Why David’s Gray death was predictable
5 Feb, 10 | by Deborah Kirklin
A lot has been written recently about the 2004 contract that allowed GPs to opt out of providing care to their patients at night or on the weekend. And about the fact that GPs are now paid more for doing less than ever before. I’m old enough to remember doing nights and weekends on-call and visiting elderly patients on a regular basis in their own homes with the aim of keeping them well. And then I had a few children, and worked part-time for a while, and then the new contract came in, and GPs no longer did their own on-call, and the requirement to provide enough appointments in surgery, along with the obligation to ensure that every action and thought was entered on the computer meant there was less and less time to do other things. Things like visiting elderly people who weren’t ill as a means of keeping them well and providing them with the human contact we all need to thrive.
Whose autonomy is it anyway? Drawing back the curtain
3 Feb, 10 | by Deborah Kirklin
A few weeks ago our first year students were thinking about patient confidentiality and it was my task to facilitate the process. The group I was with were from diverse cultural backgrounds and from several different countries, including the UK. Whilst they all readily grasped the idea of respecting confidentiality as a way of respecting autonomy, some came from cultures where doing so was less important than it is for the average UK patient. Last weekend, visiting an elderly relative in hospital in Germany, I was reminded of that conversation.
Believing Without Seeing
11 Jan, 10 | by aahmad
Esref Armagan was born blind in Ankara, Turkey. He has now become a famous artist due to his sheer talent and also due to certain significant and unusual reasons. His art displays the colour, vividness, light, dark, imagination and perspective that we are used to considering as the gifts of sight. Esref is changing the meaning of what it is to see the world.
Whilst taking part in a documentary with the University of Toronto, he exclaimed: “why would I want to see when I can see so much more with my hands?” These words fall upon us at a time where medicine is advancing through producing images of our body that otherwise we are blind to, such as fMRI, X-Rays, CT scans. We are looking into how we can perceive the human body in its finest detail. Our direction of what it means to achieve the fullest understanding of the internal physical world of the body is engaged with finding what is hidden. more…
“In Praise of Hypochondria” by Miles Little and Claire Hooker
17 Dec, 09 | by Deborah Kirklin
We have been discussing the role of the humanities in medical education, and the need to account for what one of us calls ‘medical paranoia’. By this we mean the tendency that medical students (and practising doctors) have to think that they have developed serious illnesses, making self-diagnoses frequently based on vague suggestions rather than hard evidence. We feel that it is time to reflect on the significance, meaning and potential utility of this phenomenon. more…
Abortion, human rights, professionals duties, and moral values: discuss.
11 Dec, 09 | by Deborah Kirklin
Yesterday, three women from the Republic of Ireland took a case to the European Court of Human Rights. The women argued that Ireland’s abortion law-whereby abortion is permitted only if the woman’ life is endangered-violates their human rights. Although this story only made it to page 54 of The Times newspaper I’m guessing it will be of higher interest to many of Ireland’s women, 6,000 of whom make expensive, secretive, and potentially hazardous journeys to the UK each year in search of the abortion which potentially makes them subject to life imprisonment back home in Ireland.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6950950.ece
Finding this story, for the second time, in The Times took me a while as I vainly searched in the ‘News” section only to realise I needed to look instead in the “World News”. An indication perhaps of how close the people of the UK and Ireland are in so many ways despite our shared and troubled history. A reminder also of how illusory that sense of closeness is, reflected all too starkly in the different approaches adopted by the UK and Ireland to the issue of abortion. And timely, as, by sheer coincidence, I facilitated, on the same day that the case came to court, a discussion amongst eleven first year medical students about legal, professional and moral rights and duties. more…
In Sickness and In Health
10 Dec, 09 | by aahmad
Crossing borders always presents the potential for a hold-up. When I prepared to cross the border from Macedonia (or Skopje if you are Greek), into the tiny nation of Kosovo, preparation was the key. I had one mission: to visit the hospital in the capital, Pristina. I travelled by car to the border where a contact of mine in Macedonia had arranged for another car to meet me and drive me across to the other side. I would be travelling with an ethnic Albanian who was well-versed in dealing with the officials. Macedonia has experienced its war wounds in recent years but in Kosovo these wounds are healing but very visable. Lines of hardship tell the story of the past across many faces that I saw. more…
Saving Momma Boone’s Blushes: a Cutting Edge look at Obese Bodies
8 Dec, 09 | by Deborah Kirklin
Are you watching carefully? Then I’ll begin. I’ll show you how you think and feel about fat bodies. Really fat bodies, the one’s that get doctors and politicians vexed, the ones that their owners sometimes hide away from public view, the ones that no one wants to own. Make yourself comfortable, line up those TV-time snacks, and settle in for this week’s episode of Nip/Tuck, because it’s time to be educated on just what fat means. All that and more from one of the more popular of the American medical soaps, if, that is, the authors of a paper published in the December issue of Medical Humanities are to be believed.
Establishing a Medical Humanities in Nepal with the help of a FAIMER Fellowship by Ravi Shankar
7 Dec, 09 | by Deborah Kirklin
In this guest posting, Dr Ravi Shankar tells us how a FAIMAR Fellowship help him to develop and deliver a medical humanities curriculum in Nepal. Ravi writes…
Dr. Badyal, my good friend during my postgraduate residency e-mailed me in late January 2007 informing about a FAIMER fellowship in South Asia. At that time my knowledge and ideas about FAIMER were nebulous. I knew that it was an American organization involved in international medical education. more…
Where Medicine Tells a Story …
5 Dec, 09 | by aahmad
Across many African traditions, children are taught to repeat the names of their ancestors as far back as the mind can remember. These children will not have a sense of time in the way that time dictates the movements of every possible action in the West. Instead, the legacy of their ancestors seeps into their play and family-life and schooling. Death becomes a boundary removed. more…
MH’s Jane Austen Research Paper Universally Acknowledged
5 Dec, 09 | by Deborah Kirklin
The latest issue of Medical Humanities, published on December 1st, features an original paper in which KG White argues that tuberculosis, and not Addison’s Disease, may have killed Jane Austen, one of the world’s favourite authors. The popular appeal of stories about Austen was evidenced by the rapid take up of this story by the world’s press with newspaper and broadcast media keen to report this latest twist in the tale of an altogether remarkable women.
