Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

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  By Andrew Aloia BBC Sport Last updated on 11 October 2021 11 October 2021 . From the section Football Watson was a trailblazer who helped transform how football was played There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. And yet today, 100 years on from his death aged 64, Watson remains something of an enigma, the picture built around him a fractured one. His grainy, faded, sepia image evokes many differen...

X-Ray Reveals Hundreds of Gold Needles in Woman's Knees


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Acupuncture needles were left in this woman's knee after treatment. 


When doctors examined an X-ray image of the knees of a woman experiencing severe joint pain, they found a gold mine: hundreds of tiny gold acupuncture needles left in her tissue.
The 65-year-old South Korean woman had previously been diagnosed with osteoarthritis, a condition in which the cartilage and bones within the joints degrade, causing pain and stiffness. But when pain relievers and anti-inflammatory drugs didn't alleviate the pain in her knees and only caused stomach discomfort, she had turned to acupuncture, the doctors wrote last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Acupuncture is an alternative medical practice that uses needles to purportedly stimulate certain points on the body, to alleviate pain or to treat various diseases.
In the woman's acupuncture treatment, the needles, which were presumably made of gold, were intentionally left in her tissue for continued stimulation, according to the report. [14 Oddest Medical Case Reports]
However, leaving the needles, or any objects, in the body may not be such a good idea, said Dr. Ali Guermazi, a professor of radiology at Boston University, who wasn't involved with the case. Foreign objects left inside the body can lead to inflammation, abscesses and infection.
It could also make it hard for a doctor to read an X-ray. "The needles may obscure some of the anatomy," Guermazi said. [See Image]
"The human body wants to get rid of the foreign object," Guermazi said. "It starts with some mechanism of defense, for example inflammation and forming [fibrous tissue] around the object."
Needles left in the body can cause other challenges, too. "The patient can't go into an MRI because needles left in the body may move, and damage an artery," Guermazi said.
Little evidence supports the idea that treating medical conditions with acupuncture actually works. However, the practice is widely used as a treatment for painful joints, and the insertion of pieces of sterile gold threads around the joint is a common treatment for arthritis in Asian countries, according to the new report.
In the United States, an estimated 3.1 million U.S. adults and 150,000 children were treated with acupuncture in 2007, according to a survey by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

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