Crooked Timber

Excellent blog linked from the birdog: crookedtimber.org

I may not agree with everything on this article, but it makes a good read regarding the manipulation of evidence based medicine to get "policy-based evidence making", the discussion is good as well.

Another good article on Crookedtimber.org (via Boing Boing) dealt with the ongoing scandal at Elsevier... to summarize, basically Elsevier put together several psuedo-journals that were basically a collection of articles favoring pharma companies and given legitimate sounding titles such as "The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine". More details at the Gaurdian. Are we surprised to see Merck involved with these schenanigans?

Oh yeah, first anatomy lab/full week of medical school posting coming sooon....

Nutmeg jam, peanut butter and banana sandwich.... mmmm

Attachment, actions and innervations of glenohumeral joint muscles... hmmm

Morning Lab Poll

Lots of sleepy faces at lab this morning, so I took a quick poll of my group:

"How many people got more than 6 hours of sleep last night?"

Nobody says anything, but the nice lady (can't remember name) across the table says "I think I got 6 and a half hours"

I can feel the envy around the table, but the general exhaustion prevents anyone from actually expressing it...

The lab TA (who is an MD) thinks in her head "sleep? hahaha"

Oh, and it's only week two!

Observations of a former cubicle dweller

Two weeks into med school and a few things have stuck out about how this land of palm trees and cadavers differs from that of the flourescent tinged cubes and long lunches.

First, the commute. I live on campus and have to, gasp, walk to my classes and labs. Tomorrow, for instance I have the extraordinary commute of 300 ft to my 8am histology lab. On those really tough days, I have to walk up a 100 ft hill to get to Anatomy Lab at 7:45 am... but it's still only a 7 minute walk. Yet, people complained about this.

Being a former cubicle dweller with a 30 minute commute to work and an undergrad that made his way through the juice to the blood (er, orange line to red line) and finally the awesome crystal transport buses to arrive at campus... well, I can appreciate the short commute.

Second, length of the day. Oh my gawd - It's 3pm and we're still in class. I can't believe we have to put up with almost 8 hours of lab and class on those really really long days. I can barely handle it. What? some people do this for the entire life?? They must be crazy!

Aren't we training to be doctors, people? And don't docs work like notoriously long hours? hmmm.... some people need more adjustment than others.

Ok, so it's a bit of a cranky post, but really I can appreciate being a student so much better after a few years in the work world. Yes, I did do less work when I had a 40hr work week, but campus life is so much easier in many ways. And, if I take the 'long' way home (10 minutes) I get to see some of the ocean as well...