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Desmond O’Neill: Shaken and stirred
A key challenge of teaching gerontology in health sciences is to liberate ageing from the confines of later life and to view it as a continuous process across the life course. No neater (or more...
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Desmond O’Neill: Graphic insights into Alzheimer’s disease
In my practice as a geriatrician, no syndrome is as interesting, intellectually stimulating, and simultaneously frustrating and rewarding as dementia. Ethical sensitivity, integrative neurology, a...
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Desmond O’Neill: Turner, medical history, and ageing
Limiting access adds savour to most sensory experiences, a sentiment captured by Patrick Kavanagh in his poem Advent: “through a chink too wide comes in no wonder.” A narrow aperture to one such wonder...
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Desmond O’Neill: Think global, act local
Visiting Kennebunkport, Maine, in winter is a surreal experience, almost akin to playing an extra in the Truman Show. Neat clapper board houses and snow encrusted churches cluster around a serpiginous...
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Desmond O’Neill: A grave beauty
When visiting a city for the first time, graveyards rarely feature high on my agenda. So, little did I suspect that a very beautiful graveyard would be one of the aesthetic highlights of a recent short...
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Desmond O’Neill: On transport as a contributor to economic, social, and...
Transport is the invisible glue that holds our lives together, an under recognised contributor to economic, social, and personal wellbeing. Unfortunately, in public health terms, our profession has...
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Desmond O’Neill: Lessons of the Francis Report are not just confined to the NHS
One of the most striking theatre productions I have ever witnessed was a riotous Polish play called Birthrate, the highlight of the 1981 Dublin Theatre Festival. Starting with a stage set resembling a...
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Desmond O’Neill: Ageing with Keith Jarrett
The last time I heard Keith Jarrett was just over thirty years ago, a distraction from the tensions of final med with some fellow medical students. Even the choir balcony tickets were eye wateringly...
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Desmond O’Neill: A sad day for human rights in Ireland
It is perhaps stating the obvious that the best mode for exercising human rights is while still alive: as the Vikings stated rather bluntly in their eddaic saga Hávamál, “there is nothing the dead can...
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Desmond O’Neill: Fresh approaches to long term care medicine in Washington, DC
Washington in spring is a visual treat, the spectacular arrays of cherry trees in bloom adding a frothy filigree to the sober magnificence of the iconic National Mall. Throw in blue skies and crisp...
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Desmond O’Neill: Gerontolysis
In an era when didactic teaching in medical education is frowned upon and where workshops and problem based learning rule supreme, it is refreshing to be reminded of the powerful impact of a high...
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Desmond O’Neill: Alex Ferguson and the Field Marshall
Field Marshall Mannerheim of Finland is one of the giant, if relatively under fêted, figures of European history. Called out of retirement at the age of 72 to lead tiny Finland against the might of the...
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Desmond O’Neill: Optimal ageing and the midnight sun
Helsinki in summer is a delight, its streetscapes of Russian influenced architecture illuminated and lifted by the interplay of the midnight sun and the ever present sea. The occasion was the triennial...
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Desmond O’Neill: A tale of three cities—geriatric medicine in Australia
Some minds improve by travel, wrote the nineteenth century poet and humorist, Thomas Hood: others, rather, resemble copper wire, or brass, which get the narrower by going farther. And so it was with...
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Desmond O’Neill: Elysium—an effective Trojan horse for Obamacare and the...
“Just enjoy the film, dad, you don’t always have to write about it!” is a familiar refrain from my family on our sporadic outings to the movies. Yet cinema was the great art form of the 20th century...
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Desmond O’Neill: Striking doctors and a cruel cut
The strike was so much more straightforward in 1987. I was then a trainee member of the Council of the Irish Medical Organization and our task was to change an overtime rate of half of the hourly rate...
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Desmond O’Neill: Clinical glasshouses and stones
One of the positive aspects of working in smaller hospitals in Ireland is the professional mingling that takes place in local clinical societies. Living and working in a smaller pond means that...
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Desmond O’Neill: Four helicopters and a string quartet
Unlike last year, there was not a formal cultural event at this year’s European geriatric medicine congress. The organising committee may rightly have considered this superfluous with the glories of...
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Desmond O’Neill: Food for thought
My knowledge of eating disorders stems less from my medical training than from vicarious insights into their ravages in the milieu of my teenage and young adult daughters. Yet not infrequently on...
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Desmond O’Neill: Transport and health
The Goldfinch, the eagerly awaited third novel of Donna Tartt, featured on many of our Christmas reading lists. As I devoured this wonderful repositioning of the Dickensian novel into the 21st...
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Desmond O’Neill on the power of cinema in discussing medical humanities
One of the pleasures of academic medicine, and a salve for the gentle disorganisation of Irish medical schools, is the initiative, enthusiasm, and broad ranging interests of the medical students and...
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Desmond O’Neill: Combatting rigidity in medicine
High quality films for children have a special place in our cultural landscape, an appeal which even embraces the medical humanities. To reach beyond children to the adults in their entourage requires...
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Desmond O’Neill: Expanding the imaginarium of ageing
My most formative experience in gerontology was a student gap year in Marseille. A volunteer with Les Petits Frères des Pauvres, a charmingly radical organisation dedicated to improving life for older...
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Desmond O’Neill: Some illuminations on caring for older people
Gothenburg is a handsome city with imposing stone and brick buildings, simultaneously sober and ornamented, set among green hills falling to not one but two archipelagos. It was particularly striking...
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Desmond O’Neill: Blinded by science
The newest architectural gem in Trinity College Dublin is the award winning Long Room Hub, a slim and elegant presence inserted among classical, neoclassical, and modern buildings. Just as its many...
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Desmond O’Neill: Elective Dreams
With every elective student that joins our unit, I get a vivid flashback of my own electives. No matter how much water has flowed under the bridge since then, something particularly special endures...
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Desmond O’Neill: Stethophones and barriers to effective care of older people
There is a long tradition in medicine of accepting a degree of mismatch between labels and the functions that they address. A classic example is the stethoscope, through which few of us peer, but which...
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Desmond O’Neill: Ageing, astronauts, and organists in Rotterdam
“Le frime” is an almost untranslatable French word for doing something that seems superfluous for the fun of it. It is as good a term as any for the opening ceremonies of our European Union Geriatric...
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Desmond O’Neill: Sky disc and the marvel of ageing
One of the great challenges of hospital medicine is retaining a sense of the marvel of ageing after a busy night on general take. The sheer complexity of the frail, multimorbid, and delirious...
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Desmond O’Neill: A gerontological fear of missing out
Faced with a gerontology conference with 30 parallel sessions over five days, the texting argot of teenagers comes in handy. To LOL and YOLO has been added FOMO: Fear of Missing Out! Effective FOMO...
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Desmond O’Neill: Older drivers and medical fitness to drive
Does life really imitate art, or is it the other way round? Listening to an exhilarating live performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, the droll tone poem about a...
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Des O’Neill: Flights of Imagination—Birdman and Still Alice
Birdman, one of the most riotously entertaining yet serious movies of the last decade, deservedly won a clutch of Oscars. Dealing with ageing, the fear of irrelevance, and the nature of art, it wore...
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Desmond O’Neill: The success and opportunities arising from population ageing
There is an extra uplift from spring conferences which mirrors the freshness of the season. My own traverse started in Vienna with a reflection on how the hegemony of the English language impoverishes...
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Desmond O’Neill: Surprised by beauty
Like most doctors, my conference schedule is usually mapped out well in advance, anticipating the complex leave requirements of trainees and colleagues in an ever busier department of geriatric and...
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Desmond O’Neill: Wheelbarrows, transport, and health
There is an old joke about a man who goes through a customs post with a wheelbarrow of sand every day. The increasingly frustrated customs officers make intensive searches of the contents, but never...
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Desmond O’Neill: 45 years of solitude
One of the rare pleasures of life is to encounter a movie without the encrustation of prior critical approval, hype, or derision. One of my stand-out cinematic experiences occurred at a very busy stage...
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Desmond O’Neill: Nordic insights into the art of ageing and dying well
I hate to miss the opening ceremonies of European geriatric medicine conferences, with the individual interplay between this most complex of medical specialties with the national characteristics of the...
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Desmond O’Neill: Welcoming the new ageing in a global context
Expenditure in older populations is an investment, not a cost, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) With relatively little fanfare, the World Report on Ageing and Health—one of the most...
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Desmond O’Neill: The Healing Touch
Although not as grand as the Museum Quarter of Hapsburg Vienna, Dublin has a proportionately rich concentration of museums, galleries, and Victorian heritage alongside Trinity College Dublin, our own...
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Desmond O’Neill on Star Wars: The Force Awakens—and matures
Exams and the pre Christmas rush notwithstanding, a triple-line party whip was in force within the family for the midnight first screening of Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Sitting in the back row of a...
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Desmond O’Neill: Combating bar stool gerontology
One of the greatest challenges for us as we age is “bar stool gerontology.” For most complex subjects—nuclear physics, molecular biology, or philosophy—most of us recognise that some learning and...
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Desmond O’Neill: HIP medicine
In the last month I have had two wonderful musical experiences in Dublin, each causing me to reflect on one of the key challenges of medicine, that of getting to the core of what is troubling people...
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Desmond O’Neill: Peak medical students
Asked to do a column on medical education for an Irish newspaper, I was struck by how little professional debate we have had on the extraordinary increase in student intakes in these islands....
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Desmond O’Neill: Ageing—simply complicated
Carinthia is a fascinating corner of Austria, formally included in the new Austrian Republic in a plebiscite in 1919 and imbued with the confluence of Austrian, Slovenian, and Italian cultures. Packed...
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Desmond O’Neill: Mozart in the ballpark
A live telecast of The Marriage of Figaro to a baseball stadium from the Kennedy Centre provided a delightful and illuminating synergy with the 2016 conference of the National Centre for Creative...
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Desmond O’Neill: Technology and the medical humanities
One of the great challenges of progress in the medical humanities is that of time and space. Interested clinicians tend not to work in the arts blocks of universities, and humanities scholars rarely...
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Desmond O’Neill: Singing in the New Year
Little in human nature escapes the scrutiny of scholarship, and New Year resolutions are no exception. We tap into a tradition that dates back to Babylonian times. Their new year began in March with...
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Desmond O’Neill: Eros and Methuselah—love and sexuality are important parts...
Although Valentine’s Day is often criticised as a cynical creation of florists and the greeting cards industry, it is a useful focal point for considering love and sexuality as elements of human...
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Desmond O’Neill: Going digital for global medical humanities
To those teaching and researching the medical humanities, major exhibitions of great art represent a wonderful opportunity for a focal illumination of how medicine and the arts interact. However, for...
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Desmond O’Neill: Medicalisation as a pejorative term
It is over 40 years since Engel described the biopsychosocial model for medicine, largely adopted in principle by the healthcare establishment if, as with most good intentions, imperfectly executed in...
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