Here’s an interesting study. Apparently people who have a good social network of friends and neighbours are likely to live longer. In their study, which looked at over 300,000 people from four continents over a period of seven years, those with the strongest social networks fared best in terms of health outcomes and lifespan. They [...]
Archive for July, 2010
Good friends and neighbours
Posted in from the consulting room, health on July 29, 2010 | 1 Comment »
The Master and His Emissary
Posted in books, from the reading room on July 27, 2010 | 10 Comments »
The Master and His Emissary Thank you, Iain McGilchrist. This is not only a brilliant and comprehensive work, not only utterly convincing and erudite, but it shines the bright light of understanding on so many aspects of life. I can’t remember a time I enjoyed a book more than this one. I can’t remember a [...]
Attention and observation
Posted in Uncategorized on July 27, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Have you ever seen the video where you’re asked to count the number of passes between basketball players, then you’re asked a surprise question which shows you don’t see what seems (with hindsight) obvious? Well, check out this new video. Try it out. I incorporates the original experiment and conducts a new one one you.
Light and water
Posted in from the dark room, photography on July 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I love how light on water constantly changes. As the clouds move across the face of the sun, or the sun’s rays flicker through the leaves of the trees, flashes of colour and light dance on the surface of the water. If the water is flowing over rocks of different colour, the show is just [...]
Cancer and living conditions
Posted in from the consulting room, health on July 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
There’s an interesting piece of research published recently studying the effect of living conditions on cancer. Jonah Lehrer has written about it here. It’s a study conducted on mice, not humans, but the results were pretty dramatic. In short, the paper demonstrates that mice living in an enriched environments – those spaces filled with toys, [...]
Clocks and clouds
Posted in books, from the reading room, neuroscience, science on July 18, 2010 | 4 Comments »
I recently read a great piece by Jonah Lehrer where he ponders about the way we pursue science. It’s worth reading the whole article, but here’s the paragraph which really grabbed my attention – Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly [...]
The big idea in health care? More drugs
Posted in from the consulting room, health on July 12, 2010 | 2 Comments »
What’s your vision for health care? I remember once hearing a spokesperson for WHO (the World Health Organisation) being asked that question and he said his dream would be that every child in the world was vaccinated against every known disease at birth. I wondered what planet he was living on. One vision is based [...]
Antony Gormley, Water of Leith, Edinburgh
Posted in art, from the dark room, photography on July 5, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I found four of the six sculptures on one day’s walk, but I’ll need to go back and try and find the other two. One thing which really struck me about these figures is how different they are in their individual contexts……not just a bit different, but VERY different.
How do we heal?
Posted in from the consulting room, health on July 4, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Here’s a scenario to try with any health care professional you know – Imagine a patient presents with an infection in their bladder (cystitis), with burning pain passing urine, frequent need to pass to urine and some blood in the urine. You send a sample of the urine to the lab and they grow “E [...]
What we share in common, and what makes us unique
Posted in from the consulting room, health on July 2, 2010 | 1 Comment »
The first time I saw Antony Gormley’s “The Field“, I was transfixed. The room filled with those hundreds of small terracotta creatures all gazing at me gazing at them! It’s an image which has stayed with me ever since and it’s one I think all health care professionals should expose themselves to. Every patient I [...]
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