musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

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  • The gift of accompaniment

    I remember it from my medical practice; I remember it from dealing with friends with incurable illness: the feeling of helplessness in commiseration. The recognition that my often naïve suggestions, intended to help, were not what was required, nor even wanted, for that matter. Sometimes there are no solutions; sometimes presence –listening- in itself is…

    gozzter

    August 11, 2021
    Uncategorized
    accompaniment, companionship, compassion, empathy, gerontology ward, medical students, Nicholaos Jones, University of Alabama
  • I am undone

    By now, you’d think we’d have a pretty good idea who we are. I mean, we’ve been assessing and predicting things about each other since… well, a long time. And because each of us feels a pretty unbroken identity from when they were a child, it probably makes sense to assume others do as well.…

    gozzter

    August 4, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Big Five personality traits, Carlin Flora, emotions, expectations, identity, novelists, personality, psychologists, writers
  • The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief

    I don’t know what to think of laughter anymore. I used to be happy with it solving so many issues, soothing so many cuts, but now I wonder whether it was only me all along just applying patches to the wounds. It would seem that humour is no laughing matter -or, rather, it’s the laughter…

    gozzter

    July 28, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Emily Herring, Freud, Henri Bergson, humour and emotions, humour as incongruity, humour as repression, humour as superiority, incongruity, Ingvild Selid Gilhus, Laughing Gods weeping virgins, Laughter, laughter for social bonding, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, medieval religions, parades, The Feast of Fools, theories of humour, University of Bergen, University of Ghent
  • Neither here nor there

    I don’t think I’m very good at handling conflicts -I hate confrontation; I prefer the view from the top of the Bell Curve where I can safely watch the goings-on of the extremophiles in their respective antipodes. I suppose that’s why I gravitate to boundaries where, if I’m careful, I’m neither here nor there. This…

    gozzter

    July 21, 2021
    Uncategorized
    categories, Covid, face masks, history, in-groups, Marek Kohn, out-groups, pandemic, physical-distancing, The Lord of the Flies, them, us, victors, virus
  • You Don’t Say?

    It’s hard to be upset by something you don’t know about. It’s hard to be offended if you don’t know you’ve been insulted. And, if somebody has to point out that you really have, then have you? For insults, snubs, or even rudeness to be effective, they need to be understood as such. I think…

    gozzter

    July 14, 2021
    Uncategorized
    benevolent sexism, hypocognition, Kaidi Wu, micro aggression, sexism, shoeburyness, University of Michigan
  • Is Lateral a Direction?

    Damn! There they go again, pulling the masks off the faces of those of us who grew up hoping we were uniquely creative; those of us who eschewed the logical pathway of thoughts and instead stepped off the trail to see if anything was hiding in the bushes. That’s what we lateral thinkers like to…

    gozzter

    July 7, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Age, answers, Antonio Melechi, Edward de Bono, Gestalt psychology, Henri Poincaré, lateral thinking, Max Wertheimer, pseudoscience, questions, University of York, William James
  • Marginal Thoughts

    Now that my salad days are merely photos staring forlornly at me from a tattered album, I sometimes wonder what they would think of the one squinting back. Would it be as difficult looking forward in time, as it is in looking back? Not only do features change, but so do goals. Thoughts. I am…

    gozzter

    June 30, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Alan Watts, book covers, books, childhood, Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, eulogy, Hermann Hesse, Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley, marginalia, The Unexpected Universe, words
  • Yet Death will seize the doctor too

    Death seems a lot closer now than in my youth; but it was always just around a corner, peeking out from traffic lights, hiding in the limb of a tree I might have climbed. And it’s not as if it suddenly surfaced when I retired either -death is a fact of life; we come from…

    gozzter

    June 23, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Death, Life, Nature, Psyche, questions, Stephen Cave, Tennyson, University of Cambridge, void
  • Breathing health into a stone?

    Are my emotions mine? That is, do they live inside me, or are they things that are shared -exist between me and others, in other words? Are they more the combination of genetic predisposition and situational features which are dependent on societal norms that we were taught from our early years at home and in…

    gozzter

    June 16, 2021
    Uncategorized
    Bernice L. Hausman, Covid 19, emotions, health, iatrogenesis, Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis, medical skepticism, medical therapeutics, medicalization, NPR, pandemic, Penn State College of Medicine, primum non nocere., TB
  • Gedankenexperimentophobia

    It’s fun to play with thoughts, to riffle through ideas, don’t you agree? Take ‘thought experiments’ for example -think up a problem, set some parameters to confine it and see what your brain, unconstrained by external reality, comes up with. It’s almost akin to the Scientific Method some would argue: ask a question; form a…

    gozzter

    June 9, 2021
    Uncategorized
    ethics, external validity, Gedankenexperiment, Hamlet, internal validity, James Wilson, Scientific method, the Trolley Problem, thought experiments, University College London
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