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Audit of the accuracy of ultrasound in the localisation of undescended testes in children
Full text linkBackground: There has long been debate surrounding the application of ultrasound (US) in the evaluation of undescended testes (UDT), with the current consensus showing that it doesn’t have an application in the routine evaluation of the condition. More recent papers have shown that US does have some utility in this area. It is accepted that diagnostic laparoscopy is the gold standard investigation for non-palpable UDT, however, more recent studies have shown Ultrasound scans are becoming more accurate. This project looked at the ability of ultrasound to correctly locate UDT in children at a UK district general hospital when compared to surgical findings.
Methods: The electronic notes of 12 children who were evaluated with ultrasound and surgical correction for cryptorchidism between November 2021- December 2023 were reviewed. The location of testes were noted on clinical examination and ultrasound which were compared to the surgical findings. The sensitivity and specificity of US were then calculated, as well as the positive predictive values.
Results: A total of 9 boys with 10 undescended testes underwent preoperative ultrasound scanning and surgical correction in this study. Eight of these were unilateral and 1 bilateral. None of the boys were found to have absent or intraabdominal testes. One testis was found to be scrotal on operative findings. All of the testes were palpable on examination under anaesthetic. The sensitivity of US was calculated at 100% (p=0.05), specificity at 90% for locating inguinal UDT.
Conclusions: Based on this study, ultrasound has a high sensitivity and specificity at locating inguinal undescended testes. More research with larger sample sizes should be undertaken in this area to fully assess the utility of modern ultrasonography in the evaluation of cryptorchidism
The Legacy of Covid 19: Did working on the front line during the Covid 19 pandemic impact the psychological wellbeing of front-line doctors and nurses?
Full text linkBackground: The recent Covid-19 pandemic was a challenging time with medical staff working against a novel coronavirus with restricted resources and a limited understanding of the pathophysiology of this virus. Medical staff were exposed to unparalleled levels of severely unwell patients and significant mortality for an extended time. This created unprecedented strain upon the NHS and its staff. The demands upon the healthcare system were at an all-time high. This is likely to have greatly impacted doctors' mental health. Before the pandemic there were concerns around the mental wellbeing of doctors with rates of burnout and poor mental health being high. During the pandemic many doctors reported an increase in stress levels and sleep disturbances. This paper explores how Covid-19 has impacted the mental wellbeing of frontline doctors who were working in hospitals during this period and if these effects have persisted four years later.
Methods: This paper utilised a five-point Likert scale questionnaire asking participants to self-report how their mental wellbeing, stress levels, sleep quality and job satisfaction changed before, during and after the Covid-19 Pandemic. Qualitative questions were used to understand the reasoning for participants scores. This produced ordinal data that involved repeated measures. This data was then statistically analysed using the Friedman Test to identify statistical significance and then the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test to identify whether there was statistical significance within the mental well-being data before, during and after the pandemic.
Results: The sample (N=17) was comprised of doctors who were recruited using social media. The Friedman test indicated that there was a significant difference between the participants self-reported mental well-being before, during and after the pandemic (p= .00006293), stress levels (p= .0001316), sleep quality (p= .001836) and job satisfaction (p= .00000279). The Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test indicated that there was a significant difference between doctors self-reported mental well-being before and during the pandemic (p= .0003), before and after the pandemic (p= .00424) and during the pandemic compared to after the pandemic (p= .00148). There was a significant difference in stress levels before and during the pandemic (p= .0038) and before compared to after the pandemic (p= .00512). There was a significant difference in sleep quality before and during the pandemic (p= <.5), and during the pandemic compared to after the pandemic (p=<.5). There was a significant difference in job satisfaction before and during the pandemic (p=.00044) before and after the pandemic (p=.00338) and during and after the pandemic (p=.0041). No participants elected to respond to the qualitative questions. Participants were found to be aware of the support services available to them, however, many participants expressed reservations around accessing these services.
Conclusions: This study shows that mental wellbeing worsened during the pandemic and has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. This raises concerns around the long-term implications of the Covid-19 Pandemic upon the mental health of doctors. Further studies are needed to better understand the reasons for this change in mental wellbeing
The Salience of the "Cyborg Manifesto": A Reboot
Full text linkDonna Haraway undertakes the task of reappropriating the figure of the cyborg from patriarchal, capitalist power structures in her watershed publication, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985). This process of deterritorialization forms part of the feminist tradition of taking control of the tools that previously hampered and fleeced women. Haraway’s mode of feminist theorizing has resonated across a variety of disciplines favourably, cautiously, and also contentiously. This paper investigates critically the blasphemous power of Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” specifically through the lens of cyberfeminism, a term coined by Sadie Plant in 1994 to describe the feminist approach that illuminates the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. Additionally, this paper contemplates the salience and reliability of the cyborg as a mode of feminist theorizing as we grapple with challenge and change in the digital age, where the division between the online and offline is rapidly merging
Can Thiel Fixation provide a Superior Full Body Dissection Experience to Traditional Formalin Fixation in Preclinical Undergraduate Medical Education: A Mixed Methods Case Study.
Full text linkBackground: Dissection has stood as a fundamental aspect of medical education in the United Kingdom since its decriminalisation in 1982, during which time the fixation process has almost ubiquitously utilised formalin, an aqueous solution of formaldehyde, for preservation of the cadaver. However, novel fixation techniques such as the Thiel method have been purported to provide a more authentic dissection experience for students. In 2022 our medical school switched from formalin to Thiel-based cadaver fixation which presented a unique opportunity to conduct research into the impact of this change on students’ experience of the dissection process.
Methods: The aim of this study was to compare students’ experience of the dissection process using Thiel-fixed cadavers to formalin-fixed cadavers. Questionnaires were distributed to students who had undergone dissection of only Thiel-fixed or formalin-fixed cadavers, and interviews were conducted with students who had undergone a mixture of both.
Results: The questionnaires showed no significant difference between the two groups (p <.09822) with a median response of 3.75 and 4.0 in the Thiel and formalin groups, respectively. The interviews identified a clear preference towards Thiel, however, with students finding such cadavers more flexible, sectile, and lifelike in appearance. However, some students had complaints around the quantity of fluid produced by the Thiel cadaver, and how the increased realism of the cadaver made the dissection experience more unpleasant for them.
Conclusions: The overall findings of this research indicated Thiel may offer some benefit over formalin for the purpose of cadaveric dissection in medical education, however some limitations to this method were raised and the limited number of participants posed challenges in determining a significant outcome from the data. More research would therefore be warranted, particularly large-scale quantitative studies, before making modifications to current practices
'For Women Scotland' [2025] UKSC 16, [2025] 2 WLR 879: ‘Paper certificates’, Gender Recognition Certificates and other legal documents
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The Forgotten Foundations of Feminist Legal Scholarship: Introduction
No full textIntroduction to the special section on the Forgotten Foundations of Feminist Legal Scholarship
Cojoining the Witch and the Cyborg in Feminist Theory: Revisiting Gender Related Violence Through Old and New Materialism
Full text linkThis article brings 'old' and 'new' feminist materialist insights into conversation, exploring their respective conceptualisations of gender through the motifs of the 'witch' and the 'cyborg'. The witch emphasises economic structures and capital's penetration into all spheres of life, foregrounding the material conditions of oppressed groups. The cyborg offers a more dispersed critique across entangled issues of economy, technology, and ecology, seeking transformative potential from within existing power relations through ambiguous affinities and everyday resistance. We apply these materialist lenses to examine law's framing of Gender Related Violence (GRV). Despite decades of legal measures addressing gender violence, fundamental questions remain unresolved: how to capture violence as both a specific, embodied experience and a phenomenon reproducing broader gender power; how to acknowledge violence's pervasiveness without conflating feminised subjects with passivity; and what forms of state intervention and redress are appropriate. These debates have intensified amid contemporary calls for a binding international convention on GRV. We explore how re-thinking GRV through old and new materialisms can contribute to feminist legal engagement with the definitional parameters of gendered violence, particularly regarding the normative framing of 'gendered violence', 'subjectivity and victimhood', and 'the role of state intervention’
'Decide One More Time': Prostitution and Sexual Intelligence in the Early Writings of Andrea Dworkin
Full text linkAndrea Dworkin’s first book, Woman Hating, was published in 1974, and written while Dworkin was in her 20s. It is experimental, literary, and ultimately hopeful. Right-Wing Women, which had its start as a Ms Magazine article in 1977, was expanded into a book in 1983. The most difficult of Dworkin’s works to find today, it was also her least favourite, owing to the academic conventions demanded by the publisher. It is dense, political and unflinching in its criticism. Despite their differences, these two books demonstrate the evolution of Dworkin’s thinking as she grapples with a central feminist contradiction – the need to remake the world while simultaneously living in it. Dworkin’s message in both books is that sexual liberation without sex equality is not the revolution we need. Women aligned with the male Left fail to understand both that Right-wing women are striking a clear-eyed bargain with their oppressors, but also that Left-wing women are in denial about doing exactly the same thing. Forty years later, the contemporary relevance of the analysis developed in these works is striking, even as the legal and material conditions of women’s lives have changed in many ways from the world that Dworkin describes. This article focuses on the resonance of Dworkin’s analysis for the current feminist debates around prostitution. Dworkin was consistent in her identification of prostitution as incompatible with women’s freedom and equality. Read together, these early writings help us to understand why so many women, on both the Right and the Left, believe that their equality can be achieved while other women continue to be prostituted, and why women continue to look the other way when faced with this expression of male sexual entitlement
Exploring the Highlights, Limitations and Possibilities of EU Citizenship as a Progressive Status for Gays and Lesbians
Full text linkAlthough the original treaties of the European Union (‘EU’) conceptualised the EU as a trade body, in recent years the competencies granted by Member States to the EU have expanded greatly, not least in the area of equality and non-discrimination. In response to criticisms about a democratic deficit, the concept of EU citizenship was introduced. This entails voting, free movement, residence and non-discrimination rights across Member States for EU citizens and their family members (who do not have to be EU citizens themselves). For non-mobile EU citizens the EU has had a huge influence in expanding non-discriminatory employment rights. Yet in order to be truly democratic the concept of citizenship needs to engage with all citizens in an equal manner. In contrast to the Brexit agenda which researchers consider to be readily aligned with hegemonic masculinity, the EU is portrayed as pro-feminist and lesbian and gay inclusive. This piece tests how much in reality EU citizenship includes those who do not conform with a heteronormative, liberal equality model. Whilst real progress has been made, many difficulties remain. EU soft law in this area offers hope for future development
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