conversations about medicine and life
Charlotte Parallel
We know our heartbeat intimately. We can feel it through our skin and fingers as the internal pulsing of blood, muscles contracting and expanding in a rhythm that is our own. To hear our sinus rhythm ‘outside’ our body is quite an unusual experience, but this was the basis of my participatory sound-works show, Waves and bodies in waves in bodies.
Dr Joe Baker
The 2016 North and East Otago Literature is Therapy Society (NEOLIThS) conference was held in the seaside village of Karitane last February. The keynote speaker was Professor Ivor G. Rudge who believes many patients are unhappy with their health providers but are unwilling to complain. Professor Rudge asks patients to write down their grievances. The process of transcribing their thoughts to paper is therapeutic for the patients and allows them to take more ownership of the issues. Professor Rudge also believes that disseminating patients’ concerns can inform health providers about what really irks patients. Professor Rudge presented various case studies. The first was a patient describing a typical encounter with his GP who we have called George (not his real name).
Dr Leah Kaminsky
A physician works at the border between science and the soul … the wise doctor probes not only the organs of his patient but also his feelings and emotions, his fears and hopes, his regrets and his goals. And to accomplish that most important task of applying wisdom, the physician also needs to take his own emotional temperature.” – Jerome Groopman, in the foreword to Writer, M. D., a collection of works by doctor-writers edited by Melbourne GP and writer Leah Kaminsky.
Kaminsky writes: Writing for me can be a kind of thermometer, where I check the rising mercury of my own beliefs, biases and uncertainties. It is not a place I hope to find answers—rather, I use the blank page to try and understand what kind of questions a doctor needs to ask. My medicine has always fed and informed my writing. But more importantly, literature has, I hope, made me a better physician.
Laurence Fearnley
Novelist Laurence Fearnley walks on Dunedin’s Signal Hill every day, and as she walks she creates a map of the scents she encounters.
Paying attention to scent has resulted in a more intimate response to landscape, one that grows stronger with each change of season as my daily walks nurture my familiarity with the ground I cover. Every day Signal Hill grows more interesting and more beautiful.”
Barbara Brookes
Artsenta: the First 30 Years by Kath Beattie
We are often oblivious to the health initiatives taking place in our communities. This came home to me forcefully while reading the recently published history of Artsenta, a Dunedin-based supportive art studio which started life at Cherry Farm Psychiatric Hospital in the 1980s. Artsenta was the initiative of Dr Julia Aranui-Faed, and grounded in her belief that creativity is integral to well-being. Artsenta: the First 30 Years charts the evolution of this idea in practice, an idea whose philosophy is well-expressed by long-time Artsenta staff member Heather Martin:
… to focus on art and the well bit inside everyone”. [Read more…] about Creative Spaces in the Community: ‘Artsenta: the First 30 Years’
Chris Nichol
My mother-in-law has a radio in her head. She enjoys audio hallucinations. Well, “enjoy” may not be the word. Sometimes, I think, she enjoys them. At other times she endures them. The real problem is she can’t turn them off. For the best part of a year now she’s been concerned that muzak is regularly playing in her apartment. She’s asked us to have a word with the management to get it turned off. Unfortunately we can’t hear it at all. It’s not playing for us.
