I’m fond of referring, in talks and in discussions about medical professionalism, to the midnight meal. It’s a metaphor that I borrow from Dr Jerome Lowenstein, a friend and colleague who wrote an essay of the same name. In that essay he recalls a time when the medical team would meet in the hospital restaurant, […]
Tag: Blog
Mad, bad or simply sad: a medical humanities look at mental health legislation
Vincent Van Gogh. Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889. London, Courtauld Institute Gallery. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/artistBiography?artistID=301 This month the Mental Health Act (MHA) 2007 came into force in England and Wales. This Act, which amends the MHA 1983, is just the latest in a series of Acts of Parliament that form part of an on-going search for […]
The Birmingham Children’s Hospital: the day the silent scream got noisy
http://www.munch.museum.no/content.aspx?id=15 This week a leading national paper in the UK broke news of what has been rightly called a medical scandal. They revealed the existence of a report into the systemic inadequacies of management systems at Birmingham Children’s Hospital. The impact of these failings on the standard of care provided by the hospital are now […]
Abortion: Response to a Letter to The Times, 17th October 2008
In a letter published today in The Times Newspaper a group of Medical Law and Ethics academics call for the UK’s Abortion Act to be modernised. Whilst I welcome this contribution to the on-going debate about the provision of abortion services in the UK, I am concerned by the focus on the suggested paternalistic role of doctors […]
World economic events: their implications for health
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 […]
The high cost of going blind: patients allowed access to sight-saving drug
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 […]
Lawyers: the advocates of choice for those too ill to work?
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 […]
Access to NHS Funded IVF: NICE if you can get it
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 […]
Today was a difficult day: thoughts on being useful
Today has been- to use popular management speak- challenging. Today was one of those days when, in spite of twenty-two years as a doctor, I find myself distressed at the suffering that I’ve encountered. And I’m left wondering how to find the right balance between being useful, of use to my patients, and still being […]
Medical Humanities Resources: Visual, Performed, Oral and Written Stories of Illness
One of the primary aims of this blog is to enable quicker and easier communication between the providers and users of medical humanities resources. One of the most important of these types of resources focus on the importance of the stories and experiences of those affected by illness. Sometimes the aim in recording these stories […]