Dental decay | Wedding dresses | Cleaning the Garrick Club | Duane Eddy | Blocked loo logbooksPenny Mordaunt chose an unfortunate metaphor in referring to the Big Bad Wolf’s dentures in her attack on Labour’s supposed duplicity on the NHS (Politics live, 2 May). If the wolf had been reliant on NHS dentistry under this government, Little Red Riding Hood...

UK demand growing for beverages made from fungi, but experts dismiss innovations as ‘health products you don’t need’Sipping mushroom coffee sounds like a weird camping trip anecdote but more Britons are embracing this alternative morning pick-me-up as “mushroom mania” sweeps the high street.With the food industry eager to cash in on demand for “functional...

Throughout her life, Danyah Miller developed coping mechanisms to help deal with certain challenges. Would she have thrived if she had known about dyslexia, or would a label have limited her? Discovering that I have dyslexia, and most probably dyscalculia, later in my life has raised many questions for me, not least whether a childhood diagnosis would...

Beware what the fitness gurus tell you: the body has its limits. Perhaps that’s why orthopaedic waiting lists are so longI am preparing for an anaesthetist to sink a hypodermic needle into my back at a busy London hospital ahead of a scheduled surgery to replace my knee. Knowing this might be painful, I ask a fellow patient how he got his mind around...

As more NHS trusts in England report budget deficits health leaders warn that waiting lists will riseHospitals are being forced to cut medical staff, threatening their ability to care for patients, senior health leaders have warned.NHS trusts are reporting budget deficits after the chancellor Jeremy Hunt gave England’s health service £2.5bn extra funding,...

Lost documents prevented victims from finding out the truth, official inquiry toldDisastrous failures that caused the contaminated blood scandal were denied by ministers for decades after officials destroyed, lost and blocked access to key documents, memos submitted to the official inquiry reveal.Several batches of files involving the work of a blood...