Category: Uncategorized
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Gender
I am a prisoner of my age, a hostage to my generation; I never thought I’d say that, but I suppose none of us do… We are as contemporary as our minds and experience will allow. My own epiphany came, as I recall, when a patient engaged me in a discussion of gender. I had not…
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The Ethics of Counselling
Primum non nocere -First, do no harm. I remember the phrase was used in one of the first lectures I attended in medical school and it nested -sometimes uncomfortably- in my conscience as the lectures and the years progressed. It would signal me from the back seat in Pharmacology lectures and tug on my sleeve in Physiology labs when…
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Dermoid
She was sitting in a black leather chair in the corner by the window holding a magazine in one hand. A small, thin woman in jeans and a black sweat shirt with short blond hair, she watched the room like a television screen. Even in the confusion of a pregnancy-filled waiting room, she looked oddly at ease, content, smiling at the life…
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Acknowledgement
Medicine, like Fashion, has its vogues, its conceits if you will. Admittedly less capricious, they are nonetheless as unpredictable. Think, say, of the menopause. Until relatively recently it was largely ignored. There were so many other health issues in a woman’s life, that if she was fortunate enough to survive to the menopause it was seen as…
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Fibroids
I sometimes prefer to call them leiomyomas -it’s more descriptive of a condition that involves muscle cells- or even fibromas. I said this by way of beginning an explanation to a patient who was sent to me for them; she looked at me as if I had just sworn at her -belittled her condition. I hadn’t meant to… “Hiding behind medical…
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Hormone Replacement Therapy
Do you remember those Once-upon-a-time stories from when you were a child? They seemed to promise so much and yet, when considered in the light of the next day, offered so little. Sometimes I think that the story of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has a lot in common with those faerie tales. I mean it…
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Midwifery
Perspective is a mysterious thing: a thousand people crossing a single bridge is a thousand people crossing a thousand bridges. We can only see the world through our own eyes; none of us is exempt. When I first graduated, doctors were a cult, and immersed in it as I was, I would not have thought of it as such.…
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