House Swap

February 2nd, 2010

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

- debs

University of Sheffield’s Med Students take on Kumar & Clark

February 2nd, 2010

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 thatSDC14524SDC14598 - Copy (2)SDC14601IMG_0995 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

- debs

Kumar & Clark the Podcast

February 1st, 2010

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

- debs

Tamiflu tunes

January 25th, 2010

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.


- Dom

Haikus for Health

November 25th, 2009

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.

- Dom

The contribution of medical students to services in pandemic flu

November 25th, 2009

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.

Examples of clinical activity that may be appropriate for a final year medical student to undertake include
• Clerking of patients in emergency or ward settings
• Ordering investigations under supervision
• Getting the results of investigations
• Venepuncture
• IV cannulation
• 12-lead ecg
• urinary catherisation
• arterial blood gases
• setting up an IV infusion
• manual handling, after specific training
These skills listed are taken from Tomorrow’s Doctors where it is stated what practical skills FY1s must be able to perform. The document may also set a precedent in stating that medical students should be paid a wage for work done outside of studying. Medical students will not be forced into doing this work, and must opt in to do it. They will be provided with immunisations. Many clinical medical students have already immunised as a matter of Trust policy around the country. It is unclear whether final year medical students or retired doctors will be called first if there insufficient doctors. It would make sense for the Department of Health to have policy on this. It seems unlikely that swine flu will overwhelm the NHS this winter, but it’s good to be prepared for the future. The document can be found here.

- Dom

Medical slang

November 25th, 2009

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.

- Dom

Nicotine gum overdose

November 25th, 2009

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.

Aiden Williams was just hours from death after he chomped his way through 45 pieces of low strength Nicorette Gum — the equivalent of 180 Marlboro Lights in just 25 minutes.

Shockingly, children as young as 12 can be given up to a week’s supply of gum — 105 pieces — by school counsellors without their parents knowledge.

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.

- Dom

GMC reports on medical schools

November 25th, 2009

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 GMC visits each medical school twice every ten years, the stages of the visit are:
  • Collecting information (June to December)
  • Confirming information (January to July)
  • Integrating information and making judgements (June to August)
Every year, each medical school must provide a return to the GMC that:
a. Identifies significant changes to curricula, assessments or staffing.
b. Highlights risks or issues of concern, proposed solutions and corrective actions taken.
c. Identifies examples of innovation and good practice.
d. Responds to issues of interest and debate in medical education, including promoting equality and valuing diversity.
e. Identifies progress on any requirements or recommendations arising from the QABME visit process.
The GMC writes to each medical school towards the end of the calendar year to request the specific information required that year. School returns allow the GMC Education Committee to identify:
a. Issues to explore with all medical schools.
b. Examples of good practice that can be shared.
c. Issues to be investigated with individual medical schools.
Respective medical schools fill in tables under the columns:
  • Tomorrow’s Doctors area
  • Requirement/ Recommendation/ Change/ Innovation/ Risk or challenge
  • Action
  • Contact
  • Supporting documents list
  • Timeline including a deadline for actions to be carried out
This will be the first year after the new edition of Tomorrow’s Doctors, so some of the goalposts have moved. The 2008 report for Birmingham reports that the increase of SSCs from 12-13% to 25-33% has just been achieved. The new edition specifies this is no longer necessary. At least there will be some leeway for changes that have been made. The fact that medical schools are being measured against specific criteria produced by the GMC means that these reports are more meaningful that any league tables produced by broadsheet newspapers. This is the best place to look to find out how well a medical school is performing.

- Dom

Swine flu visualised

November 15th, 2009

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.

- Dom