musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

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  • Different Flavours

    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy –so says Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I suppose as one ages, there is a tendency to become, if not indifferent, then less surprised at the plethora of variations that exist when they are sought, less amazed at the range of combinations…

    gozzter

    September 20, 2017
    Uncategorized
    adoption, Age, ambiguous genitalia, BBC news, Bell curve, break the sweet potato, childbirth, difference, flavours, gynaecologist, Hamlet, hermaphrodite, historical revisionism, intersex, Kenya, Luo language, midwives, normal, rainbow, Robert Frost, Seline Okiki, Shakespeare, society, spectrum, The Road Not Taken, the Ten Beloved Sisters, traditional beliefs, traditional birth attendants, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human RIghts, Zainab
  • Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind

    There is a time, a dark time, when normal daylight thoughts are banished. A time when what remains are skeletal shadows, atavistic remnants of ancestral fears, unbidden fragments of anchorless dread which in the fullness of a sunlit day, are sheer cotton. -translucent at their best. It is when doors are left ajar and watchmen…

    gozzter

    September 13, 2017
    Uncategorized
    All’s Well That Ends Well, angst, BBC news, bipolar disease, deafblindness, educational support, empathy, Man’s Search for Meaning, mental health support, Molly Watt Trust, night blindness, panic attacks, Shakespeare, social life, solitary confinement, speech therapy, teenage social needs, Usher syndrome, Victor Frankl
  • The Temple of Clothes

    I caught someone inspecting me the other day. Okay, it wasn’t an inspect exactly –it was more of a look… Well, maybe a glance, but it bothered me all the same. I could feel her eyes doing a quick little dance on me. They started on my mud-caked running shoes, before appraising the hem of…

    gozzter

    September 6, 2017
    Uncategorized
    Afghanistan, anticipatory dresser, chador, clothes, eyes, forest, inspection, names, Pashto, trail, translator, vocabulary, woods
  • Let Virtue be as Wax

    We are all products of our era, and often unbeknownced to us, our language is to blame. Words become signposts that reassure us that we know where we are headed. Where we came from. And yet they can be as lost as us –especially in the domain of sexuality. Even the word ‘sex’ itself –a…

    gozzter

    August 30, 2017
    Uncategorized
    BBC news, Brandon Ambrosino, cuddling, David Halperin, Hanne Blank, heterosexuality, homosexuality, labels, language, queer, sex, sexuality, signposts, University of Michigan, words
  • Sometimes the Twain Should Meet

    That we are, each of us, different is a given; that societies and the cultures they produce are different, is also self-evident. But that any one individual picked at random should be representative of that difference is another matter. We humans tend to be bicameral when and if it suits us. For example: my Asian…

    gozzter

    August 23, 2017
    Uncategorized
    Alex Masoudi, Alex Mesoudi, BBC news, British Bangladeshi families in East London, critical analysis, deductive reasoning, East/West divide, Family, generalizations, headscarf, hijab, inductive reasoning, Muslims, neckties, Richard Nisbett, tradition, University of Exeter, University of Michigan, Weltangschauung
  • Crybabying

    I remember (sort of) my days in Elementary School, when one of the most devastating insults a little boy could receive was to be labelled a crybaby. I’m not sure why, really. Maybe it meant you didn’t fit in with the prevailing umwelt –with what you were supposed to be as a little boy- or…

    gozzter

    August 16, 2017
    Uncategorized
    babies, Baby feeding, Canada, CBC News, children, colic, crybaby, Denmark, Dieter Wolke, feeding infants, fuss/cry duration, Journal of Pediatrics, meta-analyisis, normal variation, Rule of threes, UK, University of Warwick
  • Methought I heard a voice cry Sleep No More.

      I have always had a healthy respect for fire. I suppose this is not unusual, although nowadays fire is not a regular component of our daily lives, so its presence awakens something that alternates between fascination and fear. Something atavistic. Fire –especially unexpected fire- can produce panic; smoke –also if unexpected, or inexplicable- can…

    gozzter

    August 9, 2017
    Uncategorized
    BBC news, Child’s neurological development, Derbyshire Fire and Rescue, Dundee University, female voice, fire, mother’s voice, Noise, Rodney Mountain, Shakespeare, smoke, smoke alarm
  • Let No One Put Asunder

    At my age, I suppose I should have learned to expect the unexpected, to revel in the entrepreneurism of a new and alien generation, and to wonder at its ability to see opportunity in the predicaments of others. But then again, why not? Isn’t that what lawyers are all about? And doctors…? Where would we…

    gozzter

    August 2, 2017
    Uncategorized
    Alexander Pope, BBC news, culture, divorce, G.B.Shaw, marriage, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Sweden
  • Cycling in a Dish

    Where do they get this stuff? Menses in a dish –or, to be more academically abstruse, ‘A microfluidic culture model of the human reproductive tract and 28-day menstrual cycle’? It has a pedantic ring to it, even though it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but I have to ask a simple, quasi-lay interrogative: why?…

    gozzter

    July 26, 2017
    Uncategorized
    BBC news, body on a chip, cell culture, cell model, craigslist, menstrual cycle, Nature Journal, reproductive cells, retirement, scientific literature, side effects of drugs, testing in vitro cells
  • The Stealing Steps of Age

    Elderspeak. We’ve all heard it: baby-talk for seniors, an almost unconscious reaction to those we deem cognitively impaired, or hopelessly out of date. It’s a kind of pretend-communication with those who seem unreceptive, or beyond the pale of verbal comprehension. Although the term is aptly descriptive and eerily evocative of rows of beds with wrinkled…

    gozzter

    July 19, 2017
    Uncategorized
    ageing, Anna Corwin, baby-talk, CBC News, cognitive impairment, Elderspeak, Kristine Wiiliams, linguistic anthropologist, male nurse, nuns, physiotherapy, Shakespeare, strokes, The Gerontologist, University of Kansas School of Nursing
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