#760 - To Probe (With Transcript)

In Today's Podcast to help you learn English: The verb and noun "Probe". Antidepressants are being probed by the Government. Cheers Stars, Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson begin a new podcast. Tom Sellick from Magnum PI writes a Book Jurors in the UK get offered Counselling. Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yuC-p53_L5WmIzvQkNzlOzrZdiOQHjNAvfHCJQL-1xw/edit?usp=sharing Extract: Hello everyone and welcome again to another Teacher Joseph Podcast. Today's phrase is to be probed or to probe. Now this literally means when you take a mechanical instrument and you prod it against something. So let me just give you some examples.  So imagine you're a doctor and someone comes to you and says, oh, I have this big thing on my arm, like a spot or a blemish, and you get your tool and you start to push it to see what's in there. Maybe you want to burst it just to see what's there. Also, if you work in a factory and there's a big machine and it's not working properly, you can probe it, you can look around it, you can get your tools out. You can try to work out why it's not working for you. That is to probe or in the passive voice you can say that the machine is being probed by the boss. Now, the most common way to use this is as a metaphor. When something breaks down, whether it's a rule or a policy or a government  issue, or even when people are not working to their capacity what they could be doing. There's often a probe, and in this case it means like an investigation as to why something isn't working the way that it should.  So today's main news story says  Prozac is among 30 drugs to be probed over some kind of link to suicide and self-harm. And we're going to read through this story together. And this story today is from the British newspaper. The Independent. Okay. It says. “Concerns raised by families over the safety of most commonly used antidepressants force an official review”. Now let me just explain a little bit there. So first of all antidepressants or antidepressants. That's the medication some people take to stop them being depressed. It says concerns raised by families over the safety of the most commonly used antidepressants. So the most common ones, okay, like Prozac. There’s being concerns raised by families over their safety.  because these, uh, medicines are being given to everyone and the story continues, that they're being given to children as young as four years old. 1s So let's continue reading this. It says “more than 30 of the most common antidepressants prescribed in the UK are to be reviewed by the medicines regulator, as figures point to hundreds of deaths linked to suicide and self-harm among people taking them.  The medicines, which include Prozac, will be looked at by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.  And it will look into the effectiveness of the warnings which these medicines carry”. So, you know, these medicines often have a warning on them. So it doesn't say they're going to remove the medicines. It looks like they're going to be changing the warning on them. It says there were 85 million prescriptions. That's the note from the doctor... prescribed…that's the verb we use when the doctor gives medicine. There were 85 million prescriptions for antidepressants in England in 2022. 23. That's up from 58 million in 2015. 2016. So yeah, big concerns there over Prozac. So we'll just read that first part again.  “Concerns raised by families over the safety. of the most commonly used antidepressants forces an official review by the government after hundreds of these things have been prescribed some to children as young as four years old”.