It’s Wednesday afternoon, and I head over to the Project:London (P:L) clinic where I volunteer as a support worker. I begin my first social consultation with Prisca*, a South African woman who has been living in the UK for five years. She begins telling me her story, explaining why she has come to the clinic, when she […]
Category: Students
Joe Knight on health scares and teenagers
Being a teenager and being healthy are two things you hope can go hand in hand. However while your mind is tirelessly trained by the finest educators in the land, your body sits idly by, forever being stuffed full of the sugar and caffeine that keep the ever busy brain working. […]
Siddhartha Yadav on young people at Women Deliver 2010
Last week, more than 3,000 global leaders working in the field of maternal and reproductive health gathered in Washington, D.C for the Women Deliver 2010 conference. With the theme of delivering solutions for girls and women, the conference focused on sharing solutions that can help us achieve the millennium development goals on maternal and reproductive […]
Kayte McCann on dealing with the death of a close family member
Dealing with the death of a close family member, whether expected or otherwise, is perhaps one of the most harrowing things you can deal with. Doug Kamerow dealt with the death of his mother after multiple stays in hospital and long term care facilities, and writes about it in the BMJ. She had Alzheimer’s disease […]
Neil Chanchlani: The silent killer
For most of us, it’s textbook – chills, fever, and phlegm. We know the impending list of causes and antibiotic management regimes off by heart, but what we don’t know recognise is that it is still the number one killer of children in the world. Pneumonia – we’ve yet to conquer the battle. It is […]
Neil Graham on the dangers of advertising abortion advice
In May Channel 4 broadcast a television advertisement for the sexual and reproductive health charity Marie Stopes. The charity says that its aim is to prevent unintended pregnancies and unwanted births. The advert, the first of its kind in the United Kingdom, has been criticised, largely by campaigners opposed to abortion. Indeed the Advertising Standards […]
Frances Dixon on medical education about menstruation
A couple of weeks ago my year-group had to plan and carry out an experiment as part of our teaching. I won’t bother going into details, but this experiment involved urine collection and sampling, with ourselves as the subjects. During the planning of this experiment some people were worried about contamination of the samples with […]
Vaibhav Gupta on starting medical school
It was like going to a black tie event, except some people were in shorts and some dressed casually, with only a few holding up the proclaimed dress code (some didn’t even know why they were there, which explains the flip-flops). This is what going to medical school was like. Having just arrived in the […]
Joe Collier: Sharing intellectual space
In a recent blog I suggested that relationships between students and teachers will have been changed in those medical schools where students address the staff by their first names. As I saw it, the practice of addressing teachers using surnames and titles will have provided some sort of barrier between teachers and taught. Where this […]
Jonny Martell: The magic of alternative medicine
I was working next to a world renowned psychic and spiritual healer in the healing sanctuary of a music festival. This made me nervous: my own training in complementary medicine before medical school gave me no such special powers. Many of the people I treated had the customary battle wounds of a sedentary office bound […]