Stephen McDonnell

When they amputate a limb, they also cut nerves. And when you injure nerves, the chance of someone having pain that doesn't go away is much higher than when tissue is injured. And so hydro dissection involves using ultrasound to inject very high volumes of fluid. It could be local anesthetic, could involve steroid, saline, in this case, a sugar solution, and it breaks up scar tissue.

It can improve blood flow to the patient. scarred nerves that are not receiving blood flow. It could wash out if it's done early on calcifications that can form and be painful. It can stop these nerve endings from spontaneously firing and it can release them when they're scarred down.

we know that outcomes are better for acute pain than for chronic pain. So some of the potential advantages for doing this early is like when calcifications form, they're probably extremely difficult to wash out if it's late. And the studies are mixed, like when they use high volume washouts with fluid, whether it can prevent calcifications. But the other thing that happens with chronic pain

is that your nervous system becomes more sensitized and that becomes really, really difficult to treat.

They've studied it for chronic pain from tissue injury and they've studied it for neuropathic pain or pain that follows injuries to nerves. And the results are very auspicious, but I will say the studies are not super large and super high quality.

The potential is definitely there.

A lot of people would be scratching their heads looking at where the world's going at the moment with the way the Trump administration is throwing trade relations everywhere into chaos and wonder how can the Chinese government be this confident.

I've just come from the great hall of the people and it'd be crazy to be ignoring the elephant in the room. I think every Chinese person who heard that speech would know what he's referring to there. I mean, why is this especially a problem for China? I mean, just have a look at the Chinese economy. Huge areas where they've got to deal with these problems.

The ongoing property crisis, youth unemployment, local government debt, sluggish consumer confidence. Chinese people don't have enough confidence in the economy, saving too much, not spending enough. Now, the areas where the economy is doing pretty well, electric vehicles, solar panels, new tech. People all know about DeepSeek and TikTok. This is all export-driven stuff.

And so what the Chinese government doesn't need now is a renewed trade war with the US, or anyone else for that matter, when these bright light areas of the economy are reliant on exports. And yet they're still saying they're going to achieve around 5% growth this year.

A lot of people would be scratching their heads looking at where the world's going at the moment with the way the Trump administration is throwing trade relations everywhere into chaos and wonder how can the Chinese government be this confident. I mean, for example... One thing it really needs to do is to get domestic consumption going.

Interestingly, and we look at the tea leaves here in China, the word consumption was mentioned 31 times in the speech today as opposed to 21 times last year. Now, you might think, well, why does that matter? Well, it shows that this problem of building up greater consumer confidence is at the forefront of the minds of the Communist Party.

And, you know, a decade ago, they said there was going to be this shift towards consumerism. an economy reliant much more on domestic consumer confidence, domestic consumer spending. But it hasn't panned out that way.

To attempt to encourage this, they've had financial incentives to switch out your old clapped-out car, to swap your old appliances for new ones, cash for clunkers, as it's being referred to. They're going to allow a greater proportion of the GDP to be caught up in debt, so the deficit-to-GDP ratio has gone up. and yet not really much change to China's social safety net provisions.

Many economists are saying the way to fix this is to put more money into the hands of ordinary households, and that way they'll spend some more. And yet really, this time round, not a lot on that front, and so there's still a lot more work to do.

No sign at all that Beijing will be caving in following the threats from Donald Trump. I mean, it's funny, I saw those comments from him overnight and it did strike me as wishful thinking on his part if he just thought the Chinese government was going to turn on this so quickly, especially when they're accusing the US of blackmail. They've been ridiculing the whole idea of...

that the original Trump tariffs were reciprocal anyway, saying that this is the act of a bully. They're saying that if Donald Trump makes good on his latest threat, well, they've got their own countermeasures, which they'll reveal. So how it might play out over the next couple of days, well, as you mentioned, today's the deadline. China isn't backing down.

So we're going to see another 50% tariff placed on all Chinese goods going into the US. That brings it up to 104%. I mean, it's quite high. So then we're going to have some sort of countermeasures from China. These countermeasures obviously are going to hit... Any US companies that want to sell into the huge Chinese market hurt US consumers.

But also, you know, it's interesting to think of what they might be. There's a journalist from Xinhua here, Xinhua Wire Service, who on his private social media account has said he's been told that what it could include is... well, includes significant increases on US agricultural products, so soybeans and sorghum, a complete ban on the import of US poultry into China.

Now, all of that's going to hit straight into the Trump heartland. a suspension of Sino-US cooperation on fentanyl-related issues and a ban on the import of all US movies into China. So no sign it's going to slow down this trade war.

You know, of course, people want to be able to buy stuff from the US and they've said they'll change their spending patterns. But really, there's pretty good Chinese electronic goods now, you know, cars and what have you. So they don't necessarily need the products from the US. I don't think it's such a nationalist response here, at least not yet. It's more just based on price.

And if these US goods are priced out of the market, people just won't buy them because they've got other alternatives.

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Die Ärzte der 4. Military Medical University in Xi'an haben ihre Studie im Journal of Nature veröffentlicht. Sie sagen, sie hätten ein Blut von einem genetisch modifizierten Pferd in einen körperlosen Menschen transplantiert. Apparently it had six edited genes to make it a better donor.

After monitoring the blood flow, bile production, immune response, they're saying it functioned really well and crucially was smoothly secreting bile. Now one of the problems with livers, unlike other organs, is they do multiple things. Clean blood, breakdown, alcohol and other things in the body and produce bile. So it's made it a technically very difficult thing to do. But for the first time,

Such a transplant of a liver from one of these genetically modified pigs has been, in their words, successful into a human. Now, the human, obviously a brain dead human, the family had agreed to this and the trial was terminated after 10 days at the request of the family. Das ist eine große Interesse in der medizinischen Welt.

Schau dir die Ärzte auf der Welt an und sie sagen, wie unglaublich das ist. Sie sagen auch, dass es ein großer ersten Schritt ist. Das bedeutet nicht, dass wir jetzt bereit sind, mit diesen Lebern direkt in die Menschen zu gehen. Nicht nur große Anforderungen, sondern große und wachsende Anforderungen.

Und es ist ein noch größeres Problem in einem Ort wie China, wo es für verschiedene kulturelle Gründe nicht so viele Donationen gibt. Wenn du deine Fahrradlizenz oder so schickst, dann sagst du, ich werde meine Körperpartien donatieren, wenn ich sterben werde. Das ist ziemlich klein, viel zu klein in einem Ort wie China. Also suchen sie andere Optionen.

Also ja, natürlich sind die Menschen am meisten gespannt auf die Möglichkeit, that if a liver from genetically modified pigs could be developed to routinely be placed into humans, well, it would be a massive scientific breakthrough.

A lot of people have asked me, did you actually watch it, Mayor? And the answer is yes. I legitimately view this as a public safety threat.

People are scared. They fear being themselves. They fear violence. They fear retribution.

Well, it's still very early in the morning here in Beijing, but no doubt what the Chinese government will say is that, look, other countries shouldn't be expected to feel grateful just because Donald Trump eased up on some of the chaos that he's responsible for in the first place.

They'll also say that everything they've been saying to this point about the damaging nature of tariffs remains true today, perhaps even more so. For ordinary Chinese people, I think what they'll take from this is that Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass es an irgendeinem Punkt zwischen Beijing und Washington geschlossen wird. Nun, die Frage ist, woher der Trigger kommt.

In der Zwischenzeit weiß Beijing, dass Donald Trump versuchen wird, sie zu wecken, um China als den schlechten Mann in diesem Szenario zu verleihen. Ich denke, sie versuchen wahrscheinlich, es auszuweichen, bis das passiert. while the pantomime, as they would see it, plays out in Washington, and then that eventually an off-ramp will present itself and they'll take it.

The tariffs going both ways now from China to the US are so high anyway, it kind of wouldn't matter how much you raise them, according to some analysts. It's already so damaging for any company that wants to trade either way. The pressure is already there. Obviously the damage is going to cut both ways and pressure is going to come to bear both ways.

Beijing has argued that it can, like I say, it's been telling its own people that it can ride this out, just as I suppose Donald Trump is saying the same to his people.

Well, these significant new tariffs on Chinese goods entering the US come off the back of the significant tariffs on Chinese goods, which were already in place, care of the Trump administration. Now, naturally, they're going to hurt the ability of Chinese companies to sell stuff into America. Then Beijing's response is naturally going to hurt the ability of China

US companies to sell stuff into this huge market. But in a strange way, it's also a bit of a gift for Xi Jinping because he's portraying this country as the free trade country, as the backer of multilateral institutions. And just last week, China's leader was sitting down in this city with the CEOs of global corporations and saying, well, look at the US under Donald Trump and look at us

We're open for business, and every time Donald Trump does something like this, it makes that job easier and easier for him.

The scene in front of me is being repeated right across China today, and in fact every day. Parents wait outside the gates of a school to pick up their kids. They feel the need to protect their children and don't want to risk anything going wrong if they were to make their own way home on, say, public transport.

But such fears have only heightened lately, with schools being targeted by those seeking to violently take out revenge on society for a range of grievances. This is all making for some pretty grim introspection, as people here ask what's going wrong with Chinese society that's causing such bloody, desperate attention-seeking.

Other parents tell us they're not so worried because the number of recent mass attacks in China has been statistically small. George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University's China Centre, says that the relatively small number of mass killings doesn't reflect the overall build-up of tensions, which seems undeniable.

What are being referred to here as revenge on society attacks are not new in China. But this year, there have been so many that they've been hard to keep track of. On 11 November, there was dismay as footage spread of a 62-year-old man driving his car into those exercising outside a sports stadium in Zhuhai, killing at least 35 people who'd been jogging or dancing outdoors.

Police said he'd been unhappy with his divorce settlement. Days later, another car was being driven into children outside their primary school in Chengde, Hunan. After the vehicle stopped, locals smashed in its windows, then bashed the driver and held the man down until police could get there. And on and on the list goes.

Lynette Ong is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

With tension increasing in Chinese society, the government has also been criticised for not providing enough counselling services for those in distress. People feel they can't turn to the courts because they're seen as inefficient and only loyal to the party. With state-controlled media, it mostly won't air people's stories if they make high-level officials look bad.

For now, the stress points seem likely to keep opening even wider. The only question is just how much pressure this might bring to bear on social order.

They can enforce their rules, that's fine by me, and my response is then I'm out.

And what did it feel like, David, back then, your 12-year-old son helping to try to save your life?

He saved your life, not just once, but twice. So tell me what's happened more recently.

David, what a beautiful thing your son is doing for you. The obvious question is, were you ever in any doubt of taking it from your son in case he needed both kidneys in later life?

He tells me five things a day. Does he?

Beijing, interestingly, hasn't gone for all U.S. goods, but targeted products which really hit rural communities, actually. So it's, for example, 10 or 15 percent tariffs on everything from chicken, seafood, soybeans, cotton. Now, the reason, of course, you'd be going after these areas of the U.S. community is because they're backing Donald Trump. There's people who voted for Donald Trump.

And the U.S. president said, oh, no worries. You can all just sell more things inside the U.S. Well, I'm sure those sections of the US farming community would also like to be able to have the opportunity to sell their produce into the massive Chinese market and having tariffs placed on them. Well, depending on the industry, that could be really terrible for them.

And also over the last 24 hours, China has announced tariffs on similar goods from Canada. Now, this is in response to Canada putting tariffs on electric cars from China. And to give you an idea of what a big deal that might be for Canada, like 40% of China's beans come from Canada. So that's huge.

Yeah, you're right. Consumers are the ones who are going to pay for it. I mean, it's funny. Donald Trump seems to be making out when he speaks to people in the US that somehow or other, other countries are going to be paying these tariffs. No, it's the US consumers that pay those tariffs if they want those goods available to them. I'll tell you who else it hurts.

Imagine you're a company in the US and you have some components, for example, that come from China. Well, then you've got to pay the tariffs as well. That makes your equipment, even though it's built in the US, more expensive because some parts of that machinery have potentially come from China.

So, you know, it just keeps spreading and spreading as far as you like because, as people know, the global economy, it's just so interlocked these days. And so once you start hitting tariffs on one portion of it, well, it just flows from one to the other.

And, of course, the other thing is that, I mean, it's funny, Donald Trump has said that he's going to whack tariffs on anyone who responds to his tariffs with their own tariffs. Well, then it just keeps escalating because what does he think other countries are going to do, just sit back and cop it? Of course they're not.

And so especially a country like this, the might of China, well, really, they've been relatively modest at the moment in what they've opposed on U.S. goods and they're keeping their powder dry. So there's plenty more China could do in terms of hurting U.S. exports if Beijing decided that it wanted to go down that road.