Michael Carrick's injury no surprise to malehealth

If you're regular malehealth reader you may have been expecting Michael Carrick to fracture a metatarsal bone in his foot this week-end. The England and Manchester United midfielder fits the profile exactly. Want to know who will be next? It's not too late to get the inside story on the great metatarsal mystery

Are you enjoying longer GP opening hours?

More and more GPs are opening for extended hours. According to the Department of Health, 45% of practices are now offering something more than just the good old 9-5. But there are still areas of the country where nothing much is happening. What's your experience of extended opening hours. How many GPs are now open on Saturdays and how many are offering extended hours on one, two, three or more days a week? Let the MHF know.

Malehealth manages to mention Murray's midnight miracle

Still recovering from Andy Murray's sensational semi-final win over Rafael Nadal at the US Open? A four-set victory over the man who won in Paris, won at Wimbledon and won in Beijing is just the sort of thing British tennis needs to get us all picking up the racket again.

If you're tempted then you'll want to check out one of the questions answered by our fitness columnist Sales Sharks coach Scott Pearson in this month's column: what are the best exercises to get fit to play tennis? I'm 41 and haven't done much sport for ten years. Just what you need.

We've also got an interview with the last British male to make a Grand Slam final outside the USA. John Lloyd made the Australian Open final in 1977, but I must admit that this interview is about his gut problems and probiotics! Still, if your stomach's churning with excitement over Murray's miracles …

Men are hypocrites about sex? That's not news!

Yesterday we reported the government's survey showing public support for its idea of making paying for sex illegal. We highlighted the fact that many men have hypocritical attitudes to prostitution: happy for their male relatives to pay for it, unhappy for their female relatives to sell it. Overnight one of our American readers took us to task over this. 'Men are hypocritical about women and sex?,' she thundered sarcastically. 'Ya sure? Oh the shock.'

What do you think? Are we daft to even raise this topic? Will men always be hormonally hewn hypocrites and half-wits about this subject or is a sex industry that doesn't exploit men or women possible?

Essential reading for Cristiano Ronaldo

Wow, where did August go? Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo must be thinking the same thing. One minute the talk was all of his supposed transfer to Real Madrid. The next, the season begins and he's still recovering from a knee operation and unable to play for anyone.

I don't know if the UEFA European Club Footballer of the Year is a regular reader of malehealth but he won't like this month's lead feature which is about the great metatarsal mystery. Osteopath Don Blyth explains why the humble foot-bone, first put on the map by David Beckham, has become the bane of so many professional footballers lives. His conclusion is that on his return Cristiano is a prime candidate for a metatarsal injury himself. Why? Well, it's nothing to do with those fancy-dan boots. Check it out.

Is the US's HPV vaccine safe enough?

The US Food and Drug Administration has released documents suggesting that in the two years since the HPV vaccine Gardasil was introduced in the country 18-20 women have died as a result. During that time 8 million women have been vaccinated. That suggests the chance of dying from the vaccine is very roughly around 1 in 500,000.

You've 28 times more chance of dying from Gardasil than of winning the UK national lottery. It's not quite as simple as that since the UK is using a different vaccine - Cervarix - for which I haven't seen the side-effects data but you see the point.

The vaccine protects women against HPV which causes cervical cancer. The disease can already be detected using a smear test while HPV transmission can be reduced by practising safe sex.

But let's put these considerations aside for a moment. The big question is: vaccine programmes only work if pretty much everyone is vaccinated, is it acceptable for George Bush - or Gordon Brown - to ask citizens to run a 500,000-1 risk?

Celebrity +hot topic +sex = internet hit

Angelina Jolie +twins +dollars. Cristiano Ronaldo +slavery +diving. David Cameron +smug grin -policy. We are told that the best way to get your stories picked up on the internet is to make sure there's plenty of search-engine friendly words in there. Celebrity names. Hot news topics. Tenuous links to sex.

So even if your story is about double-entry book-keeping (if such a thing still exists in the spreadsheet age), you need to begin the first paragraph with: 'Rather than joining a late night love nest at the Hague with Radovan Karadžić or reading Hello! magazine, the accountants of Barack Obama, Jenifer Aniston and Madonna will be concerned about the hottest, sexiest development in double-entry book-keeping'. Could we do that sort of thing on malehealth? Or would you find us just a little less trustworthy when you had an important health question to ask?

OK, stories on the drug-related song lyrics of French president Nicolas Sarkozy's former nude model wife Carla Bruni might be going too far - even if they are vaguely health-related - but we could do more with the website (and with the Men's Health Forum's own website). The technology they're built on is stone age by the standards of the web and, very limited resources permitting, we're looking to make improvements. Have a look at the site and let us know what you'd like to see.

As well as the site itself, I'd particularly like to know whether we should be trying to get our content out there on other people's sites whether as links, news feeds or via social networking portals. It might help to get the site better known but it takes time. Would our limited time be better spent developing our articles so that when someone does type a health concern into a search engine, we've got material on it? That's a question I can't make my mind up on. What do you think?