I am forty-four. Even allowing for the decade or so that modern medicine has added to our Biblical three score years and ten, I am, statistically, over half way through the journey. There are times when I feel it. Not so much physically: never having been much of an athlete the decline of my body […]
Medpedia, a medical version of Wikipedia, had to happen, and now it has. The full site will launch later in 2008, but a preview is already available. The founders—James Currier and Mitch Kapor, both serial entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley—aim to create “the most comprehensive and collaborative medical resource in the world.” I see no reason […]
A friend, possibly drunk, recently sent me a message on Facebook to ask if I was a Thatcherite. Thatcher was in the news because of the debate about her state funeral. Hours later my friend sent a second message hoping that she hadn’t offended me. Eventually the next morning she rang me, desperate to be […]
My attention was drawn to a story in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper about alleged abuse of eleven Iraqis by British soldiers, coming less than a month after the BMJ covered a press conference organised by Physicians for Human Rights, which I attended. […]
When I was a child I had three basic approaches to making a mistake. Firstly I would run away as far as possible and pretend it hadn’t happened. […]
I think I’m healthy, but am I right? I’m tubby. My hair is white and thin and gone altogether from some parts of my head. I’m short sighted and astigmatic. My Achilles tendon aches at times, and when I get out of bed in the morning I hobble. I haven’t had my blood pressure measured […]
Losing your power of speech is the stuff of nightmares but is a reality to many people after a stroke. I’ve just been on a one-day workshop run by Connect, a charity that works for people with aphasia, and it was inspiring. […]
Do art and misery share a bed? Although we might expect art to entertain and even, at a push, to improve its audience, artists themselves are surely supposed to suffer. It is part of the job spec. […]
“I want to live”, read the caption to the life-size photograph of a young man attached to the dialysis machine. I had seen this photograph at a hospital gate in Nepal almost everyday for three months before I came to London two weeks ago, and it is likely that it is still there. Surprisingly, he […]
Has anyone ever studied why life speeds up the older you get? John Mortimer (in The Summer of a Dormouse – which should be required reading for any geriatrics rotation) puts it beautifully … “In childhood, the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons. The […]