Month: August 2015
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The Gyne Weed
I think most of us have a rather Schadenfreude relationship with weeds: on the one hand, they are undesirables, illegal aliens usurping land otherwise dedicated to something useful; but on the other, some of them are quite pretty -even beautiful. Especially in someone else’s garden. Of course it’s all a matter of context, isn’t it? It’s a […]
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Aphantasia?
We are a culture of categorists. Slotists. Namists. It is a society of Nomino, ergo sum. It’s as if we can sleep more securely knowing we have named and categorized everything we have seen that day –no matter how bizarre, no matter how unimportant. No matter, even, how mistaken the belief that by so doing, […]
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What’s in a Word?
Alexithymia. Ever heard of it? Me neither. It sounds like one of those words you’d get in a national spelling bee when they’re trying to off you. Fortunately it has a rather pedestrian etymology: ‘a’ meaning ‘without’; ‘lexis’ –speech, or words; and ‘thymos’ – soul, or emotions. In other words: no words for feelings. Hmm… […]
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Placentaphilia
Finally! Somebody has had the courage to think the unthinkable and say what most of us have been too shocked to verbalize, too nauseated to contemplate: that eating your baby’s placenta is not a plus. My risen gorge has been vindicated. An article in the BBC news http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33006384 reports on a review article on placentaphagy […]
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Staying in Touch
In the endless dark of night, belief that there will be a morning is sometimes all that sustains us. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, as Alexander Pope declared in one of his essays -and that is occasionally all there is. When Medicine fails, the understandable temptation is to turn to alternatives; when inductive […]
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Dealing with Women
“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” cried Chicken Little running around frantically when confronted with an unexpected knock on her head. There are any number of versions of the story but all, seemingly, involving females who misinterpreted some benign event as being catastrophic. Fearful. Outside of their comfort zones. In other words, acted inappropriately given […]
musings on women's health 