Archive for September, 2008

How are New Members of AΩA Chosen?

The Constitution of AΩA gives many degrees of freedom to each chapter for the process of election of student members within certain firm guidelines. These can be summarized as follows: At approximately 16 months before a given class will graduate from medical school, the Councilor must arrange with the dean’s office, with the students’ permission, [...]

Medical Eponym Database for iPhone (Free)

This eponym database from Andrew J. Yee has been made available for iPhone or iPod touch by Pascal Pfiffner. The database currently contains more than 1’600 medical eponyms and is updated from time to time. The app will be able to download updated eponyms without having to update the whole application. Search for Eponyms (for [...]

How to Suture

Stay one step ahead by learning the basics of suturing before your surgery rotation. For step-by-step instructions and streaming video demonstrations of basic techniques, visit Basic Knot Tying and Suturing hosted by Boston University School of Medicine. Find a Dermatologist’s in-depth review of Suturing Techniques at eMedicine. If your school offers suturing clinics, get a [...]

Choosing a Mobile Device for Medicine

“smartphone” is used to describe a wide range of phone devices, and some are smarter than others! If you plan to use your smartphone to run software applications such as Epocrates, check that it comes with one of the major mobile operating systems (Palm, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and soon, iPhone). Knowing how and where you [...]

Rational Decisions with Sunk Costs

I believe the best way to remember sunk costs is to pretend you were starting with a fresh decision. Eliminate the past and pretend you were starting over. a sunk cost is a term from economics to describe money (or time, energy, etc.) that has already been spent in a past decision. Since the money [...]

Understanding Sleep Pills

“Often people attribute everything bad that happens to them, including being angry and crabby, to lack of sleep,” says Donna Arand, Ph.D., clinical director of the Kettering Sleep Disorders Center in Kettering, Ohio. “It puts such a burden on sleep that not sleeping gets blown out of proportion.” many [OTC sleep aides] — like Nytol, [...]

Countering Low-Productivity

Walk around. Anywhere will do …It’s all about looking for something positive you have never seen. Taking time to smell the roses may be just a cliché, but those roses could be anything. A restaurant you’ve never seen. A friend’s cubicle. Some kids playing ball. Set an alarm and work on just one thing for [...]

How to Excel on Surgical Rotation

Another gem from Half MD: become very familiar with the reasoning behind the procedures. Attendings don’t care if you know how to remove a gallbladder. They will, however, expect you to know what are the indications for taking one out… How urgent is this procedure? Are there any alternatives to this procedure, including medical ones? [...]

For-Profit Medical School

Yife Tien bought the 24-acre Colorado property and built Rocky Vista, a 145,000-square-foot building tricked out with bright anatomy labs, patient simulators and fully wired classrooms, with $30 million from his father, Paul Tien, a wealthy 80-year-old Taiwanese immigrant who started the American University of the Caribbean medical school in 1978. Tien’s grand plan, revealed [...]

Cervical Cancer Biomarker

A simple test for a protein called P16INK4A provided a biomarker showing cell changes that indicated a woman likely has pre-cancerous lesions “The marker shows there was some sort of disruption by the HPV virus,” Ronco said. “Only a small minority of women who have an HPV infection actually develop cancer. The challenge is to [...]