Exercise May Slow Telomere Shortening, Aging (CME/CE)

Very interesting article... one of the first pieces of research I've noticed that delves into things that can reduce shortening our telomeres... a positive type of age research if you will - I'll be sure to check the references on this paper...

Exercise May Slow Telomere Shortening, Aging (CME/CE): "Endurance training appears to have anti-aging effects at the molecular level, researchers found."

In-Flight airway obstruction - what would you do?

Had an interesting discussion today in Anatomy dry lab. We were examining pictures of the larynx and describing how someone would do a crichothyrotomy. We discussed how that is done quickly on the street to open an emergency airway vs. the tracheotomy that is typically done in the hospital and can be a more time consuming procedure...
During this, one of the fellow students gave an anecdote (I couldn't find it online) about a physician on an in-flight airplane that performed a crichothyrotomy and saved the passenger's life. After this, the patient turned around and sued the physician for scarring their neck/larynx by doing the procedure that saved his/her life! The student then went on to say with the way malpractice suits are in the US, that he would not do the same thing.
I was shocked by this and argued that I would do the same thing and that it is our responsibility as physicians to help in an emergency. He said if he is not working in the hospital then he is not responsible for what happens. I countered that society has invested great resources to train us as physicians, to which he retorted that he is paying for his education and that he would not run the risk of being sued. As this was during lab, I only got partway through explaining that the government (society) sponsors our loans and didn't get to mention medicare funding for residency positions. Nevermind the ethical implications.

Now, both of our positions are based on our very limited understandings of lawsuits, mainly anecdotally or research, and our lack of having been in a similar situation with the ability to do something about it. But, it made me wonder: has the malpractice industry gotten that out of control - or at least the perception of it - that those with the power to save a life would just look the other way?

What would you do?

Mornings

I have been trying to stick to a morning schedule this semester, with spotty success. I've aimed to get up by 8 most days, only to roll out of bed in the 9-9:30 range most days. Lately, I've found that giving myself some deadline or something to do in the morning helps. Today that was getting my ID card at 8 (got there at 8:15 for it) and printing out a lecture to listen before histo lab.

As I was walking back after getting my ID I saw my first hummingbird in Grenada! I think it was a Copper-rumped hummingbird, looked like this guy. It flew around in its insect like manner and was off before I realized I brought my Nokia with its phone with me! A nice treat that may entice me to take some morning walks early in the morning...

Brainless

Just thinking about how it's been 2 weeks of head and neck and aside from cranial nerves and some vessels, we haven't really touched the brain. Just feels odd. I guess there is a lot of other stuff going on in your head and neck, like ear and eye and random ganglions and the nasal cavity and glands and muscles. So lot's of anatomy... but I feel that brain just sitting there. Waiting.

Toon Docs

Nice collection of cartoons from the Golden Age of Comic Book Stories via Neil Gaiman's journal. A few of the medical oriented ones are copied below, enjoy.

The Benefits of Cigarettes

The conversation began benignly enough: a discussion with my roommates of life cycle assessments (LCA) and how disposable coffee cups may or may not be better than re-usable mugs. It did not take long before the conversation went from the limitations of LCA to the much murkier territory of whether or not people will care enough to make changes before resource depletion forces us into a nasty evolutionary conundrum.

Why do so many conversations about environmental issues descend into philosophical arguments over human nature??

At that point it looked as if we were at an impasse - while I argued that people and society can make changes, I appeared outflanked by the cynical routine of "no way man, people just don't give a damn about anything except instant gratification". Mind you, this was a conversation among three medical students - so an interesting insight into potential predispositions towards patients. One (me) sucker thinking the reality TV junkies just might start exercising and the other thinking the lady with a sickle cell crisis is really looking for a morphine fix...

I thought about this for a moment and came up with a workable counter argument. I pointed out that smoking cigarettes was once commonplace: less than 30 years ago people smoked at work, in airplanes, at home in front of children - everyone smoked everywhere! If you had told people back then that there would be a time when you couldn't smoke inside buildings or even in bars(!) they would have thought you were crazy and that it would never happen... yet it did. And it happened because society as a whole recognized the inherit health risks from smoking and judged their lungs and wellbeing to be of greater value than convenience and gratification.

Unexpectedly, this point was granted and one more human realized that there is the possibility that things can change for the better...

Watching House as a med student

I watched my first episode of House (Season 5 - Episode 22 "House Divided") as a medical student. I think it was good timing being after midterms, because now I know just enough to catch some of the medical conversations, but not nearly enough to know what the hell is going on. It felt like trying to watch a film in a foreign language with only a year completed...The odd part was that there were two languages that I have very limited knowledge of presented in this episode: American Sign Language and, er, Medicalese...
In a way, it was more frustrating to watch the show because as the episode progressed I tried to figure out why the symptoms presented as they did:

Why can the deaf kid feel the boombox on his chest but not his arm? -- neuropathy is such a general answer!
They said Vagus and Phrenic nerve! And even mentioned hiccups with the phrenic! Yay thorax!
Eosinophilic something disease... I remember eosinophils...(meanwhile I miss 5 more lines of dialouge)

I soon realized there was no way I'd be able to do this.. this lead to my frustrated thoughts interfering with my ability to listen to the episode - which was a very good one... even the hallucination of dead cutthroat bitch was well done.
It was good to see myself progressing in my medicalese... and it gave me a bit of a better appreciation of the amount of work it will take to become truly fluent. Same goes for ASL.