Memories This piece is a reflection on an article from the New York Times this week. The story is told about a large family from Colombia, and their many relatives who have developed early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The case has been baffling doctors and scientists, both in Colombia and the United States. […]
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Dr Ciraj A.M. writes about ‘An Unusual Annual Day’ in an Indian Medical School
This write up will share the experiences of an educational intervention with a difference. It narrates the story from a medical school located at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. For the annual day celebrations of this school, the faculty used to host a cultural show as a mark of their love and reverence […]
Blue lights and all: the paradox at the heart of being a doctor
This week, life as a general practitioner has been a little too exciting for my liking, and far too eventful for my patients- young and old- around whom this unnecessary and unwelcome excitement has centred. Twice in as many days I’ve had to call, in the middle of a surgery, for an ambulance, and to […]
It’s A Suffered Life
This is an account of a woman, herself severely injured during an attack in Sudan and who witnessed the murder of her babe. It’s A Suffered Life Gilded grace Upon Darkness. Tomorrow’s Heart Becomes the custom for sorrow. Fragmented faces Forgetting The Eyes of those who Beg to look afar. […]
The Landscape of Lesotho
Lesotho is one of the highest countries and is entirely landlocked by South Africa. 40% of Lesotho’s population survives on less than $1.25 a day. In centuries gone by, the people of Lesotho were driven high up into the mountains by the Xhosa and Zulu people and have repeated a solitary and isolated life, mainly […]
Roboticism: Sima Barmania reports on a worrying new pandemic affecting the UK’s junior doctors
After spending some time away from medicine, I return to find that there seems to be a surreptitious, mysterious pandemic infiltrating the junior doctors that practice medicine in the United Kingdom. The cause of this pandemic has largely been overlooked but recent research can now confirm the existence and rampancy of the condition, which can now […]
Jeanette Glasser on “The Pains of Youth”
Intense and challenging, the National’s recent interpretation of “Pains of Youth” (which ran from October 2009 – January 2010) at the Cottesloe, under the skilful direction of Katie Mitchell, has the audience gripped throughout. It is a fast-paced play about medical students in Vienna in the early 1920s – their fraught, turbulent psyches trying to […]
Why David’s Gray death was predictable
A lot has been written recently about the 2004 contract that allowed GPs to opt out of providing care to their patients at night or on the weekend. And about the fact that GPs are now paid more for doing less than ever before. I’m old enough to remember doing nights and weekends on-call and […]
Whose autonomy is it anyway? Drawing back the curtain
A few weeks ago our first year students were thinking about patient confidentiality and it was my task to facilitate the process. The group I was with were from diverse cultural backgrounds and from several different countries, including the UK. Whilst they all readily grasped the idea of respecting confidentiality as a way of respecting […]
Believing Without Seeing
Esref Armagan was born blind in Ankara, Turkey. He has now become a famous artist due to his sheer talent and also due to certain significant and unusual reasons. His art displays the colour, vividness, light, dark, imagination and perspective that we are used to considering as the gifts of sight. Esref is changing the […]