After spending some time away from medicine, I return to find that there seems to be a surreptitious, mysterious pandemic infiltrating the junior doctors that practice medicine in the United Kingdom. The cause of this pandemic has largely been overlooked but recent research can now confirm the existence and rampancy of the condition, which can now […]
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Jeanette Glasser on “The Pains of Youth”
Intense and challenging, the National’s recent interpretation of “Pains of Youth” (which ran from October 2009 – January 2010) at the Cottesloe, under the skilful direction of Katie Mitchell, has the audience gripped throughout. It is a fast-paced play about medical students in Vienna in the early 1920s – their fraught, turbulent psyches trying to […]
Why David’s Gray death was predictable
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 […]
Whose autonomy is it anyway? Drawing back the curtain
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 […]
Believing Without Seeing
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 […]
“In Praise of Hypochondria” by Miles Little and Claire Hooker
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 […]
Abortion, human rights, professionals duties, and moral values: discuss.
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 […]
In Sickness and In Health
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. […]
Saving Momma Boone’s Blushes: a Cutting Edge look at Obese Bodies
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 […]
Establishing a Medical Humanities in Nepal with the help of a FAIMER Fellowship by Ravi Shankar
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 […]