Metaphors of illness and healing

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a really interesting programme this week entitled Metaphor for Healing. I don’t think you’ll be able to listen to it (unless it’s still on the BBC iPlayer) but they’ve put up a good page about it on the bbc website. There’s obviously a link between issues of metaphor and those of [...]

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Exercises in making sense

Human beings are sense-making creatures. We continuously process all the information we can gather from our environments – internal and external – and try to put the information together somehow. I think we use two particular sets of skills to do this, and they’re related.
The first skill is pattern spotting.
What do we think when we [...]

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Strange things happen…..

The other day Ian sent me an email with a link in it (he does this quite a lot!). It was to a book which he thought would interest me. I followed the link and, yes, it sounded really up my street. The book was called “Friends in Low Places”, by James Willis and it [...]

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Suffering and good lives

My daily working life is that of a doctor. That only tells you a little because Medicine is a very broad subject and doctoring can require extremely different sets of skills. Sometimes I muse about just what is the job of a doctor? Or what makes for a good doctor? I’m pretty sure it involves [...]

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Myths which improve life

People often use the word myth as if it is the opposite of the word truth. It’s juxtaposed to reality. You hear that a lot. An explanation about something is dismissed as a myth, meaning that it’s not true, not a fact, that’s it’s unreal. It’s quite strange how we’ve developed this way of using [...]

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The stories that emerge from little observations

Let me tell you a story.
Last week, when visiting my parents, my mum said she was looking for her collection of Robert Burns poetry (it was Burns Day), and she came across her aunt Wilhelmina’s “Burns Birthday Record”. Here it is

I’ve never seen a book like this before. You can see it was owned by [...]

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Stories and genes…..how we are made

Although I get a genuine thrill out of scientific discoveries about how the body works, it’s never quite enough for me. I’m always aware of something else. It’s partly that knowledge that a complex whole human being is so much more than the sum of his or her parts. But it’s also the knowledge that [...]

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I am because you are

One of greatest joys of blogging is how it facilitates the discovery, and creation, of connections. My daughter, Amy, who writes the wonderful lessordinary, has developed a whole online network of friends through her blog. She’s a great networker and deliberately creates her blog to make and develop connections with others. Let me tell you [...]

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Storytelling and the science of the mind

Because I deal with stories every day, I decided to learn more about the place of narrative in human experience, but coming from a medical perspective I couldn’t find much about narrative, even though there are emerging disciplines of “narrative-based medicine” and “narrative-based research”. Instead, I found the best thinking on storytelling lay in the [...]

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4 verbs which make us human?

Let’s consider four verbs which highlight essential characteristics of human beings.
SENSING
All living creatures are sensate. All have sensory organs to pick up stimuli from the environment – light, sound, odours, temperature and so on. As human beings we have a particularly elaborate sensory system, possibly THE most elaborate of all creatures, however, being sensate is [...]

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