By Dr Owen Wiese I remember very clearly an incident during my community service, when I walked into the trauma unit at a day hospital in Cape Town one morning and found a patient lying on the trolley, bleeding profusely from a knife wound. I picked up the patient’s file and read: stab wound to […]
Health
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, General, Health, Lifestyle
Fantasies of binaries: Why are we so uncomfortable with difference?
By Pierre Brouard By Sunday May 17 I would have participated in a panel discussion on LGBTI migrants and asylum seekers at an Idahot event organised by the Alliance Francaise in Sunnyside, Pretoria. Idahot is the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, and is intended to celebrate sexual and gender diversity. This celebratory spin […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence, Health, News/Politics
Xenophobia and violence: A call for psychological expertise
In recent months, the country has experienced gruesome incidents of xenophobia-related violence. Some South Africans attacked, injured and killed a number of non-nationals and South Africans. Businesses belonging to non-nationals were looted and burned. People were driven out of their homes and had to spend time in refugee tent camps. The scenes reported in the […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health
Dying for a transplant
By Patricia Erasmus It is a lawyer’s worst nightmare — having to watch your client die. But this was the reality for our staff when an Ethiopian man was brought to us in the final stages of double renal failure. As he lay in the parking lot of our offices, disorientated, weak and struggling to […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health
Fighting TB with prisoners’ rights
By Annabel Raw Today is World Tuberculosis Day, commemorating the discovery of the cause of the disease in 1882. Tuberculosis (TB) is an ancient disease with traces in human remains being recorded since antiquity. Despite advances in public health and treatment, today TB continues to claim over one and a half million lives every year, […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Becoming a man…and losing something on the way
By Olga Bialostocka As South Africa celebrates the first, successful penis transplant in the world, with much-deserved public awe, the question we should ask is why there’s a demand for this sort of specialist treatment. The results of the medical efforts of Stellenbosch University surgeons should be praised but the reasons why young men lose […]
Posted inHealth
The bitter sugar debate
At a kid’s birthday party recently someone remarked how thin I looked. I told the lady I was following Tim Noakes’ low-carb-high-fat Banting diet. I told her I ate butter like it’s cheese. She gasped a little. I told her I cut sugar completely out of my diet, which made some of the guests stop […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health
Unaccompanied migrant children: Why we need to close the legal gaps to protect them
By Anjuli Maistry According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, almost half of the world’s forcibly displaced people are children. A number of factors lead to the migration of foreign children to South Africa. Some flee conflict and unrest, natural disaster or recruitment as child soldiers, while others leave their countries in the […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, Lifestyle
How to survive dinner party small talk
If you or anyone close to you has ever made the big move of relocating between the Cape and Gauteng you are probably aware of the stereotypes around their divergent social cultures. Residents of the northern twin cities, after moving south, often describe the social scene in their new home town as clique, and the […]
Posted inEnvironment, General, Health
‘The Life of I’: Narcissism and (of course) you
“Paranoia is the self-cure for insignificance … the paranoiac is at the centre of a world which has no centre … to be hated makes him feel real: he has made his presence felt. To be unforgiveable is to be unforgettable.” (Emphases mine.) Australian social philosopher Anne Manne shrewdly begins The Life of I: the […]
Posted inHealth, News/Politics
Relax, you’re not going to die of Ebola
Quite a number of things are killing South Africans at the moment. High salt diets. Farm attacks. Tuberculosis. Cardiovascular diseases. Giant rats on the loose in Alexandra. Viagra-induced heart attacks. Oscar … The list is endless. What’s not really a threat to most people, however, is Ebola. Take this from a self-confessed germaphobe like myself […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, News/Politics
Nuclear power carries risks that are simply not worth taking
In the wake of President Jacob Zuma’s recent lone ranger escapade to Russia, evidently to secure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assistance regarding South Africa’s energy needs — the status of which seems to be uncertain at present because of accusations and denials of him acting unilaterally flying to and fro — the question, whether one […]