conversations about medicine and life
Emer Lyons
When my mother reads one of my poems that uses the personal pronoun ‘I’
And the word queer to describe myself
She gets all worked up, all don’t be showing this to your auntie and only upsetting her
My mother doesn’t care that the LGBTQI community have reclaimed queer
Or that when a poet writes a poem using ‘I’ it’s not necessarily their perspective
Sarahmarie Innes & Katie Mahn
Many of us remember adolescence as a difficult time. Our mental well-being may have suffered because of increasingly busy lifestyles and academic expectations, body image issues, and peer pressure.
It’s also a time of increasing independence, which means more freedom and responsibility for your own dietary choices. Studies have shown this increased independence over food choices often results in teens eating less fruit and vegetables, having takeaways and snack foods more often, and missing meals such as breakfast.
Ruth Harvie
One of my favourite recipes is this chocolate brownie recipe from healthyfood.co.nz which is made without butter and uses unsweetened apple sauce instead of sugar. It allows me to over-indulge in the chocolate flavour and avoid the added richness of butter.
However, for many people this ‘healthy’ version of a brownie is anything but healthy. It may cause diarrhoea, farting, pain, bloating and stomach gurgling. This is because the recipe is high in short-chain carbohydrates known as FODMAPs (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols) which are poorly absorbed by about fifteen percent of the population. [Read more…]
Jade S. De La Paz
I am a forensic anthropologist. No, not like Bones, but I’m glad you have heard of it! For those who have not, forensic anthropology is the application of biological anthropology in a medico-legal setting. In reality, it has many more uses than Bones gives it credit for. In forensic anthropology, we focus on estimating the biological profile of human skeletal remains: age, sex, stature, ancestry, trauma, disease, time since death, burial context, number of individuals, etc. All this information, gleaned from skeletal analysis, helps with identification efforts, trauma analysis, and the scientific understanding of death(s).
Shalini Kumar
On Tuesday morning I was sitting at my desk working on this article, struggling to put my research into comprehensible sentences by avoiding any scientific jargon that would drive my potential reader(s) away. That was when I came across this cartoon. A pregnant woman is putting on a brave face, saying that her pregnancy is going “just fine”, when the truth is nowhere close! Her thought bubble precisely sums up everything a pregnant woman is most likely to face during those precious nine months of her pregnancy. Although I was spared the varicose veins, thank God!