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Archive for December, 2008

As the sun sets on 2008….

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 31, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Took a wee trip north today, and on the way home caught the last sunset of the year. (….in Perthshire, Scotland)
Lovely, huh?

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Angels

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the viewing room, life, movies, music, photography on December 22, 2008 | 2 Comments »

I saw this angel overlooking George Square in Glasgow…….got me thinking about angels and one of my favourite films of all time – Wim Wender’s “Wings of Desire”. If you haven’t seen it, you might have seen the US re-make which was called “City of Angels”.
What I love about this movie is how it is [...]

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Wallace monument in the mist

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 17, 2008 | 5 Comments »

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The unpredictable

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on December 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Black Swan, author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, was interviewed recently for Philosophy Now magazine. I happened to be reading it the other day and it came back to my mind as I sat in a train outside Queen Street station for half an hour this morning while engineers attempted to unstick a “points failure”.
My core idea [...]

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Does depression make for better doctors?

Posted in from the consulting room, health on December 16, 2008 | 1 Comment »

A study of medical students in Brazil found that 38% of them had at least 10 of a list of 63 depressive symptoms during their internship years -
Affective symptoms represent the core symptoms of a depressive mood, based on students’ reported levels of sadness, dissatisfaction, episodes of crying, irritability and social withdrawal. The cognitive cluster [...]

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The day I went unicorn hunting….

Posted in art, from the living room, life, photography on December 14, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Stirling, Scotland, where I was born is dominated by a beautiful Castle.

I saw a news item on the BBC recently which announced the hanging, in the Chapel Royal within the Castle, of the latest tapestry in the series “The Hunting of the Unicorn”, so I decided to go and see the unicorn for myself. As [...]

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Treat the patient, not the lab tests

Posted in from the consulting room, health on December 12, 2008 | 2 Comments »

The focus of medical practice is the lesion. It’s the lesion, the abnormal cells, tissue, organ or body system which IS the disease. This is the pathological approach to health. It gives pre-eminence to physical, “organic” abnormalities, names them (diagnosis) and then seeks to directly address those abnormalities with treatments. The treatments are primarily surgery [...]

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Is the placebo effect the self-healing effect?

Posted in from the consulting room, health on December 9, 2008 | 3 Comments »

The placebo effect is much misunderstood, seriously under-researched and full of peculiarities. I must admit I’ve assumed that the placebo effect is the body’s self-healing effect. I’ve always thought that’s an important point to make because otherwise people tend to think of the placebo effect as some kind of trick. Whatever it is, it’s real. [...]

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Today, first and last

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on December 6, 2008 | 4 Comments »

You’ve probably read somewhere the advice that you live today as if it were your last day on Earth. It’s a common counsel, and it’s supposed to get you to better appreciate the present. The argument goes that we tend to live unconsciously (like zombies), dreaming about better tomorrows or ruminating over worse yesterdays, and [...]

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The holly and the ivy

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 2, 2008 | 9 Comments »

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