Archived Blog
Today slashdot mentioned the ending of an internet show which I had never heard of, but which apparently included the handing out missions to it’s viewers, and one of these had been to make an earth sandwich.
Think of it. Placing one piece of bread in one spot on the ground, and then placing (or coordinating with other people to place) another piece of bread on the exact opposite side of the world, thus creating an earth sandwich. I just love the imagery..
Something I was reading a while back that I thought was a fantastically interesting possibility was the notion of using Propranolol (a beta adrenergic receptor blocker drug, most commonly used to treat high blood pressure and heart disease) to treat PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).
I first saw it on 60 minutes (which is of course always such a bastion or journalistic reliability and cautiousness), but afterwards I had a look on Pubmed for any published scientific articles on the topic, and while there weren’t many, and they were mostly case studies or case series, it did seem that this was not as unsupported and crazy as I had initially suspected it might be.
The 60 minutes article and several papers talked about using the drug for short courses (days to weeks) at what seemed like comparatively high doses, in conjunction with cognitive therapies and emotional stimulations relating to their specific PTSD situation.
The patients reported that while it did not remove the traumatic memories, there was no longer the intrusive emotional and physical responses associated with the memories.
There were some “experts” (philosophers and some psychiatrists) who were voicing concerns about the use of drugs to effectively modify memories, arguing that it was a dangerous precedent, since we formed bad emotional associations to stop us making mistakes repeatedly, but those who were researching this treatment made the counter argument (which I agreed with) that PTSD is not a normal response, and if we see someone with a broken arm we don’t deny them pain killers because it will cause them to miss out on the full experience of having broken a bone, so why would we consider it any different to contemplate withholding treatment for someone’s emotional pain?
One of the things they tell you about in Med school is the ability of certain medications to give you a metallic taste in your mouth.
Previously I had always though: “Metallic taste, that’s not that bad. I wonder why they make such a big things about it”.
That changed a few weeks back. With lunch I inadvertently had a glass of water that had come out of a copper pipe and it wasn’t until I’d finished most of the glass that I noticed the blue tint to the water and then started to taste the metallic taste. As the afternoon wore on I’m not sure if the taste got stronger or if I just became increasingly conscious of it, but it became highly unpleasant. Drinking water or tea didn’t decrease it. Eating didn’t decrease it. Even brushing my teeth didn’t help things. Eventually it disappeared (overnight I think), but it quite startled me just how unpleasant a situation it had been.
Another thing I suppose that I can learn to take people a bit more seriously about when they report it as a symptom…
We came, we saw, we drank a lot of wine.
We have now been in Italy for almost a week and I’m getting into the holiday swing of things.
We spent two and a bit days in Rome seeing the major attractions and adding to our list of things we will go back and see when we return in a weeks time. We have now been in Tuscany for two days and everyone loves the atmosphere and the food (although the weather is a bit variable (raining when we arrived wednesday, sunny and warm yesterday, sunny and cold today)). Day trips to Pisa, Sienna, and Florence are all on the cards, although we’re pretty much operating on a no alarm clocks and figure out what we want to do today over the breakfast table type itinery.
Enough for now. More in a week or so when I next make time to find an internet connection (a concept that makes me realise how in holiday mode I am, given that usually I would be politely described as being umbilically attached to my computer and the internet).
Ciao
Japan, it’s this whole other country, dontcha know.
So greetings from a whole other country.
We have an overnight stopover here before continuing on to Rome tomorrow. Since we landed pretty much everything has been amusing me and confusing Simone. I’ve been chuckling and grinning as though I’m quite derranged. There was a truck when we were leaving the airport that had an emblem that appeared to be a stylised cat carrying a kitten. For the life of me I couldn’t what airport related industry that could represent (pet relocations maybe?).
At the hotel the toilet had an instruction manual and the ironing board had a power cord (and we have been debating whether it is in fact some kind of clothes press).
We watched a bit of Japanese TV, including a bit of manga (and yes, it is as confusing in Japanese as it is in English), a show that appeared to revolve around food associated with trains and trams, and a channel that appeared to be mostly ads (which are as bizarre and funny as they are always reported to be, even with the language barrier). we watched Sesame Street in Japanese, and a bit of some apparent real life pokemon spin-off, which in true Japanese style involved a lot of physical challenge type tasks.
Other than that we had dinner, I had some sake (when in Rome… wait, that’s tomorrow) which I have always enjoyed since I first had it many years ago in a restaurant in Dunedin, and passed out.
More big flying tomorrow.
It’s been a while since I last seriously studied, and I had forgotten the true power of procrastination.
Once more (as always) the housework is getting done, the blog is being maintained, my computer files are getting (re-)organised, and more people are being emailed to (although any number is likely to be above my previous level of close to zero, and does not necessarily represent a huge increase in that activity overall).
I haven’t quite resorted to exercise, but I’m sure as the temperature drops towards the middle of the year that too will come into play.
This week, as the latest delightful assignment in my term of relieving, I am working in the mental health department.
I’m there for 2 weeks.
In order to do any of the genuinely useful tasks as a doctor you have to be trained in and certified in the use of the mental health act (so that you can admit/detain/treat psychotic patients against their will etc). Unfortunately to get trained takes 3-4 days, so they didn’t have time/incentive to do that for me given the short time I’m around.
That fact, combined with the fact that I haven’t dealt with a seriously mentally unwell patient in almost 3 years, and even then it was in med school at a hospital where the mental health unit was spectacularly understaffed, and resultantly dysfunctional, and so we didn’t really get to actually do/learn all that much (general hint here – don’t come to me for treatment if you get schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, because I won’t be of much help to you).
So basically I am wandering around all day doing general medical things for the other doctors who have better things to spend their time on, and trying not to draw too much attention to the fact that I’m not really much use to anyone. I go and see patients, and diligently write down what I see and what they tell me, and generally have no idea what to do about it beyond saying “they seem better/worse than how they were described yesterday”.
That said, I did still feel quite chuffed this afternoon when I managed to get a patient to tell me all about how he was seeing things that weren’t really there, which is not always the easiest thing to do.
In what surely has to be one of the more amusing lab “accidents” a researched may have accidentally stumbled onto a cure for a number of different kinds of cancer.
She was working with cancerous epithelial cells while researching treatments for inflammatory bowel disease when she made a mistake and added too much of one of her test drugs.
Afterwards she found that all the cancer cells had died. Initially she was irritated at her mistake ruining her experiment until one of her co-workers pointed out that perhaps “it killed all my cancer cells” was actually a cause for excitement.
So we’ll have to wait and see if it makes it to clinical trials, but it’s a pretty cool story.
One of the things I remember commenting after September 11th, was “Well, that officially ends airline hijacking”.
Prior to 9/11 it had seemed to generally be in the hostage’s best interests to sit quiet and wait to be released/rescued. The likelihood of getting harmed by cooperating was sufficiently low as to discourage heroics.
After 9/11 that all changed, and my assertion was that anyone who tried to hijack a plane would be assaulted by every able bodied passenger on the plane because the odds had now swung to being “moderate chance of getting hurt attacking the hijacker” vs. “certain death if they kamikaze the plane into something”.
So it seemed that the in convenience and additional billions spent on upgrading airport security was probably a little hollow, because the most effective deterrent was the knowledge that not only would any future hijacking fail, it would probably fail in a manner that involved the passengers beating the hijacker to death in the process.
And now (and I’ve actually seen several stories similar to this one in the past few years) I’ve been proven right (at least in this one instance).
As I have mentioned perviously, I have begun studying for the surgical part 1 exam in october, and so it would seem has Jack.
Whenever I sit down at my desk to study he plonks himself down behind my textbook to supervise.
Sometimes he sleeps. Sometimes he swishes his tail across my textbook or my computer, and sometimes he decides that I’ve been studying long enough and steals my highlighter and bats it around on the floor until I come and take it back/play with him.
Below, for the pleasure of the jury, is photographic evidence.
Today, given the page Jack was trying to knock my physiology text book open to, I think he wants to learn about Excitatory postsynaptic potentials and neuron membrane physiology. I can certainly see why that would be an issue of some interest to him…