conversations about medicine and life
We publish a range of perspectives on health and wellbeing, especially reflective work which fleshes out the biomedical version of illness and disability.
Elaine Reese
Who says teenagers don’t talk? I can assure you that they do, at least when you seat them on a sofa across from an interested and patient interviewer who hangs on their every word. They talk – oh yes, they talk. In our research on teens’ life stories, we have some 50-page transcripts of teens talking about their lives.
What do they tell us? Quite a lot.
Ben Wheeler
Bone needs an adequate supply of calcium and phosphate to mineralise properly. Failure of this mineral supply (for any reason) results in defects like osteomalacia (impaired mineralisation of the bone matrix) and osteoporosis (overall low bone mass). In children, inadequate mineralisation causes rickets. There are multiple causes of rickets, but the main one is vitamin D deficiency.
[Read more…] about Vitamin D deficiency rickets: a problem for our times
Max Reid
A couple of Saturdays ago I attended a meeting of Kidney Health New Zealand’s Consumer Council. The Council comprises around 18-20 individuals from around the country, each with kidney disease of varying types and progression. We only meet once a year, and only for around five hours – for those attendees on dialysis, the logistics involved in planning their dialysis around such an event preclude meeting more often or for longer.
Each meeting begins with a round of introductions. How they do that has always been over to the group – but always the format has been the same: name, where they’re from, and the nature of their condition.
“Hi, I’m Ben from Tauranga – on home haemodialysis.”
“Morena. Haami. Northland. In-centre haemodialysis.”
“Hi. My name’s Bridget. I’m from Christchurch, a transplant recipient, but also the mother of a deceased organ donor.”
Susan Wardell
Medical anthropologist Dr Susan Wardell reviews Moon Circle: Rediscover Wildness, Intuition and Sisterhood by Lucy AitkenRead.
A moon circle is, by basic definition, a night-time gathering of women. Its roots as a cultural practice are very old, as old “as the ages”. Often outdoors, and comprising a mixture of symbolic activity and verbal sharing, the moon circle is making a resurgence in the contemporary West. AitkenRead’s book, unapologetically feminist in its goals, sets out to “rediscover wildness, intuition and sisterhood”:
We are purposely stepping into the river of womanhood that has twisted and turned throughout herstory.” – Lucy AitkenRead
For this kind of voyage, it seems ritual is the best vessel.
Sue Wootton
Poet, essayist and all-round international man of letters, Clive James, was diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema in 2010. He wasn’t expected to survive long, but he’s still here, and writing the best work of his life. And this is largely, he says, because of death. There is nothing like intimations of your own mortality to sharpen your focus on what makes life worth living:
I am here now, who was hardly even there.”
In 2015 he published what he thought would be his farewell collection of poetry, Sentenced to Life. Last year, kicking on, as it were, like “an exhausted footballer with legs of lead”, he published another collection, called (with typical Clive James wit) Injury Time.
Sara Boucher
Your daughter needs to eat more salads.”
My nine year old self heard the doctor’s stern words and took to heart that he was calling me fat. I was an active child and my family mostly ate nutritious foods. But when we ate, we ate a lot.
In high school, my drive to be thin led to disordered eating: starving, bingeing, purging, cutting out whole food groups, and subsisting on sole food groups. Nothing got me closer to fitting into smaller jeans. After days or weeks of trying to lose weight I always gave up. There seemed no point in trying to reach always-unattainable weight goals.
At the time, I wondered why my body wasn’t considered good enough by societal measures and my doctor’s opinion when I could outswim and outrun my peers. Technically, I was healthy. Blood pressure? Perfect! Cholesterol? Perfect! Fitness? I had that, too. But my weight gave my doctor reason to believe I was headed for doom and gloom.
