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Cause: an Effect?
The real world: that’s where we are all supposed to live. The place where everything has a readily identifiable cause and everything makes sense -or would, if we were to delve sufficiently deeply. It’s a place where the absence of answers suggests inadequate investigation. I’d love to live there -in that particular world- but I suspect we all live in different…
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In Praise of Painted Toenails
I went to a celebration last night, an acclamation of an event so unique and yet so common as to defy -almost- the need to single it out and frame it in the usual infinite regress of hyperbole it inevitably invokes: a birth. I have to admit that I enjoy birth, although as an obstetrician my perspective is necessarily more…
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HPV
Cancer of the uterine cervix is a sexually transmitted disease; it is the second most common cancer of women in the world and it is spread sexually. Who would have guessed? The clues were there all along, of course: it was more common in sex workers, and women who had become sexually active at an…
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The Guardian
To anyone watching from a distance, they were both very much in love. Hands entwined, bodies linked at hip and shoulder, they clung to each other like moss to a tree. Her eyes sought his for sustenance, energy, approval; their movement along the corridor and into the office was sinuous and choreographed. Synchronized swimming came to…
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The Humility of Age
There is a humility that accompanies age, shuffles along beside it, tugs on its sleeve to attract attention. Or is it insecurity? Or maybe resignation? It’s a gradual thing -for me at least- and it surfaces mainly after a busy and sleepless night on call when the stark, brutal demons of decisions made, or actions taken, stalk the leaf-bare branches…
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Harm Reduction
I have always been suspicious of zero-tolerance; it implies intolerance as much as anything else. A thousand people crossing a bridge, are a thousand people crossing a thousand bridges… We are simply not all the same, nor are our worlds, our needs, our perspectives. And even if some issue could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, there would…
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Touch
Several years ago, I noticed a lump in my neck; I was no longer young, and I was terrified. The differential diagnosis was given to me by a colleague I greatly respected, but I had not expected the presentation to be so matter of fact. I don’t know what I had anticipated, but somehow there was a gap between her words and my condition, between…
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Gender
I am a prisoner of my age, a hostage to my generation; I never thought I’d say that, but I suppose none of us do… We are as contemporary as our minds and experience will allow. My own epiphany came, as I recall, when a patient engaged me in a discussion of gender. I had not…
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