Medical Pills

I've just finished reading Dr. Sacks' brilliant book Musicophilia.

Dr. Sacks is a neurologist who has written other popular books such as Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars.

Musicophilia collects many stories and insights on different aspects of music related to the human brain, each analyzed from a different perspective: from epilepsy to musical allucinations, from amusia to musical savants, from Williams syndrome to Alzheimers.

A great collection of tales of music and the brain, some of which are really incredible. It is indeed an understudied area of knowledge, and Dr. Sacks illustrates every single aspect thoroughly and pleasantly.

Links:
Oliver Sacks official webpage.
musicophilia.com

Below is a video from youtube, you may also find many others.

Dr. Anne Marie from the blog wishful thinking in medical education has challenged me:

Can you tell me some of what you think are the necessary digital competencies for a doctor graduating in 2-5 years time?

It is hard to tell. As a start, I think I must say I believe that the "blogosphere" is biased. I don't believe we are the ordinary internet users, we are technology geeks who are excited about the web 2.0 revolution. Maybe we are another population, the very tip of the Gaussian tail?

Some of my classmates had difficulties in sending email attachments, I am not kidding.

The BASIC digital competencies that come to my mind right now are:

- know the commands: control +c, +x, +v, +z

- basic email (attachments) and browser use (know how to set on/off cookies)

- search pubmed / OVID and be able to use the filters and the MyNCBI feature. Be able to login is with an academic proxy to access journals with subscription.

- know what is RSS and how it makes you save time not going on every single website, know how to use efficiently a feed client.


What do you think about this?


Link:
Are you a digitially competent doctor? Do you need to be?

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tacd/136881596/

So this is what I just read

Garza and his research colleagues analyzed the effect of new resuscitation protocols implemented in 2006 by the Kansas City Emergency Medical Services. Under the changes, the highest priority became chest compressions, and rescuers were told to perform 50 chest compressions before pausing to administer two breaths to the patient. Current American Heart Association guidelines for CPR call for 30 compressions followed by two breaths.
After the changes, overall survival for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients increased from 7.5 percent to 13.9 percent. The findings appear in the May 4 online issue of Circulation.

So it was 30:2, maybe it will be recommended in the near future a 50:2 approach. There are more and more sustainers of and published evidence that chest-compression only CPR could be more effective.

I am worried about the rescuers' fitness in the future: will they be physically prepared to deal with all those compressions? Especially if you start as shown in the picture (via flickr) I am sure you will be exhausted after less than 1 minute of compressions.

A recent paper, Population adiposity and climate change, published online by british epidemiologists on the International Journal of Epidemiology is giving rise to various controversies.

The authors of the study compared a "normal" population with mean BMI of 24.5 and 3.5% obese with a population with a mean BMI of 29 and 40% obese. The first reflects the UK situation in the 1970s, the second the predicted one for 2010.

Assuming that energy expenditure increases with BMI because of the increase of basal metabolic rate, and that transport energy consumption increases when there is a greater mass to move, the result is that

Greenhouse gas emissions from food production and car travel due to increases in adiposity in a population of 1 billion are estimated to be between 0.4 and 1.0 Giga tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents per year.

The study has obvious limits. Nonetheless it points out how the increase of BMI in the population can be considered also from an ecological point of view. I think this could help some people get a new reason of motivation to keep under control their weight.


Links:
International Journal of Epidemiology website.
A controversy raised by the Covert Rationing Blog

Photocredits: Mr TGT under Creative Commons