This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Figure 1 (Jason): Writing is painful for me. I do TRX Suspension Training with an amazing online and affordable personal trainer/physical therapist (email me and I’ll give you his number) to correct my posture. I rest the nape of my neck on my orange wedge called a Davinci (try it), to release tension. I use Tizanidine (feels great), and sometimes
One of the most bewildering and fascinating things about spending time with people with dementia is that they can rapidly travel through time. This was most clear with Mrs B., a daydreaming woman of 86. Her skin was deeply wrinkled and in the nursing home she kept pretty much to herself. One day, I had a long, stretched out conversation …
The concept of placebo is predicated on the opposition between active and inert, deploying this opposition to assert that an action or substance with no inherent active principle can have a paradoxical effect “as if” it were active.1 My thesis is that there is no such thing as the inert in human affairs, relationships, or experience. Think of the …
In October of 2014, Romanian mass-media featured the local story of a few dozen citizens—most of them Orthodox nuns—refusing their newly issued state health insurance cards, on the grounds that the term card imprinted on the card would spell, when read backwards, drac—the Romanian word for “devil.” It seemed that the nuns, along with a few Orthodox priests and …
Fieldnotes
The box is white, and adorned with a rectangular red button about half the size of my palm. White is clean, sterile, new. Red is alarm, is stop, is imperative. But the box sits, quite innocuously, to the side of the door. It is easily passed by, and indeed I do just that. I am chastised.
It is my …
This article is part of the following series: Ebola fieldnotes
“Without staff, stuff, space and systems, nothing can be done”. Paul Farmer’s reflections on his recent trip to Liberia in The London Review of Books reiterated in stark terms what health experts have been saying for months. There is by now a fairly clear consensus in the global health community that the uncontrolled spread of Ebola in West Africa …