Corpus - conversations about medicine and life

Heat, Health and Climate Change

3 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sarah Harrison

Otago University’s Department of Preventive and Social Medicine recently hosted a guest seminar by environmental and occupational health scientist Professor Tord Kjellstrom: “Climate change impacts on Health – the underestimated effects of increasing environmental heat in already hot places”. Professor Kjellstrom spoke about projected increases in global atmospheric temperatures in relation to various carbon emission scenarios, and how these changes are likely to impact on health.

Choosing Paediatrics as a Career in Medicine

26 June 2017 Leave a Comment

John Clarkson

My early developmental experience included growing up on a farm in the Waikato. Although I enjoyed helping to care for the calves, lambs, piglets, chickens, puppies, and kittens, I never wanted to become a farmer. Animal handling practices at the time were not always baby-friendly, and some were cruel. It is reassuring that the practice has improved to some extent.

Instead of farming I was able to follow my older brother’s footsteps to New Zealand’s then only medical school at Otago. Despite the distance and the hazards of hitchhiking as the main form of travel, it was usual to return to the home farm during term holidays. Here I was able to be involved with the observations made by my paediatrician brother-in-law, Ross Howie, on the respiratory distress syndrome experienced by pre-term lambs in the makeshift “intensive care unit” in our woolshed. Along with Obstetrician Mont Liggins, also from Auckland, who discovered the maturing effect of maternally-given antenatal steroids on fetal lamb lungs, he went on to conduct the first randomised control trial of this intervention in humans. This practice which is now standard worldwide has saved many thousands of lives. While I was a medical student it was inspiring to be on the periphery of this ground-breaking research.

Prozac and creativity

26 June 2017 2 Comments

Heather Bauchop

Off Prozac after a bit over a year, for a time there were colours and movement. But not the ease that I assumed came to other people. I still felt out of step, uneasy in the world. Looking at life through glass, trapped outside on an exposed ledge. And then over time – months or perhaps years – there was the fog and the rattle of chains and the familiar cell. Looking back, I realise that twenty-five years have passed, twenty-five years where I have made my way in and out of fog, with some years encapsulated in green and white pills, and some years marked by the awareness that the fog might roll in, and underneath all, was that the rattle of chains…. (depression is a hydra demanding over-writing and mixed metaphors, while eluding all). Even with the pills, the chains are still there, I am just more aware I am carrying them and that some of the weight is shared with modern medicine. Depression is a kind of knowing – there is no unknowing.

Celebrating the turning points: solstice in the south

26 June 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

At 99, Sir Lloyd Geering (thinker, theologian, mathematician) has published a new book, Portholes to the Past. In May, he appeared at the Auckland Writers’ Festival, interviewed by John Campbell. I was lucky enough to be present in the audience, and highly recommend listening to the podcast of their conversation here. Towards the end of the interview, commenting on the current state of the world, Geering said:

I have lately sensed a widespread apprehension for the future … We’ve lost that feeling of safety in the world… [and now with terrorism] there’s a feeling of insecurity that was not there at the beginning of the 20th century.”

In Geering’s view this wobble stems from losing, in the transition to a post-Christian secular worldview, a vital framework for supporting meaning in our lives. Geering suggests that one way we can begin to heal this loss is through establishing new rituals through which we can express our values and reconnect as a community. Geering said:

I think we’ve got to return to some festivals of nature. I think it would it be a good thing to celebrate the shortest day of the year, for example, as a turning point.”

Promises: Mental Health in crisis

19 June 2017 2 Comments

Tracey Holden

In New Zealand, a total of 36,684 referrals were made for people needing mental health crisis assessment during the 2015-16 financial year. Nearly 13,000 referrals were made for people needing an overnight stay – some patients being referred multiple times.

Yet there are just 590 beds in acute mental health wards nationwide for people in crisis.

Recently I felt compelled to sign a petition on actionstation.org.nz calling for a National Inquiry into Mental Health Services. Up until then I had been like the silent majority of New Zealanders who have glossed over stories about how our mental health services are in crisis.

Solidarity comes when our stories align.

Pursuing darkness: musing on depression and creativity

19 June 2017 1 Comment

Heather Bauchop

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.”

I have always loved writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s opening to her novel A Wizard of Earthsea. It is the perfect epitaph. In these five lines is the enormity of life and both the vitality and emptiness of existence. Le Guin confronts the value of turning to life’s turmoil and recognising that only in each imperfect moment are we alive. Thinking about Le Guin’s trilogy and the meaning we attribute to our lives, I wondered about my life and the intersection of meaning, voice and truth.

When I was 25 I was diagnosed with ‘long-standing dysthymic disorder’ (also called dysthymia – a beautiful word meaning ‘ill-humoured’ that now wears the tedious label ‘Persistent Depressive Disorder’). I was (perversely) quite happy about this – this wasn’t depression, but a persistent low mood. The diagnosis seemed less dramatic, like being in a valley rather than at the bottom of a pit. The low mood (the low mood – something distanced from the self) responded to Prozac – a new drug at the time, requiring a $200 visit to a psychiatrist to authorise the prescription. It is not until recently I realised that such a diagnosis could be a life sentence, indeed a sentence I’ve been serving out for twenty-five years.