medicine
oracknows | May 10, 2006RangelMD asks: Do student doctors really need to know anatomy and that other basic science stuff? And Dr. RW chimes in sarcastically, Who needs all that basic science bunk?
Naturally, as you might expect from recent posts, I can't resist putting my two cents in on this topic as well.
The discussion was provoked by this article:
TEACHING of basic anatomy in Australia's medical schools is so inadequate that students are increasingly unable to locate important body parts - and in some cases even confuse one vital organ with another.
Senior doctors claim teaching hours for anatomy have been…
oracknows | May 9, 2006Via Kevin, MD and The Huffington Post, of all places:
While you're at it, remember to follow the medical student food pyramid. (Of course, the pyramid left out Doritos and Coke, my Breakfast of Champions when I was a first year medical student.)
oracknows | May 9, 2006Here are some good blog carnivals today:
Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 33 is up over at fellow SB'er's place, Aetiology, and it's a big one. This carnival just keeps getting bigger and better. (It's also too much to read in one sitting.)
RINO Sightings has been posted over at the Environmental Republican.
And, better late than never, I noticed that Pediatric Grand Rounds has been posted over at Unintelligent Design.
oracknows | May 8, 2006Just a reminder, but the 34th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is scheduled to take a sojourn Down Under at The Second Sight on Thursday, May 11. The deadline is fast approaching for you to get your best skeptical blogging to EoR, and that deadline is 6 PM EDST on Wednesday, May 10. So far there haven't been as many entries as we'd like to see, but there's still time to rectify that situation.The guidelines regarding what we're looking for can be found here.
oracknows | May 8, 2006One of the annoyances of becoming an attending is the need to sign up for managed care and insurance plans. The forms are all similar, but they are sufficiently different that you can't just fill one out and be done with it. Every couple of years, a flood of paperwork comes through, asking for renewal. One disadvantage of working for a state institution is that I don't have much say over what plans I have to sign up for. My cancer institute makes the deals and then distributes the applications. However, one advantage is that there is an office that fills out a lot of the simple "busy work"…
oracknows | May 6, 2006I can't believe I almost forgot this, but in the U.S. May 6 is Nurses' Day. Doctors, show the nurses you work with how much you appreciate their care and help. I know my clinical workload would be far less manageable without my nurse; I might not even be able to handle it and my laboratory research at the same time. (Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until Monday to show my appreciation, as she was off work Thursday and Friday, and heavily involved working with my partner on Wednesday.)
Patients, show how much you appreciate their caring work.
oracknows | May 5, 2006Lately, I've been frequently lamenting how easily physicians can be seduced by the pseudoscience known as "intelligent design" (ID) creationism (or even old-fashioned young earth creationism). Yesterday, I even hung my head in shame after learning of a particularly clueless creationist surgeon, to the point of speculating that I might not be able to show my face in ScienceBlogs for a few days.
Then, just as I was getting set to show my face in ScienceBlogs again after only a one day absence (having decided not to let one clueless surgeon deter me), I see this on Bill Dembski's blog.…
oracknows | May 4, 2006Damn you, PZ!
I know I spent three whole posts discussing the problem of credulity towards creationism among physicians. I spent a lot of time in those posts explaining potential reasons why physicians might be susceptible to the blandishments of creationists and even used the example of a medical student who is a proud young earth creationist as an example of the perils to medicine of not taking a stand regarding this sort of pseudoscience.
Leave it to PZ to one-up me.
Sadly, PZ has found an example of a physician who makes Alice (our blogging young earth creationist medical student) look…
oracknows | May 3, 2006Kevin, MD, one of the big names in the medical blogosphere, is two years old today. His style is a lot less wordy than mine, as he is more given to "Instapundit"-style "link and comment" posts, but he sure does find a lot of interesting material. I don't know where or how he comes up with it all.
Go wish him a happy blogiversary!
ksharpe | May 3, 2006Hay fever, as those of you who have it know, can be a most remarkable feeling.
Your eyes itch, and your joints ache. You feel as though you were coming down with the flu.
Time itself can seem distended, warped. Your hands feel like balls of dough, and you're sleepy...so sleepy.
You feel preternaturally calm on the one hand; on the other, you can't focus (your mind, or heck, sometimes even your eyes) to save your life. You start to wonder whether this is what it feels like to have ADD.
I'm dizzy today. I feel as though someone had wrapped my head in several layers of cotton wool. There's a…
oracknows | May 3, 2006Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, "long-winded") post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical wikipedia could and could not do, I still can't help but worry that activists and alties would hijack the wiki for their own purposes.
Now I've found an actual example to consider, although it's not quite what I warned about.
It turns out that there is an AIDS…
oracknows | May 2, 2006In the comments of my post regarding Andrea Clarke, the woman whom a Texas hospital is trying to pull the plug on because its bioethics committee has declared her care "futile" despite the fact that she is not comatose and is able to communicate her wishes comes an update posted yesterday to the Democratic Underground discussion boards:
I don't really know how to begin this post. Everything is so different now, than it was before. It's like everyone moved the pieces on the chessboard, while I was out of the room.
First the good news: Andrea's white blood cell count is down, for the fourth day…
oracknows | May 2, 2006Three blog carnivals to hawk today:
1. The History Carnival
2. RINO Sightings (May Day Show Trial Edition)
3. Grand Rounds has been delayed. It was supposed to show up at Polite Dissent, but when I checked out his site to look for it this morning, his blog was gone and a site advertising cheap airfares was in its place. Scott just sent out an e-mail stating:
I'm not sure what happened. When I went to bed last night at 2 AM, everything was perfect and a 50-item Grand Rounds was posted. When I got this morning, my site had been hijacked. Arrgh!!
Anyway, the folks at Hosting Matters assure me…
oracknows | May 1, 2006A little more than a year ago, the entire nation was captivated by the case of Terri Schiavo. As you may remember, Ms. Schiavo was an unfortunate woman who lapsed into a persistent vegetative state after suffering anoxic brain damage after a cardiac arrest. Her husband insisted that she had stated that she never wanted to be kept alive in such a state; consequently, he fought to have her feeding tube removed. Her parents fought to have it left in. Eventually, her husband Michael Schiavo prevailed, and Ms. Schiavo died on March 31, 2005. In my mind, this was indeed a matter of personal…
oracknows | April 28, 2006Here's an interesting tidbit that I came across:
A new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Political Economy, calculates the prospective gains that could be obtained from further progress against major diseases. Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel, two University of Chicago researchers, estimate that even modest advancements against major diseases would have a significant impact � a 1 percent reduction in mortality from cancer has a value to Americans of nearly $500 billion. A cure for cancer would be worth about $50 trillion.
"We distinguish two types of health…
oracknows | April 27, 2006I just have time for a short take today. (If you need more, fortunately, Bora has posted the 33rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle for your edification. Yes, my preamble was just an excuse to plug the Skeptics' Circle one more time.)
In the comments of yesterday's post about a medical student who is a young earth creationist, Karl asked a most interesting question:
I hope that you saw "House" last night (on FOX, of all places). A 15 year old faith healer shows up in the hospital. At one point he touches a patient who has been dignosed with terminal (Liver?) cancer. The cancer shrinks. House…
oracknows | April 27, 2006The 33rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle has been posted at Science and Politics. Bora has kindly provided an abstract:
Complaints like "hurts my brain" and "blows my mind" as a result of exposure to incredible stories have recently been definitively tied to the neuronal cell death (apoptosis). Furthermore, the notion of the usefullness of the Baloney Detection Kit (BDK) in protection of brain cells against the negative effects of incredulity has recently garnered significant support. In this review, the authors gather the most notable examples in recent scientific and medical literature on…
oracknows | April 26, 2006The latest Tangled Bank is up at The Inoculated Mind, this time with a nifty Star Wars theme!
Orac "Skywalker," Jedi Knight? I like it.
I like the reference to "Darth Voxer" (a reference to Vox Day and his antivaccination idiocy) even more...
oracknows | April 26, 2006Oh, boy.
Last week, as part of my series Medicine and Evolution, I mentioned the blog of a homeschooled medical student who also happens to be a young earth creationist and used her as an example of why I feared that credulity towards a a pseudoscience that is so obviously wrong based on the empirical evidence, so easily debunked with so little effort is an indicator of credulity when it comes to other forms of pseudoscience, like quackery. I hadn't really planned on mentioning her again any time soon, or even ever, as I thought my point had been made.
Then a reader had to point out to me…