Show Notes
Dr Seamus O’Mahony, retired Consultant Gastroenterologist and Clinical Professor at Cork University Hospital, is the prize-winning author of four highly acclaimed books, the first of which, The Way We Die Now, won the British Medical Association’s Council Chair’s Choice award in 2017. Can Medicine be Cured? was published in 2019, and The Ministry of Bodies in 2021. His latest book, The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic, was published by Head of Zeus in 2023. Seamus is a frequent contributor to the Dublin Review of Books, Observer, Irish Times, Lancet, British Medical Journal, Medical Independent, and Irish Independent, among others. He is a member of the Lancet commission on “The Value of Death” and is visiting professor at the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London.
In this seriously thought-provoking episode of Irish Medical Lives, Dr O’Mahony recalls the sometimes tragic lives of his forebears in West Cork and his adventures in academic research in Edinburgh, before addressing the thorny issues of corruption (or self-service) in modern medicine, the relative impotence of the modern hospital consultant, the ‘pointlessness’ of much of medical literature (and its insidious ‘replication crisis’), and way in which modern medicine has become a sort of ‘global religion’. And he explains why ‘the compression of morbidity’ (the near-elimination of suffering in old age promised by the healthy longevity movement) is a myth, why the public health services on both sides of the Irish Sea are so clearly failing and why the notion of a (peaceful, painless and neat) ‘good death’ is unlikely to be realised in more than a few cases.
Nonetheless, Seamus is optimistic that - given the right amounts of humility and honesty - the modern medic can still aspire to the most worthwhile and longstanding aspiration of all, ‘to make the conditions of human life everywhere more bearable’. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Irish Medical Lives
Professor Dorothy Breen, founder of forDoctors.ie, a unique Irish coaching and mentoring service provided by doctors for doctors, is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Healthcare Management at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where she specialises in leadership, quality improvement and patient safety. Aside from this work, she has been a consultant intensivist and anaesthesiologist at Cork University Hospital and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney for 16 years, during which time she has helped to introduce major national clinical and quality improvement initiatives like ‘safety huddles’, the Irish National Early Warning System, Schwartz Rounds, and After-Action Reviews, and the first Advanced Nurse Practitioner for the Deteriorating Patient. Dorothy also has a particular interest in simulation in education, and as well as being Director of Education at the celebrated ASSERT Simulation Centre in University College Cork.
Dr Ide Delargy, a general practitioner in Dublin, has been described by many of her colleagues in all branches of healthcare as truly ‘the loveliest of lifesavers’.
Professor Ray Walley is a general practitioner, academic and medical politician who’s been responsible for ground-breaking advances in Irish healthcare, ranging from the logistics of Covid vaccine delivery and out-of-hours GP cover in Dublin to major High Court settlements, the new Irish GP deal of 2018 and the orchestration of European medical organisations’ opposition to Cannabis legalisation. He is also one of the most frequently mentioned Irish medical practitioners online.
Professor James Bernard Walsh
Dr Declan Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of Eolas Medical, an innovative healthcare technology company based in Belfast, is a remarkable medical entrepreneur who has - over the course of a half-decade - created one of the most influential clinical information platforms in the English-speaking world.