I am all for treating people fairly and being non-discriminatory, but sometimes you have to draw a line. For example, in the UK National Health Service (NHS) website, which is on the whole helpful and a useful source of information on health matters, in their efforts to try to please all the people all of the time, they [...]
Gentle reader. Observe the picture above. It’s to be found in various stock collections of photos, including one with the curious name of Unsplash where it’s available to be downloaded free of charge. It shows the face of a young man with a rather grim expression who appears to be dripping with sweat. Has he just run [...]
The UK General Medical Council (GMC), the doctors’ regulatory body, used to have a pithy aphorism to indicate what it does: ‘Guiding doctors, protecting patients.’ This was subsequently changed to ‘Guiding doctors. Ensuring good medical practice.’ I am sure doctors are sometimes in need of guidance, and doubtless there are occasions when patients may need to be protected [...]
Kawaii is a Japanese word meaning cute, sweet, pretty, etc. It’s often applied to babies, children, young girls, and – pet animals. And therein lies a problem. I have lived in Japan for four decades and regard it as a privilege to have been granted the right of permanent residency. After immigrating to this wonderful country, I have [...]
Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen and gender unspecified people! Do you have a gastric stomach, a cardiac heart, or a bone in your leg? Do you feel all anyhow, under the weather, suffer from brain fog, or galloping hypochondriasis? With your hectic lifestyle, are you no longer at the top of your game? Then, to paraphrase [...]
The British Muddical Journal is at it again. In the 20 July 2024 edition we find a headline, ‘Royal College launches physicians’ green toolkit’. I don’t know about you, but this conjures up in my mind an image of a metal box, coloured green, containing spanners, screwdrivers, etc. that I might use to do odd jobs around [...]
In an online publication called Strong Women from 2022, I came across the following headline: I had a full-body health MOT and finally got answers about some odd symptoms I’ve been experiencing. (MOT is an abbreviation for Ministry of Transport and refers to tests on motor vehicles introduced in Britain in 1960 to check the condition of the [...]
Encapsulation of what goes wrong A regular columnist in a certain medical journal who had run out of ideas, again seems to have been afflicted by the dreaded writer’s block. So, once more he’s turned to his favourite subject: himself. The first thing that strikes one about his latest column is the repeated use of the words ‘I’, [...]
An open letter of 17 December 2021 by the editors of The British Medical Journal, or 'The BMJ' as they call this august organ, has just come to my attention. It’s addressed to the man who runs the social medium formerly called BookFace but which is now styled merely as ‘Meta’. The new title, a Greek prefix meaning [...]
The title of this post is borrowed from a book published in 1967 by a doctor with the splendidly appropriate name of Alex Comfort. It deals with how doctors in the past and in the then present, inadvertently and ignorantly made people anxious, particularly over masturbation and constipation, among other matters in which they had set themselves up [...]