Purpose: The primary aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of conducting a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of kinesiology tape (KT) and usual care versus usual care alone in the treatment of breast lymphoedema (BLE). Methods: Fourteen participants with BLE were randomly assigned to either the KT and usual care group or usual care alone group. Both groups received three sessions of manual lymphatic drainage (MLD) once per week for three weeks, with the KT group additionally wearing the KT for two seven-day periods in between MLD sessions. Safety and acceptability of the KT were assessed by recording adverse events, skin changes and compliance with KT. Outcomes included were: ease of recruitment, attrition and acceptability of KT, percentage breast tissue water, patient-reported breast heaviness/fullness, breast discomfort and breast redness. Results: Recruitment for this study was an average of 2.8 participants per month. There were no dropouts from either group. No adverse events or major skin side effects were recorded in either group. Minor skin redness was the most common dermal change (n=5). Compliance with KT was excellent. Percentage tissue water in the worst affected breast quadrant reduced, on average, by 15.14% and 10.43% in both the KT group and the usual care group respectively. Conclusion: This feasibility RCT into the use of KT in BLE has shown that recruitment to a larger scale RCT is feasible. It has been demonstrated that KT is a safe and acceptable intervention with no adverse events and minor dermal changes. A large, multi-centred RCT is now necessary to accurately assess the effect of KT in BLE.

Nature of a cleare and equall glasse, wherein the beames of things should refl ect according to their true incidence. 1 Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica: or, Enquiries into very many Received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths, more commonly known as Vulgar Errors, was published in 1646 and reissued in fi ve successive editions in the author's lifetime. Within Pseudodoxia's "cabinet of curiosity", three chapters are devoted to the discussion of blackness (book VI, chapters X "Of the Blacknesse of Negroes", XI "Of the same" and XII "A digression concerning Blacknesse") which, though at times 'plundered for choice quotations', 2 have yet to receive full exposition and analysis. 3 Mary Baine Campbell offers the most detailed study of these chapters to date, but limits her analysis of Browne's representation of blackness to eight pages. 4 Moreover, in keeping with Joan Bennett's note that only two chapters in Pseudodoxia discuss the blackness of Negroes, Campbell also discounts Chapter XII; she says that in this chapter Browne 'addresses the general referent of "Blackness", separating it

This essay argues that the textual/sexual ethos of Metempsychosis is most evidenced in Donne's use of rhetorical strategies and mnemonic devices to engage the reader. Metempsychosis is about sex, poetry and ethics, and incorporates notions of both spiritual transcendence and physical immanence. In this poem Donne narrates the soul's various erotic exploits in its metamorphic journey "from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat [sic], to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book" (Epistle 34-9). The strategies of reading Donne inscribes in Metempsychosis encourage the ideal (male) reader to recognize the soul's appetitive bodily exploits as part of his own bestial heritage. This recognition, which depends on the reader's acceptance of the interdependence of body and soul in the formation of self, has salvationist possibilities. However Donne's depiction of the soul's physical adventures manifests a deep, if ambivalent, commitment to the sexual body that challenges, but does not obliterate, the spiritual ethos of his poem.

No abstract

No abstract