It’s time we get away from all of the serious nonsense and back to something I am far more comfortable with: Taking otherwise-useful information and twisting it into utter nonsense. Yes, it’s time to journey back to the wonderful world of the physical exam.
My ongoing mission is to explore the human body from my unique (albeit moderately unstable) perspective. For an overview of my previous posts on the physical exam see this post which features Dick Chaney on a Segway (reason enough to click on the link). Please visit a psychiatry blog to aid in recovery once you have done so.
My most recent post in this fine series covered the topic of psychics and about the examination of the hand. It was mainly about psychics examining the hand, but I did slip in a little doctor stuff to keep the cops off of me. But then I got a call from the department of homeland security and they said that if I didn’t shape up, I’d no longer be able to use the picture of Dick Cheney on the Segway. It’s hard to resist such harsh tactics. Read more »
The Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group at the University of Southern California (USC) works on very interesting projects. If you’ve ever wondered what an MRI of vocal performance might look like, this is it. From USC:
This video illustrates real-time MRI of vocal performance. It includes examples from a soprano and an emcee/beatboxer. This video was featured at the Sounds and Visions Session of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions, May 2006, Seattle.
The health consequences of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could be really serious and may include cancer, respiratory diseases, and hormonal disruptions. These health effects and the ecological issues are shown on a new infographic. Click on the image for the full version:
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
Medical Pastiche blogger Peter Zavislak, whom I can always count on to point out the unusual and interesting sides of medicine, sent me to a website that has nothing but pictures and videos of food in an MRI scanner.
Here’s a series of images from their site of a cantaloupe as viewed from an MRI:
I just find myself thinking that these MRI machines aren’t cheap to run and maintain. Doctors and nurses used to be able to get “freebies” by buddying up with the X-ray, CT or MRI technologist and running a scan for free.
Some hospitals allow their employees to test the machines after being set up or maintained to get images for testing purposes. I’m sure more than a technologist or radiologist or two have found incidentalomas from this practice. Read more »
It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…
I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…
I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…
When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…
I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…
