Blog by Astrid de Oliveira (née Treffry-Goatley) The outside world enters our playroom, the room with the best light and internet connection in the house. The children’s bookshelf becomes the backdrop to countless television interviews, zoom calls and meetings with world leaders. In hard lockdown, which started on 27 March 2020, we suddenly morph into […]
Tag: Blog
WITHDRAWN: Living with COVID: What We Learned from Patients with Incurable Cancer During Challenging Times
This blog post has been withdrawn owing to significant inaccuracies that the journal believes undermine its reliability. The lead author Hilde Buiting submitted the following inaccurate information to the journal: (i) that Gabe Sonke was an author of the blog, when he was not; and (ii) that Antoni van Leeuwenhoek/Netherlands Cancer Institute was one […]
Podcasting Builds Disability Culture
With funding from the Disability Visibility Project, disabled podcasters Cheryl Green and Thomas Reid are creating a space for Deaf and disabled podcasters and content creators to find each other and find audiences. The project, currently called POD Access, will host a database of Deaf and disabled podcasters and podcasts relating to deafness or disability, […]
Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions
Article Summary by Richard Gorman and Bobbie Farsides Our article, ‘Writing the Worlds of Genomic Medicine: Experiences of Using Participatory-Writing to Understand Life with Rare Conditions’ is part of our work on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Ethical Preparedness in Genomic Medicine’ research project at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. We’ve been working with a group […]
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and the Pathologization and Medicalization of Ordinary Experiences
Article Summary by Sahanika Ratnayake In the wake of prolonged grief disorder entering the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, debates over the pathologizing and medicalizing of ordinary experiences—that is, presenting what we might think of as typical experiences such as grief as disorders requiring specialised treatment—have reignited. Psychiatry of course has a long history […]
The Rehabilitation of Long Covid Requires Understanding of Not Just the Biomedical Dimensions But All Aspects of Being Human
Blog by Amali U. Lokugamage and Clare Rayner We are both senior doctors affected by multi-system long covid symptoms for almost two years now and have resorted to biomedical, humanities, artistic and complementary methods to support rehabilitation and recovery. We used art and poetry and meditation despite illness. These helped us communicate and make sense […]
Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Pigs and People: What Can We Learn from Previous Xenotransplantations?
Blog by Susanne Lundin In the late 1990s, I visited a farm at a secret location in the UK where I met the offspring of the world-famous Astrid. Astrid herself was staying in another place, hidden from the public eye (as is customary for celebrities). Astrid was not just any mother of several children, but […]
Compassion, Willpower and Social Stigma: A Journey Through the Deadly Second Wave of the Covid-19 Pandemic in India
Blog by Kunchok Dorjee Covid patients are subject to stigma, isolation, and low morale. Elderly citizens, individuals without family support, health disparity populations, and those with coexisting conditions–such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, mental health conditions, refugees, etc.–may be particularly vulnerable. Mitigation measures such as harsh lockdowns and forced isolation have exacerbated the stigma. Inclusion and humanity […]
The Bias Virus
Blog by Rachelle Ann Gonzales, BS*, Alex Im, BS* and Cynthia Romero, MD *Corresponding first-authors During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, I vividly remember watching a viral video of a young man attacking a masked, middle-aged Asian woman at the Grand Street subway station in New York City. […]
Endemic Fatalism and Why It Won’t Resolve COVID-19
Blog by Jacob Steere-Williams Pandemic fatigue has been pushed aside by a new phenomenon in many places around the world; endemic fatalism. The raging Omicron variant of COVID-19 has ushered in the highest case positivity rates since the beginning of the pandemic, flooding hospitals and attacking even those vaccinated and boosted against the disease. “We’re […]