Practice, politics, and possibilities

Practice, politics, and possibilities.

Is general practice in trouble? The discipline of general practice has developed at a truly remarkable pace in the 56 years since the Foundation of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). Humour me while I pretend that there is a single aggregated measure of the success of a discipline. And humour me even further while I plot this measure against time, starting in the early part of t...

Vaginal politics: Tensions and possibilities in The Vagina Monologues

We are feminists in our 50s who first became activists in the women’s health movement when we were in our 20s. In 2002 we performed in The Vagina Monologues and participated in the 2002 V-Day College Campaign to end violence against women. We use our experiences bthenQ in the women’s health movement and bnowQ in the College Campaign as a lens through which to introduce a bworryQ about ba cultur...

ScienceHumanities: Theory, Politics, Practice

History, politics, and practice in knowledge construction

perceptions of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory – from scarce knowledge of it, to seeing it as one among many accounts of social factors in child development, and eventually, to a wide acknowledgment that this theory provides a unique perspective on human development and implicates profound changes in many fields of psychology and education. As this approach is rapidly gaining in popularit...

Evidence-based practice: what a start and 'Oh, the possibilities'.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) was introduced in the early 1990s. In less than 15 years, it has dramatically changed the way that medicine is practiced and taught. Improvements in informatics and evidence resources have helped overcome some of the initial problems and allowed busy clinicians to use EBM in practice. Many barriers to using EBM still remain. Further work on translating evidence int...