When Mao-Tse Tung was melting saucepans in the Cultural Revolution, the Victorian gold-town of Bendigo asked Mr Lo On of Hong Kong to put 90,000 mirrors and 6000 silk scales into the longest (and possibly last) imperial dragon called Sun Loong.
(Imperial – in the dragon sense – means blessed by the Emperor, which accounts for [...]
YUPPIE YIPS – As periodic guests of pharmaceutical symposia in the Maldives will know, the yips is an affliction aligned with golf. Put simply, you stand on the green, the hole a metre away. You cannot miss; you miss. Yet a research paper from Augusta State has put forward that executive golfers, much in caddie [...]
SWIVEL NECK – Manifest widely in the female sector of the adult population, yet not exclusively in our metrosexual times, swivel neck (cervical tenosynovitis) is thought to stem from the patient’s morbid desire to learn whether their gluteus maximus is perhaps a little TOO maximus in last season’s Capri pants, or next season’s 501s.
Skeptical by [...]
SUPERCALORIFIC SYNDROME – Dietary preoccupation, revived by each seasonal craze, has nurtured a Rain-Man genius for calculating kilojoules in the least tidbit, transcending the teen monopoly of your garden-type eating disorder into a pandemic prandial autism.
Where formerly a dill pickle may have crossed a patient’s lips, the same morsel is now assayed by density, fat [...]
TUNICA ALBUGINEA TRAUMATICA – Most commonly known by its lay term, Hoover Harvey, this acute infliction of the penis is largely confined to experimental youths who nurse an inordinate belief that inserting the corpus spongiosum of their intromittent organ into a domestic suction tube will derive long-term benefits for themselves and future coital participants.
Local chafing [...]
STETAS – In this complex world of mutating bacteria and Trojan viruses, the honest GP would be quick to admit there is a growing minority of patients that presents with a cryptic array of symptoms that defies ready diagnosis. To save face, the profession has forged a selection of acronyms.
These include GORK (God only really [...]
ZUSCEPTIBILITY – Generation Z – or today’s maturing teen – is disproportionately prone to life’s incidental pathogens for reasons of long-term hygienic isolation. Where yeast once made bread rise, the same fungus can trigger atopic dermatitis in the modern adult.
Devoid a germ-rich childhood, this new breed will contract Chlamydia from a greasy spoon, E Coli [...]
THREAT FATIGUE – In the Age of Terror, emphysema is overrated. Likewise cirrhosis, salmonella, golden staph, stomach cancer, late-onset diabetes: throw them all into the same hand-basket. Across the gamut of medical disciplines, practitioners are lamenting the diminishing impacts their diagnoses for endangered clientele hold, as though renal collapse runs a poor second to anything [...]
ASIC AMNESIA – Classically, the ASIC amnesiac is a neurologically sound individual until such terms as predatory pricing and cost-benefit assessment enter the middle ear. This is especially so under formal cross-examination when heretofore accessible banks of long-term data can escape the patient’s fingertips.
Three words – I don’t recall – are as good as a [...]
SELECTIVE DEAFNESS – You’ve heard of this before? You must have been listening that day. Yet did you hear how this virulent strain of functional hearing loss has exacerbated to the point of pandemic, the aural equivalent of a spam filter with no explicit remedy at hand?
More prominent in the male of the species, SD [...]