Category Archives: Evolution

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).

Elephants, walruses, and forlorn carpenters

Freya probably spent her days swimming between Shetland, Norway, and Holland because of Global Warming; another shitstorm caused by us, people.

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…

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.

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.

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.

Klara, digital capital, Superman and me

When I say be me, that is, have integrated all my past memories, thoughts and ideas, my behaviours, imaginings, hopes, anxieties, abilities and failings.

Two roads, fever, speculation and biases

Heuristics are the pathways or grooves laid down in our subconscious that make us behave in a certain way; habit. Something works this way, I will do it again, and again and so long as all things are equal, I am ok. If a variable changes and I don’t notice, I can be in trouble.

daydream believer, this can’t be a second-wave; i haven’t had my summer holiday yet.

And, yes, those bureaucrats, the apparatchiks who felt things were returning to normal will be once again on the back-foot and find themselves redundant, scraping the earth with their over-long arms, their Neanderthal gait giving it all away.

Covid, my brain and the computer interface

Thanks Jane for allowing me to continue today’s blog; that was about the ways in which Covid has forced a change in my behaviour (likely, yours too) which in turn has led to changes in my brain. It is along the lines of the blog I wrote ages ago after reading a Stephen King bookContinue reading “Covid, my brain and the computer interface”

Self-organisation, the current state of the world and what has worked

Our growth, our evolution has happened unconsciously, at an intuitive, human level – we have been feeling not thinking, reacting not planning, doing what feels right rather than what we are told is right.

Covid – My blog is calling (Week one, through a doctor/dad/outsider’s lens)

Fear of doing the wrong thing is a fundamental of quality improvement. If you are afraid to act because people might call you out or think you stupid, you won’t do anything, and the quality won’t improve. It won’t necessarily deteriorate either, yet, in times of radical change, that is worse.

Broken sleep & Coronavirus (Bruce Lee, the philosophy of time and space and this week)

Getting rid of the routine allows people to focus on what is important. (Bruce Lee said this in the 60’s – ‘Hack away the un-essential’)

Pishers, Michael Rosen, viral illness and the Passover story (timely I know, as it is Easter soon)

Well, talking with my family when I had the distinct need to panic buy and hoard face-masks and rubber gloves the other day, (I didn’t); not only is this deeply rooted in the brains of every one of us, it is (at least I believe) amplified in some groups.

Catch-22, doctors, leaders and the NHS (healthcare, military and other absurdities)

What struck me was the similarity between bad leadership as described in the 256th US Army Air Squadron and… you guessed it, the NHS.

(Admittedly there are no bombing runs in most UK hospitals)

What will happen tomorrow if Labour don’t win the election

I don’t usually go-in for prediction. Sure, I think about the future, speculate on what might be, but jumping ahead 48 hours isn’t my usual thing. Tick, tock. It feels like one of those death clocks counting down. Measuring the minutes until everything is over. What happens? I don’t want to think about how IContinue reading “What will happen tomorrow if Labour don’t win the election”

GPs ending home visits – what the heck?!

Many are the result of an acute deterioration in the health of an older person, who, terrified of being admitted to hospital calls their GP. Many patients do not want to be admitted; they want to stay at home and recover.

Why I have been depressed for the past nine years (and how to save the NHS)

..when you see society deteriorating, when there is so much potential for improvement, that is surely depressing; when you see vibrant doctors and nurses forced into early retirement because the work has become too much, that is bad; when you know that people have and will die because of cuts, what could be worse?

Hospital

You see, The Plan says that more will be invested into community care, yet, the cumbersome nature of the NHS, again, the upside-down system of health and social care has resulted in lots or organisation and reorganisation but little transformational thought, little concept of how we can do things differently.

Medically Fit – 2020

Maybe we should call it ‘hospital check-out’, to get away from the nonsense of fitness, when many of the people described are actually quite sick and are often even dying, it is just that their death need not require a bed on a hospital ward.

General Practitioner and General Physician

A patient with a headache is more likely to receive paracetamol from a GP, a CT scan from a General Physician and an MRI from the specialist.

Who is more effective?

My Job

Mostly, my approach is to consider that we, that is the community services (those outside the acute hospital) can and do support a far broader range of patients than people realise and, when working well together, can care for a significant proportion of the people who otherwise arrive at the door of A&E.

Reception Envy

I have done some research and not seen that anyone else has written about this subject. Therefore, this could be something that affects me and no one else, or, this could be a true breakthrough in 21st Century problems. Recently I was on holiday, and, having just landed in the country and picked-up my mobileContinue reading “Reception Envy”

Manor Field Surgery Blog No. 9 – What about anti-inflammatories?

Well, part of how they work affects certain enzymes and chemicals in the body that stop  or reduce inflammation (duh!), and, somewhat unsurprisingly, inflammation although a problem at times, for example, a sore knee, is also part of our general human adaptation to life, in other words, it is how we have evolved.

I veered into Yellow

…you see your destination and intuitively perceive that the way to arrive at that goal is not straightforward, indeed, you might learn that it is only a stepping-stone towards something else.

Spiral

…all the way from human genome project, face transplants, over-the-counter Viagra, genomics and gene therapy to long-length of stay, delayed discharges and workforce crises.

Korzybski, Beck and sorry, I don’t follow.

The greater the number of people present the greater the complexity and the higher the risk of falling into what I have decided to call the ‘Korzybski Trap’

Purposeful Practice and an agreement to disagree

Richard Feynman – a physicist considered amongst the greatest minds of his generation (also a crazy bongo-player, linguist and lock-picker)

What we are losing and what we will gain

I watched Attenborough’s programme last night.   Climate Change – the facts.   My daughter called me in As This was the second time She had seen the bats dying And the rescued babies.   What could be more pathetic?   The four of us sat, Listening to the words of the scientists, Patagonia jumpersContinue reading “What we are losing and what we will gain”

Adaptive Intelligence

Their eyes were dull, tired, their postured stooped; they emanated nothing more than a faint flicker of a need to keep going, to survive today in order to continue the next.

Health Care Support Workers (Jean Bishop II)

Thank you to my friend and avid reader Freda for pointing-out something I had missed in today’s blog about the Jean Bishop Integrated Care Centre in Hull. ‘So many assessments – completed individually or as a panel? Tiring? Was thinking Doris would have to stay overnight?’ That was her consideration of someone visiting the centreContinue reading “Health Care Support Workers (Jean Bishop II)”