Tag: menopause
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The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Every so often, things are not as they seem. Perhaps that should come as no surprise to an ever-curious septuagenarian, but sometimes I realize I have been misled, lulled into a sense of complacency by the reigning Weltanschauung; or, to be clear, the previous one -the one in which I received my formal education. But […]
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Scientific Gynaecology
Damn! They did it again –just when I thought I’d finally got it straight about why HDL was the ‘good’ cholesterol and how beneficial it is, they changed it on me. Well, modified it, I guess. Lipoproteins are molecules that carry fats (lipids like cholesterol and triglycerides) to and from cells in the body. HDL […]
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The Art of Medicine
‘The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls’, as Picasso said. I suppose he was on to something there, but I rather fancy Francis Bacon’s take on it: ‘The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery’. The reproductions that hang on the walls of my office […]
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The Uber-obvious in Medicine
I don’t know what atavistic urges compel me to rail against reporting the obvious as if it were something new -something clever. Reporting something as if the rest of us would do well to take note of it and spread the revelation to the uninformed like evangelists. Of course I don’t mean to confuse the […]
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Why do we Know something?
Knowledge is interesting. But what is it, exactly? What does it mean to say you know something? Plato defined it as being justified true belief, but is it? Take Bertrand Russel’s famous thought experiment: the ‘stopped clock case’, for example. Alice looks at a clock and says it is two o’clock. Well, because the clock […]
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The Manopause
The menopause can be a mysterious time, although the mechanism is easily enough defined: the cessation of menses because of the lack of estrogen production by the ovary. The concept may be simple, but the ramifications and folklore that surround it less so. It has always worn its myths like a hood, obscuring the face […]
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The Tail and the Dog: Cause and Effect in Medicine
Does the tail ever wag the dog? Is an issue ever so compelling that cause and effect are reversed? Or at least suspended..? Sorry, I wonder about such things. I remember reading a book many years ago by the British philospher A.J. Ayer called The Problem of Knowledge. In it he discusses a religious sect […]
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Elder Gynaecology
I love old people. Sounds a bit patronizing I suppose but I’m becoming one of them, so I have vested interests. And anyway, even the most reticent among them have had a unique, personal view of history. A well tested perspective of Time and its evolutionary ravages. They have grown an almost uncanny ability to […]
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An exploration of Menopause as a Boundary Phenomenon.
For years now, and especially as I age, I have been compelled by the idea of edges. Boundaries. Something different obtains there, something that differentiates them from whatever they demarcate. They are privileged areas, faerie-tale areas. Think, for example of silhouettes -treetops, say, against an evening sky; they are nothing but edges: intricately crocheted patterns, filaments of black against the dying […]
musings on women's health 