ISSN 1538-1080
My fascination with healing dates back to my high school years when a dear friend suffered third degree burns over 75 percent of his body. I watched his recuperation with the emergency life-saving treatments, the skin grafting, the physical rehabilitation, and the agony his spirit went through. These opened my eyes to a process that
In Western biomedicine, nutritional therapies have been proven cost-effective modes of treatment in such well-researched conditions as hypercholesterolemia (McGehee 1995) and non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (Franz et al 1995). While patients are receptive to dietary advice from their doctors, that advice is seldom forthcoming in any great detail, as many physicians have minimal training in
Medical School Applicants Should Be Screened for Personality Disorders In the December 2001 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics, the authors encourage medical schools to more thoroughly screen for sociopathic behavior in incoming medical students. Dr. Michael Lowe of the Fiji School of Medicine states that screening applicants may help avoid incidents like the
I have been there: both with epidural and without, and I can say that each was right for me at the time. Here we face the age old problem of not imposing ones own values on others. But especially in terms of the patient/doctor relationship because there is definitely a power imbalance there, how to
Two days ago I completed my four week long obstetrics/ and gynecology core rotation. The month was filled with the unexpected in many ways. One of the surprises was my response to epidural (spinal) anesthesia injections that are given to reduce pain during labor and delivery. My mother started training to be a lay midwife
Working in the cardiac stress testing department of a mega-hospital complex is a little like working in a factory, except that instead of producing widgets, our factory produces completed cardiac stress tests. There is pressure from supervisors to get patients tests done quickly, so that more tests can be done. The departments emphasis on efficiently
All his life Peter had carried the pain about with him. Sometimes intense. sometimes no more than a dull ache. Sometimes for months at a time he was hardly aware of it, but it was always there. He knew that. It had a precise location, always the same, a spot below the ribs, an inch