Grand Rounds 4.22 at Science Roll

I was remiss in noting that Hungarian medical student and Medical Web 2.0 guru Berci Meskó has hosted the current and rather large Grand Rounds medical blog carnival at his excellent blog, Science Roll. Fresh off his US tour that included a presentation at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference and a talk at Yale University, Doctor-to-be Meskó returns in stride with the week's wide spectrum of medical blogging.

For those new readers, blog carnivals are periodic compilations of posts organized around general topical areas. For example, Grand Rounds is a general medicine carnival begun by ER doc, Dr Nick Genes at Blogborygmi, that has been running for nearly four-and-a-half years. These carnivals are great mechanisms for reading what bloggers think are their best posts of the week and often turn you on to new bloggers whose outstanding writing is worthy of your limited reading time.

As examples, I wish to draw your attention to two of my favorite posts from Grand Rounds 4.22, both of which came from bloggers I have not read previously:

Dr Jan Gurley at Black Future Month stated that it's a call for investing in a long-term, detailed cohort study of African Americans, like the Framingham study.

Why is it important? 2) For (literally) thirty years, researchers have documented disease rates and outcomes that are worse among African Americans. Over and over, all we do is describe the same thing. Isn't it time we moved on to why? and, most importantly, how to fix it?

While some of the disparity in disease rates and severity are due to differential access to care, evidence is accumulating that some of these disparities have genetic and/or environmental influences that can either be managed or prevented.

My second selection is in juxtaposition to the animal rights issues raised this week. There is some human research that can be done with great and long-lasting benefit to society - dissection of human cadavers:

Vitum Medicinus, a Canadian medical student, shares a speech he gave to the families of his anatomy lab cadavers at a memorial service for body donors.

For example, they have taught us about bravery. Thinking ahead to one's own final moments is not always a comfortable thing to do.

And they have taught us about selflessness and altruism. They have given as much of themselves as they could, to ensure that we, as tomorrow's health care practitioners, will have the best possible preparation for tending to those who need our help.

Good on ya, young man.