Diagnoses

Different kind of diagnoses in medicine. Doctors decide by first considering all the possibilities indicated by the symptoms: that's the differential diagnosis. Chills and fever suggest many things, so the doctor comes up with a short list of diseases, and eliminates them one by one until only one remains: that's the working diagnosis. The unpleasant part of dealing with biology whether in lab or in clinical setting is that often there is no 100% certainty, hence the working diagnosis is the physician's best conclusion at a given moment. Combined with unambiguous lab results we get the definitive diagnosis, which zeros in on the culprit.

This just in.

I pulled the trigger and ran for an office of the local chapter of the AMA. Figuring there is something worthwhile to be involved in, I fired off an email back to the current president, and found myself squaring off against a couple of classmates. Apparently my quirky sense of humor and the grizzly beard of experience swayed the voters, and I won.

Now back to the regularly scheduled blog.

And I thought I had a blog.

A treasure trove of clinical cases, something so useful to a starting doctor, can be found here:
http://clinicalcases.blogspot.com/

It's good to see people helping one another. In the hypercompetitive environment of a medical school, and probably beyond, this is a welcome resource. Whoever this person is, their blog is quite impressive.

Vocabulary lessons

It's the weekend, and I try to squeeze in some studying into the family time. It's tough, but it can be done, and my wife does all she can to help. That old cliched team effort.

As a member of AMA, I receive an automatic subscription to the Journal of the American Medical Association, otherwise known as JAMA. Funny enough, jama is what our kids call their pajamas.

One thing about reading medical journals, they're much more palatable that the old science journals from my previous life. It seems like chemists went out of their way to write as abstruse articles as they could. In medicine while the writing is technical and full of jargon, it is also quite lucid. Thus a busy doctor (or medical student) can quickly get his bearings and get an idea what's going on in the world of medicine this particular week. Much like medical school material, JAMA comes fast and furious, each week. Of course just to prove me wrong, this photograph is of that one particular issue that comes out around Christmas when they actually take a break. Anyways, this is really the first issue I've looked at seriously and read an article. The timing was very interesting: the material we learned in just the first week of the Hematology block armed me with good understanding of the vocabulary and concepts. Neat. But there were things that still needed underlining and defining, which is where the beloved internet came in.

Most pleasant was the realization that this process of "drinking from a firehose" is working. Each week there is more and more knowledge, vocabulary, and acronyms added. And each week that JAMA shows up in the mailbox, it becomes more understandable.

The article, btw, was about dengue fever, and its potential spread into the US.

And we're off...

Yup, this is as stereotypical as it gets: red blood cells imaged with a scanning electron microscope, the one that provides with those nifty 3D pictures which are later colorized. SEM's of course produce only b/w images, but that doesn't stop anyone from splashing some red in there.

The second semester of medical school started Monday, which made for a busy day, since Mondays are for regular classes, the Clinical Practice of Medicine class and associated seminar sessions on alternating weeks for each half of the class. This was my half's week to have the seminar session, so it was a packed day through 4 o'clock. But it was all fascinating, especially that this semester we are learning the ins and outs of the physical exam in the CPM class, and regular class is Hematology. No, we did not notice new students with elongated canine teeth suddenly auditing classes this semester.