Medical Humanities Online First

Advice to a trainee pathologist The Lymphoma maze is it REAL

Connolly, C. E. — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:51:41 PDT

Reclaiming the morbidity and mortality conference: between Codman and Kundera

Prasad, V. — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:51:41 PDT

In recent years, a number of commentators have voiced unease about the direction and format of the Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conference. Drawing on historical, literary and philosophical perspectives, and detailing the recent shift towards incorporating systems-based approaches to healthcare safety into the M&M, this article explores the nature and purpose of the M&M conference. It is argued that improving future health outcomes is insufficient as the goal of the conference. Instead, transcending hubris should be an endorsed objective. This paper aims to provide a definition and philosophical framework for the M&M conference.

Disability and narrative: new directions for medicine and the medical humanities

Garden, R. — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:51:40 PDT

People with disabilities are a large minority that disproportionately seeks medical care. However, disability is relatively neglected in medical education and practice, and disabled people experience troubling differences and even disparities in healthcare. Practitioners can help improve healthcare for disabled people through disability studies, a multi-disciplinary field of enquiry that draws on the experiences and perspectives of people with disabilities to address discrimination. This article outlines a disability studies perspective on healthcare, specifically the rejection of the medicalisation of disability and difference in favour of an understanding of disability that focuses on social factors that disable, such as stigmatisation and a lack of accommodation. The ‘social model’ of disability can be expanded to chronic illness and to the broader work of the medial humanities. The author argues that narrative, particularly first-person accounts, provide a critical resource by representing the point of view of people with disabilities and by offering a means of examining the social context and social determinants of disability. The author examines specific conventions of narrative, the dominant plotlines such as the triumph over adversity, that predetermine experiences of disability and illness. Through disability studies and critical examinations of narrative informed by disability studies, practitioners can provide better care for patients with disabilities and work as allies towards more equitable relations in the clinic.

There is no alternative medicine

Louhiala, P. — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:24:49 PDT

The term ‘alternative medicine’ is a misnomer because it suggests that there are two kinds of medicine alternative to each other. Although commonly used, the term is problematic. It escapes a meaningful definition, and ‘alternative medicine’ cannot be clearly differentiated from ‘conventional medicine’. The nature of ‘alternative’ in ‘alternative medicine’ is anything but clear. In addition, bundling all the so-called alternative therapies under one heading is misleading. Due to the purely rhetoric nature of the ‘alternativity’, there seems to be no such thing as ‘alternative medicine’ in any meaningful sense.