Essay - Corpus - Page 12

Hospice: a philosophy of care

28 August 2017 5 Comments

Doug Lilly

Three years ago my partner asked me to deliver a gift to Carolyn, a friend of hers who was a patient at the Otago Community Hospice. Although I lived only a couple of streets away, I had never entered the building or given it much thought. I assumed it was a very sad place full of people dying of cancer.

Little did I know that within a few months I would be working at the Hospice as Operations Manager. My superficial and narrow understanding of what they did was quickly corrected as I discovered what a wonderful service it is, and how special is the team of staff and volunteers who work there and provide specialist palliative care.

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early intervention and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psycho-social and spiritual.” (WHO definition 2002)

Sex education in schools: a student’s view

21 August 2017 5 Comments

Molly Wootton

I am 17, and lucky enough to have been brought up in a household where sex education was readily available. When I asked where babies came from I didn’t get some long-winded story about a stork, or a cabbage patch. I got the truth. This openness meant that I didn’t have to rely on puberty education at intermediate, or sex education at high school, but the fact is that our education system is many students’ only resource for learning about sex and our ever-changing bodies. However this power is not fully utilised. The curriculum still tends to shy away from some important aspects of sex education.

Fictional doctors

14 August 2017 1 Comment

John Hale

Historically, plays, then novels, treated medical doctors as stock characters, often quacks or figures of fun, as in the Commedia dell’ Arte. Similarly, in Wycherley’s 1675 Restoration comedy, The Country Wife, the doctor serves as a device for the audience to be in the know, about Horner’s camouflage as a eunuch.

And Macbeth, telling the Doctor about his wife’s condition, understands it better than the doctor does:

that perilous stuff that weighs about the heart.

[Read more…] about Fictional doctors

A rhinestone cowboy in the waiting room

14 August 2017 6 Comments

Sue Wootton

From memory, for memory, and in memory.

I used to have a physiotherapy clinic in central Dunedin. One Friday evening I farewelled my final patient and began to tidy up before heading home. It had been a busy week and I was exhausted. Already mentally off-duty, I wandered into the waiting room to stack the magazines, and to my surprise and annoyance found two men sitting there. In an American drawl, one of them said, “My friend here needs an appointment.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but the clinic is closed.”

The man persisted. “This is very important,” he said. “He needs an appointment now.”

I glanced at the friend. He was certainly holding himself rigidly, as if in pain. But the very idea of treating one more patient that day was too much for me. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but I am closing now.”

The man amped up his appeal. It’s urgent; it’s necessary; it has to be done and you have to do it.

Vaccination debates and the pain of dividuality

7 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Dividuality: “the close proximity and unexpected pull of others in one’s life” (Garish Daswani 2011).

My ears are full of screaming: the name-calling, the CAPS, the exclamation points!!! Whenever vaccination comes up online, and comments are enabled, the conversation quickly devolves into an extremity of outrage and vitriol that reads to me like ‘moral panic.’

Coined in the late 1960s, the term ‘moral panic’ makes no judgement on the value of the issues under discussion. Rather, it highlights the social processes in the associated public discourse: the way that story, meaning, and affect coalesce around a particular social problem. Untangling an objective sense of risk from this is nigh on impossible. Besides, people are doing stupid, risky, and harmful things to each other, directly and indirectly, all day long, and in every part of the world. The question becomes not what to think of anti-vaxers, but why the panic about this particular issue, why here, and why now? I believe the answer is not purely medical, but also social and moral.

Mental health media coverage: looking past ‘spectacular and notorious’

31 July 2017 1 Comment

Katie Kenny and Laura Walters

“If you were to be crass, you could say there is a bit of a flavour of the month about it,” former Health Minister David Caygill says about mental health, during a conversation in a Christchurch cafe. It does sound crass, but it’s true. The shortfalls of our mental health system are a constant topic of discussion at the dinner table, in Parliament and in the media. Headlines claiming the system is “broken” or “on a knife edge” are frequent, and hard to ignore. You don’t have to look far to find a story about a mental health advocate calling for an independent review, or a grieving family member whose child killed themselves while in the care of services.

It is part of the media’s role to expose failings and hold those responsible to account. It’s relatively easy to point fingers and blame people in power. But, for us as journalists, it’s harder to look in the mirror and ask if we’re holding up our end of the bargain.