conversations about medicine and life
Iona Winter
Tīmata
I think it’s fair to say that the majority of us who experience on-going pain will seek relief from medical practitioners. Four years of repeat presentations in excruciating pain, to GPs and emergency departments, and the medical profession were unable to diagnose my son. Being a skinny young Māori musician, they labelled him a ‘drug seeker’ instead.
When someone doesn’t fit into a prescribed box, shouldn’t you look further?
Savannah Adams
Towards the end of May, after months of organising, I was part of a group of second and third year Otago University medical students who had the pleasure of bringing to life the 2017 Dunedin Teddy Bear Hospital. The hospital runs for a week and culminates with a Community Day on the final Saturday. It gives children, mostly aged 3 to 7, the chance to engage with a simulated healthcare environment, but in this case with the wonderful moral support of a best friend – their teddy.
Sue Wootton
Recently I talked at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival as part of a panel of health practitioners who write. Called Word Balm, our session set out to explore what language contributes to the practice of medicine. At the end of a wide-ranging conversation, chair Barbara Brookes called for questions from the audience. A woman raised her hand.
This is all very well,” she said, “but how come my GP looks at the computer screen, not at me, throughout the consultation?”
Sue Hallwright
I have strong memories of being taught by Keith Macleod when I was studying medicine at the University of Otago in the 1970s. He had a unique approach to teaching in action. I recall him, for example, discussing the profession of medicine in a tutorial. He challenged our shared view that medicine is all about curing and healing. He mooted that people are dying from the minute that they are born, that every second of every day people are treating their terminal condition by taking their next breath. Only when people fail in their self-treatment and when their friends and families are unable to help them, do people eventually seek help from doctors. On this basis, medicine is a failure-based system and ultimately all people must die, so we must fail with every single patient.
[Read more…] about Keith Macleod: radically rethinking the clinical relationship
Sue Hallwright
My recollections of Keith Macleod date back to the late 1970s when I was studying medicine at the University of Otago. Keith’s views regarding the role of clinical medicine in people’s lives, his focus on patient experience and his methods of teaching all had a major impact on me. All that I learned from Keith in my early medical education has stayed with me and remained relevant over the years.
This was an era in which most doctors and patients tended to view the doctor as the ‘expert’: the person with all of the knowledge about illnesses and how to treat them. The patient’s job was to provide a good history of the condition, make themselves available for examination and investigation, and then, once diagnosed, to follow their doctor’s instructions regarding treatment. As I recall it, the importance of the patients’ expertise, the meaning of their condition in the context of their lives and the limits to medical knowledge and practice were not acknowledged within the medical school curriculum at that time.
[Read more…] about Keith Macleod: a unique and powerful teacher
Gwynnedd Somerville and Charlotte Paul
What are you here for, if not to treat difficult patients?”
“How to take a history from and examine a sick person would seem an unusual starting point to create a philosophy of life … but that did not deter Keith”, writes psychiatrist Sandy Macleod in The Next Patient in the Waiting Room, a book of essays about his father, which we have edited. Keith Macleod joined the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago in 1951 and became a neurologist at Dunedin Hospital. Following his interest in the borderland between neurological and psychiatric disorders, he later became a neuro-psychiatric consultant at Ashburn Hall, retiring in 1983. He was also a philosopher, poet and great talker. The essays in the book explore Keith’s philosophy of life from the point of view of colleagues, family, patients, students, and friends. Here we take the title of the volume to touch on some of his maddeningly difficult ideas.
[Read more…] about ‘The Next Patient in the Waiting Room’: Keith Macleod and the clinical encounter
