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The Doula
For some reason, there are opposing sides in this issue and it’s hard even to approach the topic without raising the eyebrows of one side or the other. It’s not at all clear to me why there should have to be this division, but I’ll attempt a dispassionate consideration of the concept and then venture an opinion for…
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Antenatal Genetic Testing
When I bring up the subject of antenatal genetic testing, most of my patients don’t even bat an eye: it’s just what you do nowadays. Of course you want to know as much about your unborn and developing baby as possible! But there are some -just a few- who look at me suspiciously, searching for a reason I…
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Forceps
Forceps seem to be controversial in some quarters. To be clear, I don’t find them at all controversial nor do my patients by and large. But I realize that for some, forceps are the standard bearers for all that is intrusive and perhaps malevolent in obstetrics. Everybody seems to have an aunt or second cousin somewhere that…
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Pain
I don’t want the title to imply that I am some sort of expert on pain; I am, like most people, pain averse. I do not necessarily understand pain; I see it in others and assume it has similar characteristics in common with what I experience and so I avoid it whenever feasible. I understand when others have…
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Health care is…
Health care is one thing, access to health care is another. There are many barriers to its acquisition: in some countries it is money, in others,availability of services. But for most non life-threatening health care needs, an underlying problem in all I would suspect, is fear. Not so much fear for safety as a feeling of unease: is…
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Health
Do we expect too much Health? Or perhaps less controversially, do we expect too much of Health? Are our expectations realistic or even attainable? Do we really know what Health is -or for that matter, is not? It’s an important point and one that should not be dismissed as mere academic quibbling. Perhaps, to paraphrase St.…
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Words and Names
Words are important, let’s face it; they help us address those most existential of all entities: concepts. They describe things, modify things, name things. Without them, we’d no doubt be reduced to gestures -limited descriptors at best. The richness that is reality would still be there, but unexpressed, identified perhaps, but somehow unrepresented. To an extent then,…
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Victim
One of the things about illness is that it seems unfair -especially if it involves pain or limitation. To some degree, I suspect we all give in to self-pity in the throes of the process; maybe it’s a coping mechanism: a world view that allows us center stage for a while, an excuse to treat ourselves…
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Out of Control
Are any of us in control? Or is the concept merely one that flatters us, plays to our sense of place in the vast and chaotic events that engulf us? Are we, for example, truly in control when we get in a car and drive off? We don’t plan accidents, but they happen. We don’t…
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