Tag: health
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Sleep, that knits the ravelled sleeve
At first, in a long hospital residency, and finally, a lengthy and enjoyable career as an on-call obstetrician/gynaecologist in a busy hospital practice, I found it difficult to fall asleep for those seemingly brief periods between gynaecological emergencies requiring surgery, and managing an often busy obstetrical ward. Somewhere along that continuum, I learned self-hypnosis and…
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Measly measles?
Did you ever wonder about measles -I mean before the anti-vaxxers allowed its recrudescence with their ill-founded mistrust of scientific authorities? I can’t pretend that it ever seemed that important to me when I was young; I was a child in Winnipeg, of course- we all got measles in those post WWII days. It was…
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Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing
Words are important, but sometimes it is silence that is more eloquent; often, to sit in silence takes courage, and yet it sometimes communicates more than sound. It allows the listener to anticipate and you, the speaker, to think; it is not always awkward… And yet, there are norms: whose turn it is to listen,…
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Let every eye negotiate for itself
She was just another old person waiting in the tiny cubicle to have her eyes examined at the optometrist. There were only three seats available; the rest of the office was dedicated to displaying ocular frames, and current items offered on sale; the walls were plastered with posters of happy-looking models delighted with their choices…
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The Mutable Rank-scented Many
Too much time by myself can be troublesome: I begin to wonder about things that I should have resolved years ago had I bothered to think more about them. Or, perhaps I did, and decided to shelve them while I got on with my life. Retired hands, though, are often bored; they open things the…
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Breathing health into a stone?
Are my emotions mine? That is, do they live inside me, or are they things that are shared -exist between me and others, in other words? Are they more the combination of genetic predisposition and situational features which are dependent on societal norms that we were taught from our early years at home and in…
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Risk Perception
Risk is something we all need to assess from time to time. The problem lies in how we do it. If there are factors we fail to take into account that affect our risk perception then our evaluation may as likely be wildly unrealistic, as appropriate. Emotion tends to skew things in one direction or…
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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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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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