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Archive for the ‘life’ Category

Visiting temples and shrines in Nara

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on September 14, 2012| 1 Comment »

cleansing

This is one of my most favourite activities – to stroll around the temples and shrines of Kyoto and Nara…..

nara

kasuga

kasuga

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Reduced Medicine

Posted in from the consulting room, health, life on August 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

There’s a terrible tendency these days to reduce the practice of Medicine to a slavish following of protocols and guidelines. In society there is a strong drive to uniformity and conformity – but that drive doesn’t come from individuals. It comes from the machine-like models of corporations and corporate management methods.

Iain McGilchrist says, in The Divided Brain,

We kid ourselves that doctors, teachers, policemen are there to develop a ‘product’ which we can then ‘get’ or consume. But this is nonsense. We don’t know beforehand what it is we are to go after and ‘get’, because it varies in every single case, and is dependent on a relationship between individuals.

Yet it seems we are increasingly pushed to demonstrate “outcomes” which are set before we begin, and are measured (presumably) after we have “finished.”

I think the prime job of a doctor is diagnosis – in the old sense of the word – an understanding. In other words a doctor’s job is to understand. To understand a person and to understand what they are experiencing, whatever artificial label of a named disease we apply.

Understanding is never complete.

So, diagnosis is never finished.

The GMC, in “Tomorrow’s Doctors”, says that a doctor’s job is to be able to handle complex situations and to deal with uncertainty. We need a bit more of that. We need to shift the focus away from tasks, outcomes and targets, all of which imply products and endpoints, to human beings. Every single human being is unique, and nobody, but nobody, can accurately predict how the future is going to unfold for an individual.

Medicine is a relationship between two people. One acting in the service of another. It can’t be reduced to measurable tasks. And it certainly can’t be reduced to the act of writing a prescription!

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Wonderful, not fearful

Posted in from the viewing room, life, music, personal growth, video on August 26, 2012| 1 Comment »

Emeli Sandé sang a beautiful version of Read All About It, Part III at the closing of the London Olympics, and the line “we’re all wonderful, wonderful people so when did we all get so fearful?” has been running through my brain ever since.

(I’ve embedded the video link here, but you’ll see the Olympic Committee insist you go watch it on youtube….go on, click the link…it’s worth it!! The lyric in question comes in at the 2 minute mark….)

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What if you knew?

Posted in from the living room, life on August 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

What if you knew today is a once in a lifetime opportunity?

What if you knew the food you eat today you will never eat again?

What if you knew the food you eat today you will never have eaten before?

What if you knew you could tell one person today that you love them?

What if you knew you could be kind to someone today?

What if you knew you could be kind to yourself today?

What if you knew you could listen to your favourite song or tune in your music collection today?

What if you knew you could read one poem today?

What if you knew you could smile today, even if just for a few moments?

What if you knew you could live today as if this day had never existed before?

What if you knew you could live today as if this day will never come back again?

What if you knew today was a once in a lifetime opportunity to live today?

What would you do?

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Is the universe friendly?

Posted in from the reading room, life, perception, personal growth, psychology on August 10, 2012| 1 Comment »

Einstein  said that an important question to ask ourselves is “Is the universe friendly?”

It’s an interesting question because the answer you give influences how you experience Life.

If you think it is unfriendly, you are likely to see danger all around and to expect hostility. You are likely to respond by trying to control and conquer in order to be safe. If you think it is neither friendly, nor unfriendly, then you probably experience Life as random, brief and pointless. However, if you think it is friendly, you are more disposed to engage with an open-hearted curiosity, seeking to understand more and more.

This question which he posed is often considered in relation to thinking about the emergence of consciousness in the constantly evolving universe.

An article in this month’s Psychology Today refers to the question in this context. It’s worth a read, and concludes

Any inventory of the cosmos that omits us is like a survey of the body that overlooks the brain. In evolving the human mind, the universe has fashioned an instrument capable of understanding itself and empathizing with others. We are that instrument, and since we are part of the cosmos, we err if we judge it to lack kindness, love, and compassion. If I believe the universe is heartless, it’s because I myself do not love

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Making a home

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on August 8, 2012| 3 Comments »

photo

These are unusual nests, aren’t they? Like low hanging fruit from the trees, or lanterns shining on the lake.
Here’s one in the making….

photo

You can see why the bird who makes this kind of nest is called a weaver bird.

photo

Here’s something else unusual about these little homes…

photo

The entrance is underneath!

Every single one of these nests is unique, because every single one is woven by the bird who is going to live in it. But they don’t want to be completely alone, so several of them build their nests in the same tree. It’s a little village. A small community. Every one of these communities is unique too, each one being in a different tree, each community created by a different group of individual birds.

The Universe has a creative flow.

Everywhere you look you can see differentiation and diversity, and the building of more complex phenomena from simpler parts.
Take a look around you today. Where do you see this creative flow in action? Where do you see diversity, uniqueness and the creation of links and connections?

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Thinking bigger

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, perception, Uncategorized on July 25, 2012| 1 Comment »

Ever since I was a little boy I’ve loved to look up at the sky on a clear night and lose myself in the wonder of the fact that the light from every single star has taken years and years to reach the Earth. How incredible that the tiny spots of light landing on the backs of my eyes left those stars millions of years ago!

Its astonishing to think that as you look up at the night sky you are looking at the past, the distant past. And how astonishing to realise now that our latest astronomical instruments let us see back billions of years, almost to the Big Bang itself. But not quite.

I recently came across the phrase “Cosmic Horizon”. The Cosmic Horizon is the furthest visible point in the Universe. In every direction as we scan the skies, we can detect signals from far away stars right up to a point of darkness which is so far away, so far distant in the past, that we can’t see anything any longer. This is the horizon. It’s like the horizon we see where the sky meets the earth or the sea, but much, much further away.

In the book, “The View from The Centre of The Universe”, Joel Primak and Nancy Abrams, building on this idea that the Cosmic Horizon is a limit in the timescale we can know, propose that we, the human race, need to develop our “Responsibility Horizon”.

This is a fascinating idea. Think about it. How far does you current “Responsibility Horizon” extend? One generation, maybe two? When you make decisions, do you consider the impact of those decisions on the lives of your children, or your grandchildren? You might. If you have children or grandchildren you might be concerned about the kind of world we are creating now for them to inhabit in the years ahead. But let’s stretch that beyond two generations. How far ahead do you want your Resonsibility Horizon to reach? And if it’s three or four, or more, generations, how will that influence the choices you make today?

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Evolution

Posted in from the living room, life on July 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

From the Big Bang, to the first stars; from the stars to galaxies and superclusters; from stars to planets, to Earth; from Hydrogen and Helium to all the elements of the Periodic Table; from single cell life forms to plants, to animals, to human beings……….there are a couple of themes which run through the whole story.

Differentiation and diversity. It’s a story of increasing difference, of more and more unique and different elements.

Integration. Integration is the building of mutually beneficial relationships between differentiated parts.

Complexity. As different elements, or parts, build more and more mutually beneficial links, greater complexity emerges.

And here we are now. Human beings. With the most complex systems known in the Universe – our bodies, our brains, our consciousness.

Wow! It’s really pretty breath-taking.

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The plague of corporatism – drug companies et al

Posted in from the living room, life on July 9, 2012| 1 Comment »

Is anyone in any doubt that we are experiencing a plague of corporatism? From the media sector, the astonishing stories about the behaviour of News International, dwarfed by the scandal after scandal of the financial sector (most recently Barclays coming to the fore), and now, too, a record fine for a drug company.

What’s going on?

I suspect it’s the old “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Or is it the theory that psychopaths rise to the top?

Look at the GlaxoSmithKline story….

prosecutors found the company had been allotting over half a million dollars a year to its district sales representatives to offer doctors regular golf lessons, fishing trips, and basketball tickets while promoting the use of antidepressant drug Paxil in children. The GSK sales campaign also involved helping to publish an article in a medical journal that misreported evidence from a clinical trial. Meanwhile the company was also being accused of marketing the drug Wellbutrin for sexual dysfunction and weight loss, when it had only received official consent from the FDA to treat depression. Some of its drugs reps were reportedly describing Wellbutrin as “the happy, horny, skinny pill”. In the case of a third treatment, Avandia, the company did not report to the FDA studies it had carried out that showed there were safety concerns about heart risks. Critics had been calling for the drug to be banned four years ago yet it was only in 2010 that restrictions were finally slapped on its use.

A combination of selling drugs for indications for which they didn’t have a license (because they hadn’t sought approval), to the setting aside of millions to entertain prescribers, to the much worse, in my opinion, hiding research evidence of harms, burying evidence of lack of efficacy, and misreporting trials in publications, has led to them being hit with one of the largest fines the industry has suffered – $3 billion (£1.9 billion).

The latter issues about deliberate manipulation of the research reporting seriously undermines the credibility of “evidence based medicine” (an enterprise which stands of falls on the issue of what is published as “evidence”)

The fine, although large, is a fraction of the profits made from the drugs this company markets –

Avandia has made $10.4bn in sales, Paxil took $11.6bn, and Wellbutrin sales were $5.9bn during the years covered by the settlement,

What does the GSK CEO say?

At GSK, we firmly believe that operating in a responsible and ethical way is essential for the success of our business. We have come a long way but recognise that there is much more we can do and we will continue to challenge ourselves.

The fine is split between one third as a criminal fine, and two thirds a civil one. Despite this, the company says

the civil settlement is not an does not admission of any liability or wrongdoing in the selling and marketing

The thing is, this company is not alone. Take a look at this link which itemises six major drug companies’ fines over the last three years.

This stinks. But the drug companies are sure not alone. Whatever your political persuasion, is it not clear that corporatism is failing us (the 99%)?

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The slug who surfs

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on July 4, 2012| 2 Comments »

Goodness! Look what I saw yesterday, 7am, on my way to work….

the surfing slug

A slug skateboarding!
Or was it a slug snowboarding without the snow?
Seriously, this isn’t a set up. Too early in the day for someone to have put this little guy here!
Made me laugh though, which is a good start to a day!

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