Tag: medicine
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Alone and palely loitering?
Although it seems a lifetime away, I sometimes try to cast my mind back to the thoughts that used to occupy me when I was young; when the world was still magical, and potentially infinite, things were different -or so they seem to me now, as I peer through the shower of my falling leaves.…
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Wild Medicine
I think it’s good to keep renewing our perspective on things, don’t you? What we view may be similar, but it’s how we see it that might differ; it’s how we value it that could change. When I was a child, my mother was convinced that standing under oak trees was dangerous. At the time…
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Some must watch, while some must sleep
I’ve been retired from active medical practice for a few years now; I can’t say I miss the hours or the stress, but what I did enjoy, however, were the patients and the adventure of solving their problems. It was always a journey, and like visiting a city for the first time, there was a…
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Eenie Meenie Miney
I’ll be the first to admit that I have been left far behind in the vocabularic peculiarities that are now used to describe non-normative sexuality. Perhaps it’s Age, but more likely naïveté, that has led to this deficiency rather than lack of exposure. I entered medical school in the mid-sixties when the youth were beginning…
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Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus
I must have learned a bit about phenomenology in Philosophy courses at university, but except for the fact that it has something to do with lived experience and consciousness, I have pretty well forgotten almost everything about it in the intervening years, I’m afraid. The name alone was enough for it to merit a place…
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Of thinking too precisely on the event
The right not to know -now there’s an interesting concept in today’s competition for instant news, ‘breaking stories’, and the ever present titillation of factoids. It seems almost counterintuitive -why would anyone choose not to know something? Surely knowledge trumps ignorance. Surely Hamlet’s timeless question ‘Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings…
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Oh, true apothecary
That we would do we should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes, says Shakespeare’s Claudius. In other words, do what you think you should when you think of it, or you may never do it… It seems to me that Medicine has changed a fair amount since I retired. Not only has science…
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Doth the lady protest too much?
I am neither a psychiatrist, nor a psychologist, and apart from a career in medicine, hold no official accreditation in counselling. Heaven only knows, my own Black Dog is never far away, and anxiety gathers little dust as it waits expectantly in a brightly lit corner of my closet. And yet I am still a…
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It’s About Time
‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’ So wrote Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, more than fifteen hundred years ago. And we’re still confused… Okay, I’m confused. When considered philosophically, you’d…