Posted in perception, photography on April 29, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Here are three photos I took on Sunday. They are all of some boats I saw moored at the edge of Loch Venachar. This first one, captures the mooring and the numbers which really caught my eye.
The fact the boats are numbered rather than named makes them seem especially utilitarian, doesn’t it? “Come in Number [...]
Posted in from the consulting room, health on April 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The Royal College of Nursing in the UK has published shocking results of a survey of its members. They asked nurses about their experience of patients being treated with dignity in hospitals.
In total, 81% of those quizzed said they sometimes or always left their workplace feeling distressed or upset because they had not been able [...]
Posted in life, photography on April 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
loch venachar, originally uploaded by bobsee.
How do you spend your days off?
Yesterday (sunday) I had lunch in a little restaurant on the banks of Loch Venachar. It’s lovely to be able to sit outside and eat. There’s something about the relationship between food and health that is so much more than the nutrients that food [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on April 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Human beings are complex, dynamic, constantly changing organisms. To understand a single person you have to consider them within their multiple contexts – temporal, spatial, social, cultural and so on. Changes in any of these contexts can profoundly change our understanding of an individual.
Medicine tends to divide all illness into two types – acute and [...]
Posted in from the viewing room, humour, life, movies on April 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m a big fan of Mike Leigh, but although there is a lot of humour in many of his movies, they’re generally pretty dark. His latest movie, Happy-go-lucky, is quite different, yet it retains those essential characteristics of Mike Leigh films – I can’t quite explain it but he manages to make you both care [...]
Posted in from the consulting room, health on April 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
There’s an area of the brain known as the striatum. This particular area is affected by certain diseases (Parkinsons Disease for example). One of the odd things that happens sometimes when patients are treated with drugs for Parkinsons Disease, is that they can develop strange behaviours in relation to money – compulsive gambling for example.
Some [...]
Posted in from the reading room, personal growth, psychology on April 23, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I’m very taken by network theory. Linked is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read, and books like The Medici Effect, and Smart World develop aspects of network theory too. Currently I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and he makes this simple but thought-provoking point -
Individuals in group settings exhibit behaviours that [...]
Posted in from the consulting room, health on April 22, 2008 | 6 Comments »
TED has a great short video of a scientist called Christopher deCharms explaining some of the possibilities of functional brain scans – “fMRI”s.
This is a fascinating technology – looks like a brain scan but in colour. The active areas of the brain “light up” in bright colours which allows us to map functions, including thoughts [...]
Posted in from the consulting room, health on April 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m reading Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (and, oh, how I’m enjoying it!). Quite early in the book he says this -
….in the words of the physicist Philip Anderson, that “more is different”. Writing in Science magazine in 1972, Anderson noted that aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behaviour that cannot be [...]
Posted in from the consulting room, health, tagged holistic, MUS on April 20, 2008 | 5 Comments »
The biomedical approach to health and illness, not only puts lesions, or pathological changes in the body’s tissues or symptoms, at the heart of diagnosis and treatment. The idea is that disease is a physical phenomenon, with changes which can observed and/or measured. However, what drives patients to consult doctors is frequently not the sudden [...]
