Death, suffering, and the after life – what a way to finish a geriatric medicine congress! I had at first viewed the invitation to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra concert as an unexpected bonus to an extremely stimulating and hospitable Austrian and German Geriatric Medicine Congress the week before last. Yet when viewed through the lens of […]
Category: Desmond O’Neill
Des O’Neill: Christmas, South Park, health, and pluralism
When the largest teaching hospital in Dublin removed the Christmas crib from its atrium a few years ago, the response to the resulting public outcry suggested a timorous confusion about the difference between pluralism and secularism that is not uncommon in medicine. As artists are ever to the fore in illuminating societal dilemmas, South Park […]
Des O’Neill: So, when do you become “old”?
An occupational hazard of being a geriatrician is that not infrequently I am asked at social occasions: “So, Des, when do you become ‘old’?” The questioner is usually a fit middle-class older person, often still working in one of the liberal professions. Inherent in the question is the sense of an impending instant rebuttal should […]
Desmond O’Neill: An appalling (Irish) vista
It is sad that the memory of Lord Denning, the eminent jurist, will always be associated with the unhappy phrase “appalling vista,” pronounced during the appeal hearing of the Birmingham Six. By this he meant that prolonged, pervasive, and systematic wrongdoing by agencies of the state was inconceivable: unfortunately, subsequent scrutiny was to prove him […]
Desmond O’Neill reviews “Taking the keys away”
If geriatricians had a pound for every time an adult child said that it wasn’t safe for their older parent to go home from hospital, their financial standing would improve enormously. It is an almost daily occurrence for geriatricians to mediate between older adults (who tend to value independence and embrace risk) and their adult […]
Desmond O’Neill: Social networking, telemedicine, and stroke
Some medical technologies creep up on you, some arrive with a bang. In internal medicine much of the change – electronic laboratory reporting, digital imaging – is gradualist and steered by other disciplines, and physicians are grateful if relatively passive users. On the other hand, telemedicine for stroke thrombolysis was a radical step for both […]
Desmond O’Neill: A bloomsday brush with brilliance
One of the challenges of teaching medical ethics is the need to continually connect with the wellsprings of philosophy and (whisper it) theology. Without these elements there is danger of a retreat to the pragmatic and utilitarian, or worse still to legalism (an undue dependence on the law rather than ethics), particularly in courses where […]