To My Students

COVID-19 has been wild, hey? I’ve been remarkably impressed by your maturity. Your progress along a challenging training pathway has been turned upside down; changes to classes, to clinical exposure, to assessment. I worked with multiple year levels of students in 2020 and you’ve all been remarkably resilient and transparent. The transition into (and potentially […]

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Robots and mental illness

Science fiction writers and bioethicists certainly have a shared interest in what happens when an AI (‘robot’) is able to predict human behaviour. Some of the best depictions in popular media have raised questions that we still don’t have answers to. Minority Report, GATTACA, The Matrix; these all represent the varying degrees of what makes […]

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Doctor vs. Prisoner

Doctors are fairly well known for occasionally (often) being challenging (obnoxious) to deal with. This has been attributed to the stress of the job, the culture/climate and, well, our personalities. Much has been made of the hierarchical nature of medicine and how that pervades training. Although I do just like that article’s title, it’s certainly […]

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Anecdotes

There has been a lot of talk recently about the challenges in maintaining a positive perspective about your job in medicine. Whilst I must declare my bias and admit to being a fan of administrative processes, there’s certainly no doubting that the (mythical) work-life balance is being affected. Today was a day for talking about […]

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