Condition: GUNNERHEA
Description: biopsychosocial infectious disease occuring in students of the medicine.
Etiology: USMLEs, boards, shelf exams, presence of a famous, well-to-do lecturer or physician, finals that are scheduled closely in time; cumulative finals have shown a sharp spike in gunnerhea incidence. Can also exist in a chronic state, etiology unknown. Studies suggest psychosocial, emotional, and genetic predispositions lead some to be more susceptible to gunnerhea than others.
Transmission: Verbal and physical transmission. Staying in libraries or in close proximities with infected individuals.
Signs and Symptoms: Twitching, irritability, anxiety, insomnia, mood-changes, weight lose or gain, pressured speech, poor social skills, paranoia. In severe and/or acute forms, can lead to uncontrolled aggression, frontal cortex compromise of executive functions (planning, social acumen, judgement, orientation to place, date, and time), panic attacks, and general anxiety disorder.
Diagnostic Tests: Question Test: Ask patient a medically-related question of narrow range (ex. So how can you tell if someone’s macrocytic anemia is due to B12 or folate deficiency?). If answer exceed 5 minutes in duration and topic begins to diverge, it is a positive Question Test. Another, more subjective test that can be used by the seasoned physicians: Assessment of Social Stability (ASS) Whole-Person Evaluation. This requires a detailed social history and mental status exam.
Example of a positive ASS-Whole: “A guy cut me off in traffic today and started cussing me out. I pulled the nine-iron out of my trunk to show him who’s boss. You know who won THAT fight.”
Example of a borderline ASS-Whole: “How did you know that answer? I didn’t know that answer. Oh my God, I hate my life. Stop being so happy.”
Example of a negative ASS-Whole: “I’m kinda tired but I’d love to grab coffee and go over some pharm with you. Two heads are better than one!”
Treatment: avoid contact with individuals with gunnerhea; isolation is recommended for these individuals. Usually self-limiting once the stressors are resolved (ie, finals are over or the physician leaves).
(That nine-iron story? That was my friend…whom I am more than a little afraid of now. Morale: don’t lose yourself to scores, tests, or pressure. Be healthy in mind, body, and spirit!)
The Anatomy of the Heart
On slow days, I page residents to the hospital cafeteria’s automated daily menu hotline.
On really slow days I send them text messages about poor performance and sign the program director’s name.
Dr. Baffled baffles others…
Nursing Student;
“Why Do I do This?
Why do I study all hours of the night?
Why do I put up such a fight?
I do it because one day I will celebrate new baby born.
And, one day help a family mourn.
It makes me have courage and determination.
It teaches me how to handle my dissatisfaction.
Some people will curse or bless you.
But every day they will teach you something new.
That is why I study all night.
And, why I put us such a fight.
Because one day, a Nurse I will be.
To help people like you and me”
-Ashley Lipscomb
(Source: nblanko)
Yes, this is a musical version of my Medically-Correct Nursery Rhyme: 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed.
Yes, this is another collaboration/production by the ever-creative never-predictable always-talented band The Really Good Pot Roast.
And yes, that is Mrs. Cranquis and I making monkey noises like a pair of gibbering idiots (literally having to keep from awaking Baby Cranquis as we howl with laughter around the computer microphone in the dark of the night — I had to refrain from going full-on howler-monkey, for that very reason.)
This whole thing is full of YES. So enjoy.
i haven’t been very active with exams lately, so check out part one of my Art III project: “Beauty is on the Inside”
The club got an award this past week! (There’s a typo and a missing “The” but oh well…)
And next year after I finish grad school, I’m keeping my tumblr and continuing my magazine because this is my baby :) (The members after I leave can start their own, new one if they like…)
— O, who is not a ripped guy (via md-admissions)
I’ve been away from Tumblr for just a few days (but seems like forever), writing two research papers (yes, I wrote one on Sherlock and one trying to analyze Of One Blood via medical anthropology)…but now it’s officially summer!
And I’ve accumulated new followers :) Hi guys! Feel free to leave me something in the ask/submit box!
I’ll be back with interesting stuff, just need to recuperate with nap time first :p
When actor Dennis Quaid’s 12-day-old twins developed infections in 2007, he and his wife took them to a Los Angeles hospital. But a medical error nearly killed the babies when they received 1,000 times the intended dose of heparin.
Look-alike packaging on the 10,000-unit strength and 10-unit strength vials of heparin and a failure to keep the higher-concentration vials out of patient-care areas contributed to the mistake, patient safety experts said.
Yet the same error had occurred only 14 months earlier at an Indianapolis hospital, when six infants got heparin overdoses and three of them died. The case received widespread news coverage, but it was not enough to spare the Quaid family its ordeal.
Quaid says hospitals should not need to see a serious error in their own facilities before taking preventive action to protect patients. He has joined with patient safety and aviation experts to call for an agency akin to the politically insulated, independent National Transportation Safety Board to investigate cases of medical harm and report deidentified findings to physicians, hospitals and the public.
77 patient safety organizations have been recognized by the Dept. of Health and Human Services.“We do not have bad people, we have bad systems,” Quaid said in an article he co-wrote in the most recent issue of the Journal of Patient Safety.
The proposal is the latest iteration of a decade-long push for medicine to imitate the safety success achieved by commercial aviation, which slashed the risk of death in a crash from 1 in 2 million in the 1970s to 1 in 10 million today…
But the social sciences alone don’t cover all the skills crucial to quality care: the ability to observe people, to imagine what they’re thinking and feeling, to listen, to interpret complex situations, to navigate difficult ethical decisions together with patients, to practice with self-awareness. In fact, an overemphasis on the social sciences risks repeating the errors of a reductivist science of the body by promising a science of the person. That risk is even greater if students see the coursework as training for a multiple-choice exam.
The truth is that people are messy and complex. They aren’t always predictable, especially when they’re suffering and especially when they’re facing their mortality. Bodies, too, are complicated. Every clinical encounter, every clinical decision has something unique about it.
If we want future doctors to develop the arts of communication, the skills of interpretation, and the ethical sensitivities they’ll need when they finish medical school, we need to encourage them to train in the humanities as well. They should be taking courses in literature, philosophy, ethics, cultural analysis, the arts, and history, including the history of medicine itself. Indeed, given that the humanities are virtually invisible in medical school, it’s all the more important that they figure in the pre-med curriculum…
(Source: robcayman, via confessions-of-a-redhead)
As the United States grows more culturally diverse and we hear more languages spoken around us, clinical medical education has had to evolve as well. And with national population growth, particularly in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, which are popular with medical students, those students must not only know their jobs, but also need to know their hospitals…
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Condition: GUNNERHEA
Description: biopsychosocial infectious disease occuring...
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