Rivka a French student living just outside Paris is looking to flat swap with a London student in a few months time. If this intereste you you can get in touch with Rivka here: desimeur.rivka@laposte.net

These pictures were forwarded to us by Professor Kumar herself. I’d give 10 out of 10 for effort to these fantastically creative med students from Sheffield: Emily & Teja who recreated Kumar & Clark 6/e with just a few bits of cardboard, a couple of felt tipped pens and some sticky backed plastic. Amazing effort ladies, just look at that detail. If anyone has similar homages to any of our books please feel free to send into d.watkins@elsevier.com . Also if you want to let us know how you feel about K & C don’t forget that you can let us know here

Hello all,

We thought that you might be interested in a podcasted chapter from Kumar & Clark’s Clinical Medicine 7/e that has been created for us very kindly by Ed Wallitt at podmedics . The chapter is on Multiple Sclerosis click here to enjoy

Until now songs about swine flu had focused on the effects of the illness itself. The balance has now been redressed by a song talking about the side-effects of the treatment. This is not a vaccine. One paper in the Lancet is titled “Possible harms of oseltamivir – a call for urgent action”. Due to unexpectedly good containment of swine flu, various government subsequently downgraded their orders of oseltamivir and the developed swine flu vaccine. It seems that six people must be treated for one of these people to reduce their change of becoming infected with swine flu, but more than of these people will have side effects. The swine flu vaccine was quite quickly developed, and can safely be given at the same time as the seasonal flu vaccine. Although it does seem to have produced more side-effects, which reports of some flul-like symptoms and pain in the arm.

Poems begin each

Issue of JAMA, which is

An uncommon start.

Not always great but

Doesn’t mean health poems

Can’t inspire doctors.

Winners of a contest

Of online haikus are

Found by clicking here.

The Department of Health has released a guide to how medical students can help in the event of pandemic flu. It’s predominantly relevant with final year medics. There’s probably scope for expansion to other potential disasters, although this guidance applies explicitly to this particular disaster.

People throughout the ages have forged group identities by use of their own mannerisms and development of their own slang. Understand what people were saying and communicating with them was a sign of membership of a group. These terms would not find their way into dictionaries as they were not in common use, so it was not possible to look up what they meant. Now anyone can log onto sites like Urban Dictionary and look up such definitions as Selected Fatigue Syndrome.

Fatigue which is used as an excuse when one does not want to perform undesirable tasks such as work.

My co-worker claimed her Chronic Fatigue Syndrome kept her from coming to work, but she had no problems making it to the nightclubs. What she really has is Selective Fatigue Syndrome.

I remember being told by a sociologist in a lecture at some point that medicine is seen by some as a sub-culture in itself. It’s easy to become completely lost in jargon. For this reason, SlangRN.com has been set up to serve as an Urban Dictionary of medicine. Words like donorcycle are defined, but several of the terms from the House of God are thankfully absent.

Phillip von Hohenheim was born with quite a good name in 1493, but it wasn’t quite good enough. He adapted the fairly amazing name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim before the less impressive Paracelsus. This was just making the point that he was as good as, or perhaps better, than Aulus Cornelius Celsus, the Roman author of De Medicina.  Whether or not he was in fact better than Celsus is contentious, but he was quite an innovative doctor at the time. He has been called the father of toxicology for his dictum “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous”. Rarely has this been illustrated so well by this parable from The Sun:

A HORRIFIED mother condemned teachers after her 14-year-old son nearly died when he overdosed — on NICOTINE GUM.

Today Aiden’s mum Caroline, 36, called for the gum to be banned in school after her son’s hospital overdose ordeal.

Just goes to show, you can’t be too careful, and that even the safest medications have dangers.

The General Medical Council inspects each UK medical school in what is known as the QABME (Quality Assurance of Basic Medical Education) cycle. The result of this decides on whether or not a medical school is allowed to remain awarding medical degrees, so it is something they tend to take quite seriously. They are measured against the standards set in Tomorrow’s Doctors, the guide to undergraduate education produced by the GMC. This information is in the public domain and can be found here.

The visionary David McCandless at Information is Beautiful has taken some data and turned it into pictures. In this instance he has turned swine flu statistics into coloured-in maps and tables. Visualisation can often be a useful tool to help people to understand things. Certainly claims that ‘the USA have had more deaths from swine flu than any other country’ can sound worrying until you examine the ideas further. I’d really like to see more information in this format, it’s a lot easier to remember bits of red and blue on maps than tables of text. If departments of health or the World Heath Organisation made information freely available in a standardised format it would be possible to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to make maps automatically. Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org developed software to turn global health statistics into graphs, which turned out to be so good it was bought by Google. As a consequence, lectures at schools of medicine and public health all around the world became more interesting. If someone could make software to make maps using this precedent that would be much appreciated by students and policy makers everywhere.