Month: April 2013
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Intimations of Mortality
It’s never easy to be a doctor -especially an obstetrician. Accouchement is just too unpredictable; babies are just too vulnerable, too fragile. Too many things can go wrong. Quickly. Unexpectedly. Too many people are affected -the doctor included. Most of us travel through our days in the naïve hope that we will somehow escape unscathed; that bad things […]
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Memories
She looked familiar; you have to give me that. And my receptionist nodded and smiled as I picked up the chart from the rack by the waiting room; I knew that nod -obviously I’d seen her before. I’ve seen so many patients over the years, and I don’t remember them all, so I appreciate these little cues from […]
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The Great Divide
Is there a Great Divide? Strange, perhaps, that the question has continued to haunt me all these years; but you see, if there is, it matters. As I’ve written about before, we each see the world through our own eyes and bring to that perception our own acculturated expectations, our own history, and yes, our own prejudices. […]
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Medical Ethics 1
Ethics in Medicine should be fairly obvious, don’t you think? Primum non nocere – variably translated as something like: ‘Most importantly, do no harm’- pretty well sums it up. And yet even that can be difficult.. Although there have been several formulations of various ethical tenets throughout the years, there seem to be four main principles involved: […]