Here’s one for your diary, an exhibition of images by Deborah Padfield, in collaboration with patients & clinicians at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, entitled Can you see Pain? Anyone who knows Deborah’s work from her previous exhibition and book entitled Perceptions of Pain won’t want to miss this.

http://www.dewilewispublishing.com/PHOTOGRAPHY/Perceptions.html more…

I recently attended the 2nd Annual Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Symposium, which was held at Warwick Medical School and hosted by Professor Donald Singer and Associate Professor Michael Hulse. During the day, a group of researchers and clinicians from a variety of backgrounds gathered to explore the role of poetry in the discourse of medicine, including renowned poets, Marilyn Hacker and Gwyneth Lewis.

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Having recently visited some of the most modern hospitals in the world, I have been struck by the style of their architecture. There seems to be a changing face of medicine, whereby the expressions of the building housing the body of medicine mirror certain conceptualizations of the human body. I began to wonder how does this affect our experience of ourselves in both health and illness. From the compartmentalized, sterile structures of cosmopolitan cities to the shacks of mountainside shamans, what are the similiarities and differences to be found?

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Perhaps, one form of illness where telling a story of the body is most evident is in respect to mental health.

Yesterday’s ruling by the High Court’s Court of Protection, that a 69 year old lady with severe schizophrenia must receive the medical treatment for a prolapsed womb, which she has been strongly refusing and protesting against, reveals the battle that one person’s voice can hold.

Is it pathology to not fight the presence of pathology in the body?

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The month of Ramadan is drawing to a close. During this time, Muslims from every terrain, from the hottest countries, to the most Westernised societies, have been involved in a shared yet equally an exclusive passage of religious rites.

Ramadan is a unique time in the Islamic year. For a period of one month, the spiritual attire of a pious Muslim is found in the exercise of fasting. With the exception of the sick, a Muslim is forbidden to eat or drink during the hours between sunrise and sundown.

The routine is one that involves the highest degrees of self-discipline and control. Through such rituals, there becomes a higher degree and awareness of spirituality. With the removal of a conscious acknowledgement of bodily needs, there is space for reflection and prayer. However, the object of effect is the human body. Awareness of the soul can be attained only through the regulation of the human body. Thus, there is almost a paradoxical relationship between the body and the soul during fasting.

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Memories

This piece is a reflection on an article from the New York Times this week. The story is told about a large family from Colombia, and their many relatives who have developed early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The case has been baffling doctors and scientists, both in Colombia and the United States.

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Lesotho is one of the highest countries and is entirely landlocked by South Africa. 40% of Lesotho’s population survives on less than $1.25 a day. In centuries gone by, the people of Lesotho were driven high up into the mountains by the Xhosa and Zulu people and have repeated a solitary and isolated life, mainly farming, ever since. However, Lesotho is also experiencing one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDs infection rates in the world. This is their modern day crisis. What does survival mean in this situation? How can we conform to a meaning of being human when our human situations differ so dramatically?

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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.

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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…

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…