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Performance Anxiety
I have recently developed performance anxiety -no, not the wide-eyed, heart-thumping, late night Viagra-requiring variety… although that does sound interesting. And not the more artistic type you would expect to get while standing behind the curtain backstage before walking into the spotlight to the expectant applause of a full theater. I don’t have that kind of talent. And anyway…
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The Cancer We Think We Know…
In those early, once-upon-a-time days when I thought I knew everything and before humility had forced itself upon my stage, a haggard middle aged woman named Mary walked into my office a week early for her appointment. It was in the young days of my career and as it happened, a patient who was scheduled for that…
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Human Embryology -Ontologically Awkward Thoughts
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: foetal development goes through the same stages as evolution would have -Haeckel’s theorem. It’s a phrase -one of the few- I remember from my embryology classes in medical school. It’s a bit simplistic, of course, and long since discredited but nonetheless illustrative of some evolutionary phylogenetic similarities. It demonstrates the potential for variation in the…
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Are Human Rights Contingent?
Here’s a question: are human rights contingent or emergent? In other words, do they depend on the circumstances and the cultural milieu? Do they depend on the context in which the events in question are imbedded, and maybe even the time-frame –the Epoch? Or, do they exist a priori and exist no matter what the circumstances and so transcend any particular event? An existential…
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A Medical Chinese Curse?
Change. We are condemned to live in interesting times, as the Chinese Curse purportedly observed -although there seems to be no evidence that there ever was such a curse, nor does anyone appear to have any idea what it means… But I have always assumed that it had to do with change, and our sometime antipathy to it.…
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A Picture is worth…
Communication -explanation- in Medicine is so important that one might even consider it paramount. Except in circumstances where the patient receives a treatment of which she is unaware because of an accident or the severity of the illness, her understanding of the reasons for the therapy and the side effects it may engender often determines whether or not the…
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A test for Alzheimer’s Disease…
Now here’s a scientific and epidemiologic conundrum: Suppose you develop a test that will give you advance warning of a fatal disease you can neither treat nor prevent. But that foreknowledge might allow an understanding of the really early aspects of the disease -while it was still asymptomatic- that could eventually lead to a treatment. Especially if…
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Diet in Pregnancy
There was a time when the prevailing dietary wisdom was simple: food contained calories, weight was a function of caloric imbalance. If you used less calories than you took in you gained weight, and vice versa. It was intuitively appealing and it still is; anybody with even an elementary grasp of mathematics understands. But it is becoming increasingly…
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Once Upon a Time…
You learn new things every day; sometimes, learning about learning is one of them. I am learning about babies. As an obstetrician, I deal with them every day -or, more accurately, them as developing organisms- from shortly after conception until birth. Then, as the mother’s needs change -and the baby’s- I kind of lose track…
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