I want to bring your attention to this one day symposium on the use of the arts in medical training. The setting for the symposium- the Barts and London- is an inspiration in itself. The format for the day invites the delegates to draw on and share their own experiences and ideas as well as to hear from invited speakers. 

Further information and booking details are available at

http://www.performingmedicine.com/om/season.htm

As I write, much of the information rich world is focussed on the precarious state of the highly interrelated global financial structures. For many others, the daily struggle to survive, coupled with lack of access to minute-to-minute updates about these unsettling events, means they remain unaware of the economic drama unfolding around the world. This, unfortunately, will not protect them from the inevitable fallout of these disturbing developments.

The relationship between health and poverty is well established. The reliance of a large proportion of the world’s population on cheap food has been brought into stark relief by  food riots in a number of countries, sparked by rising food prices and the hunger and fear this inevitably evokes. 

Even in so-called emerging markets- those parts of the world like China and India where growth far outstrips that in older more established industrial economies- there is rising concern about what a collapse of the financial system would mean for these fledging economies.

So as politicians in Washington struggle to find it within themselves to vote for an expensive bailout that might lose them their jobs come the November US elections, I wonder if it is anything other than naive to ask them to contemplate the human dimension, within and well beyond America, of their decisions. To echo a well worn metaphor, if America catches pneumonia not only will the world sneeze but many many people around the world will find themselves out of work, unable to eat and care for themselves and their families, and life expectancy for the poorest and most vulnerable in all parts of the world will shorten.  more…

Organised by their student section, this evening will undoubtedly prove one of the highlights of the RSM’s busy programme of events. Publicity material for the meeting promises an opportunity to “explore emotion and communication in a medical setting through theatre”. This enticing and still relatively novel approach to medical educational meetings will hopefully attract both the converts and the curious to what looks likely to be a provocative and lively evening. 

With Nell Dunn, the play’s author, Trevor Walker, the play’s director, TV and news presenter Anna Ford and Jed Mercuio, doctor turned author and screenwriter of TV series ‘Bodies’ taking part in a panel discussion after the staging of two ‘Cancer Tales’, this evening is surely a must for anyone within traveling distance interested in finding out what incorporating the arts and humanities into medical education means in action. more…

There are some plays that leave you, quite literally, breathless with awe.  Osage County is one of them. At 3 hours and 20 minutes, this remarkable play is longer than average, and so it’s a tribute to the brilliance of the script, staging, direction and acting that it nevertheless rushes by. Watching Osage County in New York this summer, I can’t have been the only member of the audience who would have happily stayed put, there and then, to watch it all over again.

Sex, drugs, and a dysfunctional family to rival any Tennessee Williams gave us, are all on offer in this Pulitzer and Tony Award^®winning American play. Written by Tracy Letts and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, Osage County comes to London from Broadway for just 8 weeks. Its reputation precedes it so doubtless it will sell out fast.

So, if you’re lucky enough to be nearby, visit  www.nationaltheatre.org.uk and book your tickets fast.

See you there!

This week there was good news for patients in England with an age-related eye condition that leads to blindness. This week, long after a new and effective drug treatment for a relatively common condition called wet macular degeneration became commercially available, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) ruled that it should be made available to NHS patients in England.

It’s easy to have the impression that most recent rulings from NICE have been negative, in the sense of declaring a new treatment insufficiently cost-effective to merit provision by the tax-funded National Health Service. So this positive ruling- allowing access to effective drugs- is to be welcomed. Nevertheless I found something rather disturbing in the tone of the media coverage of this news story and therein lies a medical humanities perspective. more…

Jointly organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine at University of Glasgow and the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, Glasgow (a research collaboration between Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Strathclyde), this conference should be of interest to all medical humanities scholars.

http://www.sshm.org/confs.html

The focus of the conference is an engagement with historical perspectives on how health has been defined, by whom, and- importantly- the motivations and objectives informing these choices of frame. An important aim of the conference is to “engage with and critique ‘governmentality’ as a tool of analysis in the history of medicine.” The idea of medicine as an instrument of social control is of course familiar to social historians of medicine, and, as evidenced by conferences like this, continues to be both provocative and informative. By contrast, most doctors are likely to have never, at least knowingly, encountered this way of thinking about the nature and purpose of medicine. more…

Few politicians in the UK would dare to argue publicly against the principle that those too ill to work deserve help from the the State. Nevertheless, in recent years, politicians have struck a chord with the public by highlighting the disincentives to work that are inherent in the UK disability benefits system. The main disincentive is financial, with the state providing more money to those who can’t work because they’re ill than to those for whom no job is available. This, coupled with the fact that for some people paid work still brings them within the threshold for receiving income support, means that for some people it pays to be too sick too work.

All matters far from my holidaying mind until I came across an article in the local newspaper, here in Oregon in the USA, entitled “Getting disability payments can be a fight to the death”.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1217564703119820.xml&col more…

One of the most powerful teaching tools available to educators is- for me- art. And one of the wonderful things about being a medical educator is the fact that so many of the world’s great art galleries and museums have- or are in the process of -making their collections freely available on-line. In this posting I’ll tell you about three of my favorite on-line collections in the hope that you’ll share yours with me. more…

In this posting, Nepalese medical educator and MH Editorial Advisory Board Member, Ravi Shankar, describes the educational background of students entering medical school in South Asia.

more…

To say that it is sometimes appropriate, even obligatory, for guidelines to be ignored will not make me any friends  amongst those campaigning for more equitable access to NHS funded IVF treatment. Nevertheless, and in spite of my discomfort with the inequitable access to IVF treatment experienced by people in different parts of the UK, I’d like to tell you why I think guidelines are made to be broken. more…