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The Obstetrical Celibate
Celibacy seems so counterintuitive and aberrant to me that I’m constantly amazed how close to the surface it seems to float. Its etymology comes from a Latin word meaning ‘unmarried’ and that, in turn, is an amalgam of two proto-Indo-European words meaning ‘to live alone’, but its exact definition seems contextually influenced. For example, despite…
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Prove it!
If there’s one thing that a long life has taught me, it is that most of us seldom stray far from the path. Once launched, our trajectory is largely predictable. I suppose this is necessary for co-existence –that there are societal norms is, after all, what binds us together as a group. Knowing what people…
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Do We Really Understand?
Okay, call me a cynic, or maybe even a curmudgeon, but I sometimes wonder just how much we understand about Information –and by extension, it’s relationship to Knowledge. Information can be construed as the answer to a question or, seen from a different perspective, as that which has the potential to resolve uncertainty. Numbers, for…
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Leave Me Alone
I have lived in a hospital as an on-call obstetrician on more days –and nights- than I can count over the years; hospitals were the grudging homes for me ever since medical school and the subsequent ages of specialty training that fell upon me like unbidden hats. And despite the palimpsest of colours I was…
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The Gyne Codes
We all use codes; sometimes they are simply shortcuts, at other times they identify us as part of one community or another. However, the codes I like are the ones that are attempts at disguise. Camouflage. They offer the challenges that colour my day. I have to say that I was absolutely fascinated by the…
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The Colour of my Baby
What a great idea: a bandage that tells you when what it is hiding, is itself hiding something –an infection. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34808273 I suppose it was an idea looking for a platform. When bacteria are growing, they often invent ways to keep doing just that. Sometimes they overwhelm by sheer numbers to defeat the body’s defences,…
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The Trigger Warning
Call me naive, if you will, or maybe even uninformed, but not insensitive. Not indifferent; I am neither. Unaware, perhaps comes closest. And, until recently, the concept of trigger warning was not one that I thought would have arisen in the day to day world of office gynaecology. But I was wrong. A trigger warning,…
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Scientific Fraud
Science –whose Latin etymology denotes knowledge- started off as a branch of philosophy and gradually morphed into its present form. Recently, however, it seems to be resting on a progressively unstable foundation with the general public. By its very nature, Science accumulates its knowledge by induction: observations elicit explanations which suggest experiments designed to test…
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