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 [...]
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’, [...]
I could not believe my eyes when I saw a headline in The British Muddical Journal (13 October 2023) proclaiming some great news: 'GPs can refer patients with low back pain to apps, says NICE.' So now at last we have the answer to this ubiquitous problem: apps! The object of this wonderful move is to help these [...]
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 [...]
If one undertakes to write a regular column in a medical journal there may be occasions when the deadline is looming and one can’t think of anything to say, though with so much going on in the world these instances must be rare. However, if afflicted by writer’s block it is always possible to turn to a subject [...]
A little while ago I joined a certain online medical discussion group. It’s lively, informal, and iconoclastic – just up my street. But in one aspect I found it disappointing. Doctors, being highly educated and having at least some degree of sophistication, you would expect to take a little thought before committing themselves in writing on a semi-public [...]
The British Medical Journal (BMJ), which boasts of being one of the world’s oldest general medical journals, from time to time publishes articles intended to guide general practitioners and other doctors on how to diagnose and treat musculoskeletal disorders. These are the very common ailments affecting the moving parts of the body (the joints, muscles, and tendons) [...]