musingsonwomenshealth.com

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

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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……

    gozzter

    August 22, 2015
    Uncategorized
    alexithymia, BBC, cancer of the cervix, cervical biopsy, etymology, Iago, maelstrom, malignant cells, Othello, Pandora, Pap smears, schizophrenia, screening tests, Shakespeare
  • The Black Sewing Box

    I love mysteries, and if they involve finding buried treasure, so much the better. Thoughts of treasure chests used to conjure up maps and pirates hiding valuable things in faraway and largely inaccessible places. I suppose that shows my age, because nowadays, the more likely proxy for a treasure chest in the popular imagination is a flight data recorder –a black…

    gozzter

    August 19, 2015
    Uncategorized
    Belling the cat, Black box, Canadian Medical Association Journal, evidence of malpractice, Hidden treasure, Jason and the Golden Fleece, knowledge, malpractice, medical incompetence, Medical information, monitoring surgeons, Morbidity and Mortality assessments, Operating Room, outcome assessment, surgery, surgical complications, technology, Tolkien, treasure chest
  • 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…

    gozzter

    August 18, 2015
    Uncategorized
    Archives of Women’s Mental Health, BBC, birth, midwife, Northwestern University, placenta, Placenta eaters, placental traditions, placentaphagy, placentaphilia, skin-to-skin contact
  • 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…

    gozzter

    August 15, 2015
    Uncategorized
    Alexander Pope, alternative medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, cell phone, Cleanse, colonics, deductive reasoning, detox, enema, Hope, Hope springs eternal, inductive reasoning, medicine, probiotics, retention enema, Scientific method, texting, toxins
  • 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…

    gozzter

    August 12, 2015
    Uncategorized
    BBC news, Chicken Little, Confirmation bias, dominoes, folk tale, Henny Penny, Iran nuclear negotiations, Macbeth, male bastion, male-only club, misogynous culture, misogyny, Orthodox Jewish community, P5+1, Sampson, Samson’s hair, shake on it, shaking hands, stereotyping, Wendy Sherman
  • The Myth of Medicine

    The concept of the myth has always intrigued me. Not, as it is historically characterized – the fabulous stories of gods and heroes- or the more populist idea of an untruth or counterfactual, but rather as a metaphor. Myth as a way of explaining something that is difficult to put into words, that defies rational…

    gozzter

    August 4, 2015
    Uncategorized
    cancer, Carl Jung, expectations, Feminism, Gynaecology, Hamlet, Joseph Campbell, Matryoshka dolls, metaphor, Myth, pap smear screening, Pap smears, Russian dolls, sexual disease, sexual history, Social Anthropologist
  • Forget it?

    Memories are tricky things. Sometimes they’re not around when you want them, only to arrive later, when you don’t; sometimes they surround you, pester you, like wasps at a picnic. And other times you can’t find them at all no matter where you look. But the really tricky ones are those that never happened and…

    gozzter

    July 31, 2015
    Uncategorized
    Brian Williams, Caesarian section, clanking forceps, delivery report, false memories, Fetal distress, fetal heart rate decelerations, forceps, incompetance, Iraq, malfeasance, medicolegal issues, memories, negligence, PTSD, retrospective falsification of memories, trial of forceps
  • Recycling the Old

    For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven… Really? It made sense when I was young, I suppose -when all of Time was ahead. When I needed to think there was some order to things. That past and future meant old and new. But as the years slip past, I…

    gozzter

    July 30, 2015
    Uncategorized
    BBC news, bisphosphonates, bone metastases, breast cancer, Ecclesiastes, glitazone, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Lancet, new, old, Parkinson’s disease, Phoenix, recycling, Talmud, Wisdom, wisdom of elders
  • A Gift of Age

    Is philosophy a reward of age, or is age itself a gift that metaphysics merely opens: Weltanschauung? Is it just that there is a time when thoughts flow along different and unaccustomed neurons? Or are they maybe shunted to the diminishing residua of nerve cells that are still firing? I ask myself these questions sometimes when night closes…

    gozzter

    July 28, 2015
    Uncategorized
    Age, age is a gift, birthday gifts, gift, hormonal therapy, metaphysics, Mother’s Day, nerve cells, philosophy, Weltanschauung
  • Treemail?

    Treemail? You’ve got to be kidding… Or is this simply a natural progression from Emailing your fridge, or telling the front door of your house to lock when you’re at work -something that in four or five years will be so banal and unsurprising that pointing it out as interesting will ensure that you are…

    gozzter

    July 26, 2015
    Uncategorized
    BBC news, Carl Jung, crystal, friendship, Haecceity, Hamlet, identifiers, individual, individuation, medieval philosophy, Melbourne, Polonius, Quiddity, Shakespeare, social media, Treemail, trees
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