Universal Medicine

Gemisha Cheemungtoo For most of us, September brings about one major event: going back to school. It marks the end of the summer holidays, the beginning of autumn and for me specifically, a school supply haul. Some of you might be preparing to return to a socially distanced classroom, whilst others are welcomed back via online classes. So as we get ready to learn again this academic year, how much of last year's content can we actually recall?    We've all heard of a learning curve, that can be particularly steep if you are new to a subject or topic. How familiar are you with the forgetting curve, however?   The forgetting curve is a mathematical model that demonstrates how our memory of learned knowledge degrades over time. Published by a key German psychologist by the name of Herman Ebbinghaus in 1885, he conducted an experiment on himself to test learning retention. The graph produced has been well known to the field of psychology and has stood the test of time when re...

Maliha Shakir Medicine. The profession that has triumphed in historic times, in modern times revolutionizing the dangers of childbirth, injury and disease from afflicting to manageable. My experiences in healthcare have shown this to be true and is further evidenced by details embedded throughout Gawande's book. Despite this, an element of conflict zooms in on the unavoidable reality of physiological decline; aging and death. Through eye-opening truths and realities of Gawande’s patients and family, Gawande unveiled the suffering this turbulence has produced. The hardship in discussing patients’ worries about death, doctors often find themselves falling back on false hopes and beliefs that shorten lives instead of improving them. Gawande has bravely showed us the exerting struggles of his profession, representing the similar struggles of many other doctors. Woven throughout this book is his examination of the profession’s restrictions and cruel failures. Many of us, doctors or not...