LiveBlog: Risk Management

Year 3 Orientation? Worse than year 2 Orientation.

Today's topic: Risk Management.

The Final Countdown

It's THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!
T minus 46 hours until USMLE Step 1. (Picture a sweet studying montage to this song; or blacking out in the Basement. Either way.)

Medical Ethics

Folks may remember that last year Harvard Medical School students came out of the library and made some noise in the national media regarding medical instruction, ethical obligations of MD-professors, and the role of Big Pharma in the pre-clinical years (NYT article here). The bottom line was the students felt that their professors weren't teaching the facts, but rather were presenting biased reports and making questionable selections of one drug over another, often in relation to whether that MD-professor was on Pfizer/Merck etc's. payroll.

Here at Dartmouth, some professors are taking great strides towards a policy of full disclosure. In fact, just last week a well known dermatologist began his lecture with this informative statement:

I have almost run out of free pens and have accepted no new ones.

God Bless transparency.

ps- This guy, on the other hand, still has a ways to go.

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Blind Pouches

**

Sex is all over the news lately, both with TigerGate raging on strong and because of our own discussions here at AMDAL. With that in mind, here are some thoughts:

Yesterday's breast discussion in the comments section of MLR's Blake Lively post reminded me of some recent med school points of sexual education.

1) Waterbras not only look great (?), they also boost scores for those weighing in for anorexic monitoring. Then again, apparently such types already have better schemes, like hiding batteries in their vaginas.

2) Batteries in vaginas? Funny you should say that actually. Are you familiar with the theory of the blind pouch? Well, med students are. In fact, a popular game is to come up with fun things to hide in a potential blind pouch. Or even guess the contents of another's blind pouch.

For those of you not in the know, a blind pouch occurs in a man, who doesn't develop all of the male secondary sex characteristics and thus appears to have a vagina and no penis, but actually just has a deadended blind pouch. See a case report here. Or read about how a 5-alpha reductase deficiency leads to this blind pouch. Remember South African runner Caster Semenya? Yep, (s)he's got one. Any thoughts on its contents? Obviously wasn't a fake urine sample...
--
On a side note, for our lectores hispanoparlantes, a blind pouch in the Dominican Republic is known as a guevedoche, which is apparently slang for "balls or penis at 12" - as in o'clock, because they didn't descend. Any similarity to the word douche, must be a coincidence.
--
So, back to the game, what do med students keep in their blind pouches? Popular answers have included the following:
-spare set of keys
-Christmas
-rain coat
-a second blind pouch
-warm Crispy Creme doughnut
-smartphone
-condoms
-an Inca Kola
-and my new favorite, BATTERIES

So AMDAL, I propose the following:
1) Respond in the comments section with your most creative or practical idea for an item to be stored in your own hypothetical blind pouch.
2) To get in on the Tiger Woods hypersexuality excitement, I'd like to suggest a poll about AMDAL's readers and writers "sexting" practices. MLR, a lil' help?

**Being camouflaged, this pouch seemed the best metaphor for the topic.

Diary of a Short Coat Doctor

Day 7.

Up until now, we've learned how to dissect dead people and understand cells. Today is the first day where we learn how to actually be doctors. Today we get our first patients.

This should be exciting. But it isn't. Our professor's idea of "homework" is to electronically force us watch a video about how to put on gloves. In anatomy class we've been wrist deep in cadavers for two weeks. I think we figured out the gloves, boss.

In order to make the physical exams and histories more interesting, we've gotten "characters" that we are supposed to play. I'm now a 29 year old lesbian coke addict. I am not sure how to hide my landing gear or the fact that I have no idea how to make a woman orgasm.


Now they're telling me we'll get to perform our physical exams on actors and just take the histories from our "characters". Come to think of it, I probably will feel more comfortable examining someone who pretends to feel pleasure, pain.

Also, since the exams are being videotaped, when that cute* girl's hand slips during her prostate exam, we can play it back on repeat.

Lastly, one of my classmates just told me that I read my character's card wrong: the "he/she" in the description was literal. I'm playing a transsexual coke addict. Great. Maybe I should be an african-vietnamese atheist disabled veteran so that we can hit all of the diversity check boxes.

On the bright side, since my character is pre-op, I can finally stop working on my mangina.

* = On the 1 to 10 scale, med school cute is about two points below college cute. On the 0 to 1 scale, it's only one point lower.

Woman of the Week

Besides being the most fun Sri Lankan you'll ever meet, Triple A has just gotten into a very prestigious medical school in the Bay Area. She's surprised (see above). We aren't.

Congrats Ayesha!

Med School Breakthrough

Med students and bankers have something in common...they both get bottle service!!!

Proof he's no longer a corporate czar...the pictorial drawing of the ion pumps in a nephron