Month: March 2013
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Opinions
I am sometimes bewildered; I live in an ever-changing sample of opinions -often at odds with my own. In many circumstances I would welcome, even encourage this potpourri, but usually the people holding these often colourful bouquets have come to me for answers, not more flowers. But what is it that differentiates an answer from…
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Medical Mysteries
I’ve always known that there is more to Medicine than Agape, more than a wish to provide succour, more than a desire -a need– to help, to solve, to heal. It provides, for example, an opportunity to learn about others, extend one’s boundaries, explore and experience the Theory of Mind, not to mention the wisdom that accrues to practicing…
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Cause: an Effect?
The real world: that’s where we are all supposed to live. The place where everything has a readily identifiable cause and everything makes sense -or would, if we were to delve sufficiently deeply. It’s a place where the absence of answers suggests inadequate investigation. I’d love to live there -in that particular world- but I suspect we all live in different…
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In Praise of Painted Toenails
I went to a celebration last night, an acclamation of an event so unique and yet so common as to defy -almost- the need to single it out and frame it in the usual infinite regress of hyperbole it inevitably invokes: a birth. I have to admit that I enjoy birth, although as an obstetrician my perspective is necessarily more…
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HPV
Cancer of the uterine cervix is a sexually transmitted disease; it is the second most common cancer of women in the world and it is spread sexually. Who would have guessed? The clues were there all along, of course: it was more common in sex workers, and women who had become sexually active at an…