Our speaker this evening is environmental and energy expert, Professor Chris Rhodes. Professor Rhodes will give an overall view of the peak oil problem and the lack of any technological fix to the consequent liquid fuels crisis.

After discussing resource supply problems in general, he will move onto the media hype over fracking etc. compared to true levels of gas and oil that might be exhumed, and then to the shortages of metals such as rare elements for electric cars and wind turbines. He will conclude that, as a result, technology isn’t going to be our salvation and so we need to adapt our behaviour, leading to thinking locally and Transition Towns as the final optimistic solution.

Professor Rhodes has a very informative website at www.fresh-lands.com.

Dr Pete Gladwell - clinical specialist physiotherapist in pain management at North Bristol NHS Trust.

Pete’s research identified the benefits that patients report from using TENS devices (electrical stimulators used for pain relief). The findings present some major challenges for researchers working in the area and, we think, throw up some challenges for health research more widely. For example, he found that there was a very poor match between the benefits reported by patients and what researchers have measured in previous research – the implication being that TENS might be shown to be ineffective when in fact we have just measured the wrong things. Similarly, one of the benefits reported was that TENS distracts people from pain… but how do you measure distraction? – as soon as you ask somebody about it, they aren’t distracted any more. The implications of his observations are that health researchers perhaps need to think again at how they measure outcomes to better capture the effects of specific health interventions.