As the year limps towards its speedy end with reckless confidence, you may wonder what will happen when the final page on the calendar turns. The short answer is, “I don’t know.” The slightly longer answer is, “With a bit of luck, some of the things we learned this year will come in handy next …
I’ve been silent for much longer than I’d have liked. My sincere apologies for this. Over the past year, I reflected on my first 20 years as a doctor: how my patients make the wrong choices, how my colleagues make the wrong choices and – hey presto! – how I make the wrong choices. I …
Medicine, Healthcare and Wellness sound synonymous to most people. In reality, they are three step-sisters in the same house, always bickering. Can they ever be reconciled? First, some words about Hippocratic medicine. In many important ways, Hippocratic medicine is the opposite of healthcare and wellness. Hippocratic medicine puts the patient first. This is why it …
It’s been a while. Two months, to be precise. Life is not always as predictable as one hopes (on the other hand, come to think of it, that’s maybe not such a bad thing – I would never have been doing what I’m doing if life was predictable). People often wonder how on earth a …
Half a lifetime ago (literally), I was privileged to start my medical studies at the (then) University of the Orange Free State. A common joke doing the rounds at that time was that there were no oranges, nothing was free and everything was in quite a state. But the medical school was great. The facilities …
We all need it. In fact, we all crave it. Yet our modern society has made it all but impossible to get it. It’s socially unacceptable, social dynamite. It upsets all our cherished power structures. I’m talking about the permission to be human. You may not have heard about this concept, but I’m sure you …
Surgeon General’s Warning: Providing health may be hazardous to your health. Being a doctor is not as glamorous as TV series would lead one to believe. For one thing, the patients are really sick and not just lovesick (although, sometimes, they are sick all over you). When the Black Death struck Europe, being a doctor …
(or: The Rise of Reason and the Fall of Respect) Ideas have legs. Some ideas can outrun a racehorse. Some ideas keep running for centuries, slowly soaking through the fabric of society. Allow me to take you on a brief time warp. Not far, just to the dawn of the Modern Age (and no, it …
It is somewhat ironic that much of what I learnt about medicine (the real kind of medicine) was already taught by a seriously stale pale male some 2,400 years ago. Hippocrates utterly revolutionised the practise of medicine not by inventing a cure for cancer, but by doing something radical, yet surprisingly simple: he promised not …
That invisible thingie that just fluttered past you was 2013. Most of 2013, at any rate. 2013 marks the 21st year since I was let loose on an unsuspecting public to practise (ahem…) medicine on the patient (and the not-so-patient). It may please you to know that I have done a lot of practising in …
