It’s all about who?
Category Archives: Effectiveness
Diseases of despair – an Easter ramble.
Despair on Easter Sunday, mid-Passover. Who ate the goat? Who stole the Stolen?!
I’m just a quiet guy.
You feel you know me, think again…
The art (Tao) of doctoring without doctoring
Doctoring without doctoring, a state of being, non-being. I am therefore I might be.
The last lecture
I flashed-forward a decade and imagined them strutting around a hospital wards, missing the point as they seemed to miss it now.
Person-centred care and self-love
I, as a doctor might know all about diabetes or asthma, you as the person with the condition know all about you. What you know about you is always far more than I can know about the dry technicalities of disease, even with a lifetime of experience.
Please… Write to me.
It calls for better informed patients, a shift of the power-balance, away from ‘papa-says.’ It is an undoing of paternalism towards equality and inclusion.
Satori in the quicksand, the dimishing returns of a hospital admission
Thus, one doctor might say ‘chest infection’ another ‘bronchitis’ another ‘pneumonia’ and a fourth, ‘chest clear, probable urine infection.’
What is understood. Understood. Standing under. Capisce?
The humans built the tower to reach heaven or God and their punishment to forever live in perplexity, to hover above or alongside the dark matter.
Approaching Bambi
Life lesson for those in authority.
Imagine you are approaching Bambi when the moment matters.
Winter cannibalism, a theory of economics, healthcare, and D:Ream
Healthcare staff working in the late 90’s and early 00’s will be familiar with the airplane analogy. Sometimes a double-decker bus was used. This supposedly equated either (depending on who was talking and their level of cynicism) to the numbers of patients harmed or killed in US and UK hospitals every day. The UK planesContinue reading “Winter cannibalism, a theory of economics, healthcare, and D:Ream”
Dickens speaks to Marx who is in discussion with Harry Leslie Smith. They reach a compromise.
Yes, the NHS and the Tory.
Sure, the Tory has never liked the NHS, it is too leftie, too socialist, democratic, and yet, it is central to UK political debate; it is locked-in to our psyche.
Memories of Mrs. Slocombe & Blind spots in health and care.
This, for mum was a terrible disability as language, conversation and socialising was one of her superpowers. Mum could talk with anyone at any time about anything.
Tangled in safety-nets, a healthcare odyssey.
If you don’t agree, or even if you do, if you are in doubt, call an ambulance. I am sure the crew will be pleased to see you.
Crisis, alert, no beds!
Many are unaware of the pain and sometimes indignity facing the patients (as Old Adam waits on that stretcher, in hospital gown, bottom or testicle peeking-out, he needs the toilet, ‘Just go in your pad,’ he is told.)
Thirty years ago and counting. 90’s reminiscence.
He has a glass that is so half-full that the Kool-Aid is spilling over the rim.
Mild Cognitive Impairment, dementia, and a happy patient.
For the most, I think I know what I am talking about when I talk about dementia.
An unusual half hour – just a sharp scratch.
Vaccinations and Mystery photo…
Anxious Jew Redux, Professor Ian Robertson & Blindboy
Doctors are great at diagnosing or assigning diagnoses. It is something that makes many of them very happy. It provides the doctor with certainty, a finite box in which to insert their patient and to focus treatment – antibiotics, pain killers or anti-depressants. (I am sure there is a dopamine release every time a doctor signs a prescription).
Cognitive dissonance, the NHS, Virtual Wards, and the rest of the shit that is going down
I even recently read in a patient’s notes the following:
‘Called patient for telephone appointment. There was no answer. Patient has not attended the appointment. See again in six months.’
Take me to your specialist!
I know the people who can’t ‘get to see the doctor’ presume they are sitting around playing Wordle; this is not the case.
When your batteries are running low, turn down the lights. Permanent pacemakers and other medical follies.
Recently, I received a message that my patient’s battery was running low.
The promise of the object is more powerful than the object itself
…if I don’t have that additional jam sandwich I might be in trouble.
Healthy ego
The pressures, whether overt or not, the unreasonable demands, the pushing, pulling, bullying and intimidation inherent in many workplaces or the uncertainty of tomorrow, the zero-hours tightrope, all make us human, fragile.
London’s burning. Damn those firemen.
No one in healthcare works harder than GPs.
Popularity, dopamine levels and hours in the day
I started writing around six years ago as I was convinced, I was going to die from a heart attack.
Sun, sea and outdated cultural references
(Can you hear the crickets? The Bouzouki?)
Weight loss junkie (the pitfalls of too much safety)
Family-doctor-dietician and still losing weight; you must be failing the person, not meeting their needs, not creating innovative or adequately tasty food, not supporting mealtimes, not doing your job.
Belly. Thank you to Denise Lewis and the theory of misattributed causes
What happens when you blame others (things) for your own failings. Look within young Padawan.
I was taken aback yesterday (Human Factors, Elaine Bromiley & your local medical school)
Yesterday, Friday, I was out and about visiting some of our patients. We have an odd or you might say unusual model of healthcare provision in the surgery, I, as a geriatrician, not a GP don’t see a significant number of the ‘regular’ patients, instead I focus on those who are older or living withContinue reading “I was taken aback yesterday (Human Factors, Elaine Bromiley & your local medical school)”
Minimally invasive medicine
They perceive the wonder of human spontaneity, the fragility of hope and fear, the layers of anxiety, of prejudice, hope, joy and deprivation spinning atomic around the patient’s sense of self.
Just say no.
The doctor might say, ‘I won’t give you any more pain relief until you have a test,’ a kind of pharmacological blackmail.
Photographic evidence. A long, convoluted road.
Sorry, you are inadequately tenacious to change the world. Go to prison. Do not stop at Go. Do not collect…
A dying breed. Knock, knock, It’s the doctor.
What makes a GP special is their knowledge of a patient, their insight over months, years, even decades into a person’s life. The bond that continues after the acute illness has passed, the person recovered, perhaps passed through school, left for college and returned, married then divorced, raised children.
Psychoneuroimmunology and all that
We are the finite of our bodies and we are the infinite of our minds.
We are a walking anachronism.
Long distance relationships
It was a toughie. It took me an hour to unravel what was what, which medicines were which, what had been stopped, started, changed, what he could and couldn’t do, what he understood, what the family understood, the plans for further tests and follow-up.
My blood pressure is too high and when I get out of bed in the morning, I almost collapse. What should I do?
Thanks to Nigel for inspiring this blog. If follows-on from yesterday’s about postural hypotension. I don’t think, in fact, I am almost certain, no patient has ever asked me this specific question, although it is a thing. It is a condition that is tricky to manage and I suspect, one which is becoming moreContinue reading “My blood pressure is too high and when I get out of bed in the morning, I almost collapse. What should I do?”
The poop you walk past, Navalny and others on standards in society
It is more a chaotic butterfly of cause an effect, a stochastic randomness that nudges the world in a certain direction.
Free Speech, Twitter, Elon & Biko
Some people, let’s call them extraverts tend to let everything spill-out. I am not one of those.
This blog is a form of cognitive expiation.
Oxygen masks, paranoid androids and helping others
Not so much, ‘When in doubt, act,’ more, ‘When in doubt, care.’
Civility, Incivility and being nice
Incivility from me to you is as bad as my stabbing you with a knife, just less bloody.
Hospital at home, virtual wards and turning care in the community on its head
The doctor calling the ambulance rationalises their actions, ‘I don’t know what will happen to their chest (NB not ‘Albert’, but his chest – a lapse into pathology and medical-speak
Analogy
To me it means ‘oy vey’ and ‘there you go’.
Human, all too human.
This is the transparency I encounter when I visit patients at home, in their poorliness or vulnerability, on their death-beds, in their terminal loneliness.
Black-belt medicine
For me, the difference between the two belts and their equivalents in medicine can be described as transactional and transformational care.
The cost of loneliness (Roubles, dollars or robots?)
One patient recently attempted to resuscitate her (toy) baby when the batteries ran-out.
Confusion Screen
In today’s blog Rod tried to explain what he meant when he wanted to say something was to complicated to be summarised by the word ‘screen’
Safety netting – to net or not?
Sure, some readers will think, ‘Honestly, this isn’t nannyworld, people have some responsibility, they should use their common sense.’
The week that was and was not!
Still recovering from IDLES my daughter tested positive for Covid.
A ramble through dodgy phone calls via IDLEs and back again.
You can ghost, delay, emoji respond.
Have I adapted to text or have texts adapted to me?
I was an ageist arse
Makes my think of my grandfather and his dilute Dettol baths or his pronunciation of Argos
Innovation, oranges and the impossibility of happiness (Monday imaginings)
…the shape of hills, the movement of water, muscles and the eye, the mechanism of the woodpecker’s tongue, the development of the foetus, creation, innovation, perspective and momentum.
Should I or he or she or they stay at home or go into care?
Locked in a room, when you are 90 and if you have dementia and significant physical and cognitive impairment is horrible. It is cruel and harmful. It is what our older folk have to do, whilst we, the rest are out and about, living it up.
Have I got dementia?
“whistle”… Rover, where are you? Oh, he must be upstairs on the bed, that old dog.
2022
The guest that over-stayed its welcome.
The Waltzer that doesn’t stop.
Boxing day reflection
Death – tradition – Jewishness – family – education – self-consciousness
Bob Ross, Happy and Unhappy accidents (healthcare and filler-TV)
I brought-up Bob when explaining to my colleagues the meaning of ‘happy accident’ – I was being flippant although the context was not.
Three days, 15 points and just starting to recover from the British Geriatric Society Autumn Conference
For the most, this was people showing-off their successes, how many older people they had saved from peril (mostly keeping them out of hospital), how many standard deviations from the mean their intervention had generated and so on.
Broken hearts, or why telephone consultations are less than 35% effective (homage to Heathcote)
Although doctors are being battered over the head for not enough F2F appointments, in reality, telephone reviews are much harder than seeing a person in the surgery.
Take away, facial expression, eye contact and body-language and it is far more difficult to know or understand what is going-on.
Thinking mindful – geriatrician asks his followers to ‘get high’
My mind has been in a Japanese meta-reality rather than on Wong Lane
It’s worse than it’s ever been. Just kidding… Not.
‘When will I receive my Covid booster?’ Asks patient Annie, 98, unable to leave her house for the past three years.
‘We are working-our way round,’ Says the doctor.
Detour into etymology via hell and the NHS.
For all they care we could go to hell, so long as they can keep going.
It’s a bit shit.
#NHS #scapegoating #primarycare @BMA #justtryingtodoourjob
Indulgence – Sunday morning in Waterstone’s Cafe
I read this morning about patients waiting 11 (eleven) hours outside of A&E departments.
Caveat emptor – learner beware.
That doctors and nurses aren’t working hard enough, that the poor are poor from choice, and, that good things come to those who deserve it or who were born lucky.
I am long and thin by the end of the summer… Who am I?
You know the game. A cryptic clue and an unexpected answer. It came to me this evening, when I was discussing my role with colleagues. I am a hospital trained doctor who works in the community and helps older people, although sometimes young ones too. Who am I? I am a geriatrician. Although I hateContinue reading “I am long and thin by the end of the summer… Who am I?”
The offer of a natural death.
Occasionally the nurse in attendance might advise the paramedics or the doctors, ‘He was 100 years old, he was very unwell,’
Manor Field Surgery Blog 10 Dizziness (three-part series)
The most significant, particularly for older people (the definition of older is anyone who is older than you) when the effects of ageing can impair balance, coordination, and reflexes.
A Grand Unified Theory of Nowt
I popped into Tesco yesterday; there was no pasta on the shelves (no petrol in the pump either).
The default mind network, flow and magic mushrooms
I worry that I might not have enough time to complete all the work I have planned on Monday prior to the deadline when I will be asked to present the results of the…
Shady Towers, Social Care, Nora and Whitey on the Moon.
The PM announced a rise in NI tax this week. I understand this is to offset some of the damage they have done to the NHS over the past decade. Fantastic. (And yes, Whitey is still on the moon).
Balance
Perhaps I’ve had too many knocks on the head.
To stop or not? (Jerzy Kosinski, Oliver Sacks & other ideas)
If you watch the Robin Williams / Oliver Sacks movie/book Awakenings you will see what dopamine can and cannot do to the brain.
You get what you pay for. (this is not a happy one)
No, not the climate, not the uncollected bins, the zero hours, no, not the Shitty White Men travelling on purpose-built spaceships that fly over the filth and poverty of a world falling apart, all of it together.
Chaos theory. Calamity in action.
The misdirected guided by the uninformed.
If I told you I’m good, you would probably say I’m boasting & Teamworking
We want to be associated with the best – the best team, country, organisation.
Others don’t really care.
Some see the whole of the moon.
Others Brigadoon.
Occupational hazard – emotional blunting.
‘She’s probably holding something in her mouth,’ I said – since the arrival of pup, she has taken to hoarding all sorts of toys and chews in her mouth.
It’s not all about falling over
One of those instances that over time becomes part of how you see the world.
Cars, Communism and Consumerism
‘Are you some sort of Communist?’ He asked.
Two worlds
If their lack of safety is 10 times greater than your perception of safety, are they safe? Are you?
To what extent has Covid damaged medicine?
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow…