Odysseys of George

A moving talk – something for patients and doctors alike…..something we doctors have forgotten .. the human touch.

As written on the TED, “Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points, and calls for a return to the traditional one-on-one physical exam.”

I have been stumbling on some very nice articles and this kind of brought tears to my eyes….. Lovely piece from CELIA WATSON SEUPEL….

What She Has to Offer

I’m in the kitchen starting the coffee when Mom comes in. “What can I do to help?” she asks before she even clears the door.

It is very important to Mom to feel useful. She doesn’t like others doing things for her. I try to make sure there is always a job she is able to do. Sometimes that is difficult, but this morning I am prepared. continue reading…

Another interesting article I came across on how scientist are dealing with Malaria.

Human Swallows Pill. Mosquito Bites Human. Mosquito Dies.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Scientists have proposed an intriguing new way to fight malaria: turning people into human time bombs for mosquitoes.

A cheap deworming pill used in Africa for 25 years against river blindness was recently shown to have a power that scientists had long suspected but never before demonstrated in the field: When mosquitoes bite people who have recently swallowed the drug — called ivermectin or Mectizan — they die. continue reading…

I read this beautiful article by Dudley Clendinen who is a former national correspondent and editorial writer for The Times, and author of “A Place Called Canterbury” and suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The Good Short Life
By DUDLEY CLENDINEN

I have wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me. continue reading…

This article was written by RONALD MCCOY who was the former president of Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) and International Physicians for the Prevention of the Nuclear War (IPPNW)

My right to wear clean yellow T-shirt

Human rights and fundamental freedoms have become dominant issues of the day, since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The Preamble states that recognition of the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all individuals is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

1966, the General Assembly adopted two binding Covenants, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which together with the Declaration form the International Bill of Human Rights.

However, the Malaysian government has not signed or ratified both Covenants. continue reading…

There was an editorial written in Surgery News by the esteemed lead editor, Lazar J. Greenfield, M.D. who is a Professor Emeritus of Surgery, University Michigan and also the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The editorial brought about complaints and eventually, the inventor of the Greenfield filter — a device placed in the IVC (inferior vena cava), used to prevent blood clots migrating to the lung, resigned as the editor -in-chief and the editorial was retracted. However, the editorial was printed on a blog.

As I read the editorial, I personally find no fault with it. However, many women found it demeaning and offensive especially the last sentence. I would like to know what readers feel of this editorial thus I will paste the editorial here. For the comments and what was the issues leading to the resignation of a surgeon of such caliber and a retraction of the editorial seem to me just a little bit over-kill and very political in nature! I guess it is one of those instances where people were just waiting to kick his butt probably for some other reasons which have been accumulating over time – being a surgeon, I foresee a possible character issue with being blunt, sarcastic and occasionally rude.

** taken from Retraction Watch
Now back to the offending editorial, which we’ll bring you in its entirety since 1) we think given the events that you should read the whole thing, and 2) because the ACS has taken the entire February issue off its website we can’t link to it even if we wanted to (more on that later). Under the heading “Gut Feelings,” Greenfield wrote (we added links):

One of the legends of St. Valentine says that he was a priest arrested by Roman Emperor Claudius II for secretly performing marriages. Claudius wanted to enlarge his army and believed that married men did not make good soldiers, rather like Halsted’s feelings about surgical residents. But Valentine’s Day is about love, and if you remember a romantic gut feeling when you met your significant other, it might have a physiological basis.

It has long been known that Drosophila raised on starch media are more likely to mate with other starch-raised flies, whereas those fed maltose have similar preferences. In a study published online in the November issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigators explored the mechanism for this preference by treating flies with antibiotics to sterilize the gut and saw the preferences disappear (Proc. Nad. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2010 Nov. 1).

In cultures of untreated flies, the bacterium L. plantarum was more common in those on starch, and sure enough, when L. plantarum was returned to the sterile groups, the mating preference returned. The best explanation for this is revealed in the significant differences in their sex pheromones. These experiments also support the hologenome theory of evolution wherein the unit of natural selection is the “holobiont,” or combination of organism and its microorganisms, that determines mating preferences.

Mating gets more interesting when you have an organism that can choose between sexual and asexual reproduction, like the rotifer. Biologists say that it’s more advantageous for a rotifer to remain asexual and pass 100% of its genetic information to the next generation. But if the environment changes, rotifers must adapt quickly in order to survive and reproduce with new gene combinations that have an advantage over existing genotypes. So in this new situation, the stressed rotifers, all of which are female, begin sending messages to each other to produce males for the switch to sexual reproduction (Nature 2010 Oct. 13). You can draw your own inference about males not being needed until there’s trouble in the environment.

As far as humans are concerned, you may think you know all about sexual signals, but you’d be surprised by new findings. It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Sad to say that such an editorial can bring down an eminent man to his knees. Any hopes to go further in the surgical fraternity is next to impossible. The question is where does this lead too – are we all going to have to write political correct articles and that being sarcastic or blunt is totally disallowed? I read that editorial over and over again and am still not able to find it offending or demeaning rather find it a little amusing. Are we getting too uptight?