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.