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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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