1-6 out of 100 people might have shingles a second or third time in their life. The risk of getting shingles again is higher for people with: Weak immune systems Other health problems A severe first case of shingles Lasting nerve pain after their first bout of shingles What Makes Shingles Come Back? Several things can make shingles more likely to come back: Age As you get older, your immune system gets weaker, making it harder for your body to keep the virus inactive. Weak Immune System People with conditions like HIV/AIDS, cancer, or those taking medicines that weaken the immune system (like steroids or chemotherapy) have a higher risk. Genetics Some people may be born with genes that increase their likelihood of developing shingles multiple times. Lifestyle Factors High stress, poor diet, and lack of sleep can weaken your immune system and may increase your risk. Environmental Triggers Things like too much sunlight or injury to an area of nerves might trigger the virus to wake up again.

An X-ray is a type of scan that uses very small amounts of radiation to create a 2D black and white image of the inside of your body. X-rays send small amounts of radiation energy through the body and detect the amount that has passed through to the other side. Different tissues block or absorb different amounts of the X-rays depending on how dense they are. The more dense the matter, the more radiation it will block and the lighter it will appear. For example, bone shows up as white as it blocks a large amount of the radiation, whereas, air in the lungs allows more to pass through and shows up as much darker.

Patch testing is a technique used to see if you are allergic to a particular substance or set of substances. It's for those with a delayed reaction that takes a couple of days to emerge. Tiny amounts are placed on your skin and you wait to see if you get a reaction. A positive test is where you get redness and bumps in the area exposed to the allergy-causing substance. It takes an expert to interpret the results, as it’s not straightforward. And it helps if you have your own suspicions of what’s making your skin react so tests can be tailored to you. It’s used for those with eczema or contact dermatitis if it’s proving difficult to control with medications, in which case an allergen may be suspected. It’s also useful if you suspect something at work may be causing a rash, as your employer can hopefully offer measures to help. Identifying an allergen can make a huge difference in avoiding it and getting yourself better. Eliminating other potential allergens can also be very important to someone’s quality of life. It's a commitment of your time - several days of clinic trips and no showering during the days of testing. There's a quicker test called the skin prick test, and blood testing, called RAST IgE, but these are for an immediate reaction, so results are ready within half an hour. This is for allergens more likely to cause hives (urticaria) and hay fever-type symptoms than contact dermatitis or eczema rashes, which is a delayed hypersensitivity reaction.

FIT testing, or a Faecal Immunochemical Test, tests for microscopic traces of blood in your stool. It’s a new and highly accurate test, and has two main purposes. The first is in bowel cancer screening, where you have no symptoms, and the second is to diagnose a condition based on bowel symptoms, for example, in inflammatory bowel conditions like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, or symptoms that could be bowel cancer. There can be lots of other causes for bleeding in the gut – some serious, some less so. A positive test – that there is bleeding coming from somewhere in your gut – is used to then order further investigations that can pinpoint the cause of your symptoms, or determine whether this may be an early sign of bowel cancer. It’s important to emphasise that this is not a test for cancer or any other disease – it only tests for blood in the gut, and this could also be from haemorrhoids, a tear in the anus, a polyp, diverticular disease, or even bleeding from high up in the gut, like a stomach ulcer. It needs further investigations within context before a diagnosis can be made.

There are four main blood groups, determined by a system called the ABO system. Your own individual blood group is inherited from the genes of both your parents. To understand your blood type, you must first understand that each type is made up of antibodies and antigens. Antibodies are plasma proteins that help your immune system to defend against foreign substances like germs. Antigens are a different type of protein that are found on the surface of a red blood cell. Think of antigens like a jacket, and your body can recognise that jacket as either your own, or as someone else’s and therefore a threat that needs to be fought off. If you are blood group A, you have A antigens on the surface, with anti-B antibodies in the plasma. Those with blood group B have B antigens on the surface with anti-A antibodies. If you are blood group O, you have no antigens, but you have antibodies against both blood groups A and B. Those with blood group AB have A and B antigens, and therefore antibodies against no blood groups. Most people in the UK are blood group O.

An ultrasound scan (USS) uses sound waves to create accurate 3D images of small areas of the inside of your body. The sound waves bounce off tissues inside your body and it is how the sound waves bounce back from surfaces that are measured creating the image. The sound waves are extremely high frequency so you will not be able to hear them. Ultrasound scanning is extremely safe, pain-free, and does not use any radiation (unlike X-ray), PET, and CT scan. Ultrasound scanning can be used for looking at many areas of the body, in particular, monitoring a baby’s progression in pregnancy, looking at certain organs or lumps to help with diagnosing, and looking at muscle, joint, and tendon injuries.

Why this article matters With packed waiting lists and ten-minute appointment slots, GPs are under immense pressure. Many appointments are taken up by self-limiting or minor conditions that could be treated just as effectively at a pharmacy or through self-care. The NHS Pharmacy First scheme enables pharmacists to assess and treat specific common illnesses, such as sore throats and UTIs, and prescribe where appropriate. This saves you time and frees up GPs for more complex cases.

Lyme disease has become fairly well-known among the general population, as it can be blamed for long-term symptoms such as fatigue, aches and loss of energy. It can be serious, causing a heart inflammation in rare cases. If caught early, it can be treated with antibiotics and any long-term effects avoided. Lyme disease is an infection with a bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. It’s found in infected ticks that usually live on deer. It's not widespread, and outbreaks in the UK are mostly related to the New Forest on the south coast of England.

While most of us know that there are no benefits to smoking, it can be difficult to stop. Some people think stopping is all about willpower, and they insist on going cold turkey to give up – but experience tells us that they are more likely to return to smoking in future, and only 3 in 100 of smokers who try to quit in this way actually succeed. The good news is that there are several tried and tested methods that will help you quit smoking, but it’s always worth taking the time to understand the hold cigarettes have on us first. Why is it so hard to quit smoking? Smoking tobacco is highly addictive due to the nicotine element that it contains. Nicotine affects the brain in a way that releases endorphins in the brain. These are ‘feel good’ chemicals that make us feel happy and are highly addictive, creating cravings for them once their nicotine trigger has stopped. This temporary high is a hefty price to pay for the cost of smoking to the body. In the UK, almost 100,000 people die from smoking-related diseases every year, and there are over half a million hospital admissions due to smoking annually. Smoking takes a mental hold on us, providing a psychological crutch that’s hard to give up. Daily smoking can become a habit – a ritual around drinking, morning coffee, work breaks and nights out. It can take at least 60 days to break such a habit, which is why relapses occur so often for those trying to quit smoking. To quit for good, smokers must adjust their lifestyle completely, ensuring that it is no longer a part of their routine and daily activities, and is not used to comfort low mood, anxiety, depression or boredom. So, let’s talk through how to quit smoking, including some tried and tested methods to put you in the best position to quit and stay that way.

The prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test relates to a man's risk of prostate cancer but unlike other cancers like breast and bowel, there is no routine screening programme for prostate cancer in the UK. This is because it’s not as straightforward as having a blood test and getting a black-and-white answer: it doesn’t tell you if you have prostate cancer or not. Instead, the NHS offers an informed choice programme where men over the age of 50 can ask their GP for a test (or tests every so often), but after discussion about how difficult the result is to interpret. A PSA result can be normal and you can still have prostate cancer, or it can be abnormal but you don’t have prostate cancer. A positive test, however, does usually mean you need further investigations, and these can be uncomfortable and carry risks. Let’s talk you through what makes a good screening test, and how this can be applied to PSA screening.

PET stands for positron emission tomography, and it is a way of creating 3D images of the inside of your body as well as images to show how well certain parts of the body are working. During the scan a slightly radioactive substance (known as a radiotracer) is injected into your bloodstream that can then be detected as it moves around your body and is taken up by different cells or parts of your body. It shows which cells are more active and which are less. It is usually used in combination with CT or MRI scanning to provide detailed images. Your body then excretes the radiotracer over the course of a couple of hours after the scan so it does not stay in your system. PET scanning is particularly useful for helping diagnose cancer, looking at its spread or response to treatment as well as looking at conditions that affect the brain.

Health systems differ from country to country, and the UK’s National Health Service is no different. Lauded across the globe for its mission to improve lives by free at the point of access healthcare, the NHS can be a complicated system to understand for residents of the UK, never mind people from across the world.