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Symptoms which might make your doctor suspect lung secondaries are breathlessness, cough (especially coughing up blood) and chest pain. Your doctor may well want to check your lungs even if you have none of these symptoms. This is because they are such a common site and because secondary deposits here may be quite big before they produce any symptoms. Also it is easy to check the lungs—firstly by clinical examination, and secondly with a chest X-ray. Your doctor examines the lungs firstly by tapping his or her fingers. The lungs should sound hollow because they should be full of air. If part of the lung is solid or filled with fluid, it won’t sound hollow. Next, your doctor listens with the stethoscope, to check the sound of your breathing. If the bronchial tubes are narrowed, a whistling sound may be heard through the stethoscope. If part of the lung is not working, the sounds of air moving in and out will be absent there. If the lining of the lung is roughened, a rubbing sound may be heard. Your doctor may ask you to say something—usually ‘ninety-nine’—while he or she listens through the stethoscope. This is because the sound of your voice travels better through solid lung than through fluid.

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Fat babies often grow up to be obese adults and the idea that a fat baby is a healthy baby is fast disappearing among parents.

Unfortunately, in the process, many parents have been made to feel guilty.

Recent advice to parents has been that the child should stay on the breast for as long as possible, the introduction of solids should be delayed and, when baby signals he is full, feeding should be discontinued.

This is still good advice, but may not prevent obesity.

A recent Canadian trial appears to indicate that differing feeding techniques seem to have little influence on whether a child gets fat or not.

What is suggested is that fat babies, like fat teenagers and adults, seem to have less activity than their thinner contemporaries.

I know that I, along with many doctors, have indicated disbelief when confronted by a grossly overweight individual who protests: “But doctor, I really don’t eat much.” This may be true more often than we were inclined to believe.

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