I recently attended the funeral of the local parish priest and this led me to consider many of the similarities between what I do in medicine and the role of the ‘Parish Priest’ as well as the ‘misrepresentation’ of 21st medicine. I work in intensive care, a setting of immense emotional stress for patients and […]
Tag: Blog
‘The Other Side of the Fence’ by Michael Corbo
Medical student Michael Corbo reflects on what he’s learnt from being a patient. I am sitting on a green chair in the waiting room. I have been sitting here for hours, but it feels like it has been days. I keep looking at the clock on the wall beside me. The room is filled with […]
Hearing Voices
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 […]
LRB and Alan Bennett’s Greening of Mrs Donaldson
London Review of Books for 9 Sept 2010 has interesting short story by Alan Bennett about a middle aged widower who, after becoming a landlady to medical students, becomes a demonstration patient. The doctor in charge of the medical students exhibits many of the unfortunate characteristics that greater exposure to the patient’s POV is designed […]
A Doctor’s Language
If it is true what the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says, then, “man is at home in language”. What are the implications for the experiences of patients, when a doctor’s mother tongue speaks from a two thousand year long tradition of medical descriptions since Hippocrates founded Western medicine. The reason I have begun such questioning is from […]
“A supremely worthwhile, if sometimes unbearably demanding job”: Ray Tallis on doctoring
I’d hazard a guess that no matter how much editors like to think that readers enjoy having their ideas and prejudices challenged, there’s nothing in practice that the average reader likes better than an opinion that chimes neatly with their own. Which, I’ve no doubt, is why I enjoyed reading Ray Tallis’s article in yesterday’s […]
Vitamin D, a Public Health Issue: listen again with the BBCiPlayer to learn more
I’ve got a confession: I, and indeed a significant number of my fellow GPs, have got an unhealthy obsession with vitamin D. Or, to be more precise, vitamin D deficiency and the apparent inability of the NHS to make available to me, as a prescriber, the means to treat it in my patients. You see […]
Memories
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. […]
Dr Ciraj A.M. writes about ‘An Unusual Annual Day’ in an Indian Medical School
This write up will share the experiences of an educational intervention with a difference. It narrates the story from a medical school located at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. For the annual day celebrations of this school, the faculty used to host a cultural show as a mark of their love and reverence […]
Blue lights and all: the paradox at the heart of being a doctor
This week, life as a general practitioner has been a little too exciting for my liking, and far too eventful for my patients- young and old- around whom this unnecessary and unwelcome excitement has centred. Twice in as many days I’ve had to call, in the middle of a surgery, for an ambulance, and to […]