surgery
oracknows | August 16, 2006I bet that this probably isn't applicable to too many women:
One Israeli woman has received an unexpected boost from her breast implants during the Lebanon war -- the silicone embeds saved her life during a Hezbollah rocket attack, a doctor said.
"This is an extraordinary case, but it's a fact that the silicone implants prevented her from a more serious and deeper wound," Jacky Govrin, of the hospital in Nahariya that treated the woman, told army radio Tuesday.
"The young woman went through surgery two years ago to have a larger chest," he said. "During the war she was wounded in the chest by…
oracknows | August 8, 2006Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no 46 has been posted at Mexico Medical Student. Enjoy!
oracknows | August 8, 2006Our Seed overlords beckon:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
This one's a bit of a toughy. First off, I waited too long to answer it, which means that other ScienceBloggers have copped answers that I had thought of, movies such as Real Genius and Apollo 13. Those were definitely among the first movies that came to mind. Even though the science itself in Real Genius is downright silly, its celebration of the joys of being a science geek is infectious…
oracknows | July 22, 2006It looks as though it's time to 'fess up. It's us surgeons who are the source of all that CO2. Sid Schwab tells us why. (And, no, it's not because of all the hot air we surgeons are capable of producing; we're nothing compared to politicians in that respect.)
oracknows | July 13, 2006Sid Schwab has started blogging at Surgeonsblog.
One of his early posts is about a particularly difficult breast cancer patient that he had to deal with. He even shares my pet peeve about mammographers:
The radiologist who read my patient's current xray reported that there was a cluster of indeterminant calcifications in the previously treated breast which, in comparison to a prior xray, had increased in number. Biopsy, according to the radiologist, was recommended.
There are about a dozen difficulties here, not counting the verbal assault I'd received. First of all, I hate it when a…
oracknows | June 21, 2006Via The Onion (of course), Dr. Mike Ruddy proclaims:
'm a doctor, and I'm damn good at it. Why? Because I learned to be a doctor the old-fashioned way: gumption, elbow grease, and trial and error. I'm not one of these blowhards in a white coat who'll wear your ears out with 10 hours of mumbo-jumbo technical jargon about "diagnosis" this and "prognosis" that, just because he loves the sound of his own voice. No sir. I just get the job done.
Those fancy-pants college-boy doctors are always making a big deal about their "credentials." But I'm no show-off phony with a lot of framed pieces of…
oracknows | June 15, 2006Leave it to Dr. Charles to remind me of something that happened recently, albeit in a bit of a roundabout way. It's something I would rather have forgotten, but, when you dedicate your life to battling the beast that cancer, it is something that is inevitable and something a doctor has to learn to deal with in his cancer patients.
Fear of the beast's return.
Paradoxically, it was not anything sad at all that Dr. Charles wrote about, but rather the triumphs that we can have over breast cancer that can give a survivor her life back and how a woman who has undergone a mastectomy to beat her…
oracknows | May 4, 2006Damn you, PZ!
I know I spent three whole posts discussing the problem of credulity towards creationism among physicians. I spent a lot of time in those posts explaining potential reasons why physicians might be susceptible to the blandishments of creationists and even used the example of a medical student who is a proud young earth creationist as an example of the perils to medicine of not taking a stand regarding this sort of pseudoscience.
Leave it to PZ to one-up me.
Sadly, PZ has found an example of a physician who makes Alice (our blogging young earth creationist medical student) look…
oracknows | April 9, 2006One thing surgeons sometimes have to deal with is foreign objects placed in various orifices. As a general surgeon, I've seen various objects swallowed or placed in the rectum or nose. But I've never seen a case like this one described by RangelMD:
The other day the topic came up (don't ask how) about cases where foreign objects are inserted into various human orifi (and I don't mean green beans up the nose). One "interesting" (read, "difficult for males to listen to") case involved an apparently bored male who decided to insert a strand of weed eater line into his urethra.
Once the line…
oracknows | February 27, 2006Nonmedical people always seem to have a conception of surgery as being a particularly glamorous profession. So did I to some extent before I entered medical school, although my surgical rotations quickly disabused me of that impression. Somehow, working from 5 AM to 11 PM every day and several hours each day on the weekends, combined with the grunt work that had to be done, just didn't seem as all those medical shows. All one has to do is to spend a night in the emergency room draining perirectal abscesses to know how unglamorous surgery can be. Not that it mattered. Something about surgery…
oracknows | February 14, 2006*With apologies to Sparks.
You'd think that a meeting of surgeons in such a beautiful and sunny city as San Diego would be one big party. Well, it was to some extent outside of the meeting, but the meeting itself was a bit of a drag. Academic surgeons are not a happy lot these days, and gathering a few hundred of them in one place at the combined meeting of the American Association of Surgery and the Society of University Surgeons provided an outlet for that unhappiness.
To give you an idea of the mood among academic surgeons these days, you have only to look at the presidential addresses of…