I have successfully prescribed drugs for and treated my first patients.
Fine, they were cats. And fine, if I’d prescribed the human version to other humans, it’d be illegal in most states.
I’m not losing any sleep over it.
Abbie and I have been working on a wedding website for all our guests for quite a while now, but it’s essentially done save for adding extra arrangements for accommodations that we’ll be setting up in the next few weeks and a strange glitch with Google Maps that has been frustrating the hell out of me for the last month. At least, that’s all we think there is left to do.
Take a look. What else would you need to know or want to see if you were a guest? (Or, if you are a guest, in which case: Hi guest!) Should we have a blog to keep people updated of changes, vendors, menus, general planning progress, etc.? Some sort of comment system? More photos?
The biggest question is: Does it work? Does it look okay? If it does not, please let me know, and tell me which browser you’re using. I know there are some issues with older versions of Internet Explorer, but the rest are workable as far as I know.
Okay, so apparently if you call the IT line and speak with someone else, they will just reset your password automatically within 30 seconds of calling, in contrast to the past week of calling them constantly and contacting administrators that have better things to do than sign some forms that say some grad student can bring those forms over to someone else to sign and fax over to someone else and then go take a 15 minute class on how to log on to a computer before his password can be reset. No confirmation of birthdate needed either, although I’ll just briefly mention that it’s 3/11 and also that I accept anonymous gifts, not to put ideas in your head. Also, if you would like to help fund a wedding, that’s also an option too, not to put ideas in your head (again).
On Tuesday morning I totally rammed into some lady’s car. Hers was basically untouched save for a few scratches from the license plate, but ours is going to run us Allstate $2000. Perfect timing, seeing as I have virtually no large expenses coming up anytime soon, unless you count sister’s birthday, Christmas, dad’s birthday, replacement and/or cleaning of the numerous things the cats are peeing on these days (i.e. everything in the apartment), increasingly large winter utility bills, taxes, auto insurance, ring insurance, computer insurance, insurance insurance, and a fricking huge-ass wedding. Absolutely perfect timing.
Who am I kidding? Abbie pays for all of that stuff. She’s the sole breadwinner.
We spent the majority of the morning filing police reports, calling insurance offices that weren’t yet open, and doing other fun activities.
Later Tuesday morning afternoon I discovered that three of my five pipettes were missing. One was returned; two are still lost, and as expected, they are the two I use the most. Awesome. Also, I left my keys in the car after Abbie dropped me off, so I couldn’t get into my lab or lock it when I did get in. Three remaining pipettes went untouched, thankfully, but who cares? I rarely use those anyway.
Yesterday I managed to lose my hospital ID. Can’t get into the hospital (theoretically), can’t get into the student lounge, can’t use the underground tunnel to avoid the weather and/or weird people walking around campus…reading books…in shorts…running into people.
This morning I called the IT people to have my medicine password reset. I rarely use this password, and so I’ve forgotten it. Turns out I need to contact my department administrator, get some sort of higher-up approval, and possibly attend yet another pointless computer training session on how to log in and create strong passwords (that clearly are not memorable whatsoever) so that I can get a new password and use a single program to identify mutations, which has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with patient records or any sensitive information in the least. Can’t I just, like, confirm my date of birth or something? (By the way, it’s 3/11, and I want these. Also, this or this or both. My Paypal ID is bdf@uchicago.edu, and I do not object to donations unless they are overly large, in which case I will only object to them under my breath.)
Not a good week.
Another of my posts is up on The Differential, Medscape’s group medical student weblog. Head over there to read about the podcasts that get me through the day.
Once again, the Cancer Research Blog Carnival is coming to you straight from this here weblog, and it will once again be all nosugrefnebified. (It’s a word. Look it up.) (Fine, it’s not a word, but it should be. Give it time.) (Okay, that was enough time. It’s now a word. Look it up.) Check back here on December 7 for all the hot cancer action.
This will be the fourth edition of the carnival. For previous editions, see #1, #2, and #3. If you would like to submit a piece on the topic of cancer resarch for the carnival, which will surely bring you grand acclaim and much notoriety, leave me a link to your post(s) on the carnival’s submission page, in a comment on this post, in an email to me, or anywhere else you think I might stumble upon it. As this will be going out to press on December 7, let’s shoot for a December 5-ish deadline.
If you would like to host any future editions, which will come out on the first Friday of every month, let The AC of the bayblab blog know.
We initially had hopes for our dog to become valedogtorian upon finishing his dog class. PetersDigest on why our dog is going to be okay despite our complete ineptitude.
At the risk of fully transforming this weblog into an unequivocal anti-smoking campaign, which, to be sure, I’m not consciously trying to do in the least, I found this story from NPR a few days ago interesting.
There were no cigarette executives on hand to deny that smoking is harmful, as in the famous Congressional tobacco hearings of the 1990s; the star of this Senate Commerce Committee hearing was the Federal Trade Commission’s smoking robot…The machine has been used since the 1960s when tobacco companies started making ‘light’ and ‘mild’ brands in response to growing health concerns, but Federal Trade Commissioner William Kovacic testified that for some time, the agency has known the robot doesn’t accurately reflect what people inhale when they puff on a cigarette.
…
Cathy Backinger with the National Cancer Institute testified that tobacco company documents show cigarette makers have long known that smokers get just as much if not more tar and nicotine from ‘light’ brands, but still use the FTC ratings to market their products…’Smokers erroneously saw these products as viable alternatives to quitting, and as a result, many more smokers continue to smoke who might otherwise have quit.’
…
Yesterday, [New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg] said Congress has another urgent tobacco issue to tackle with the FTC smoking machine. ‘The FTC should not allow this rating system to continue if it cannot stand behind it, and big tobacco should not be able to hide behind the FTC method to justify the claim that ‘light’ and ‘low-tar’ cigarettes are healthier.”But cigarette makers say they don’t market ‘light’ brands as any safer than regular full-flavored cigarettes. Bill Phelps is a spokesman for Philip Morris USA: ‘Smokers should not assume that brand descriptors such as ‘light’ or ‘ultralight’ indicate the actual amount of tar and nicotine that’s inhaled from a particular cigarette.”
Right. Wait, what? What exactly does the “light” refer to then, Bill? Actual weight of the cigarette? More brilliant white paper?
Maybe I’m just going out on a limb here, but when I buy light mayonnaise, I usually expect there to be less fat in it. Same thing with dressings, peanut butter—pretty much everything. When I drink light beer, typically there are less calories. When I buy jambalaya that is advertised to have “lower sodium,” I expect—not always, but usually—there to be less sodium in it. Maybe your industry works differently or uses a different English dialect or something. Where I’m from though, which happens to be exactly where you’re from, “light” is used to assuage peoples’ health concerns and usually refers to a product that has “less bad shit.” You do know that tar and nicotine are bad for you, right?
I’m getting tired of this crap. It’s getting really old. On the bright side, as Leo reminds me, I won’t be out of a job anytime soon thanks to these people.
Another of my posts is up at The Differential, Medscape’s group medical student weblog. Check it.
Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics fame and now-NY Times blogger, points us to an economics study concluding that, when taking into account mortality and economic value of life, each pack of cigarettes ultimately costs over $222 for men and $94 for women. Yikes.
The formula they used, which I understand entirely, goes something like this: Greek letter[1+(mumbo jumbo)/µ¢ª-4]/Greek letter®=$222.423845432, which they rounded to $222 so lay people could understand it. Pretty impressive stuff if you ask me, and being a mathologist, I should know.
Whoa. Lots o’ good smoking-related news flying around in the past few days.
The World Lung Foundation announced recently that it expects the smoking-related death rate worldwide to double over the next two decades or so. As it stands now, of the 1.3 billion(!) smokers worldwide, about 5 million of them die every year with smoking as the culprit. Another interesting tidbit to tie into this: There are more smokers in China than there are people in the United States. (See 1.7: Cigarette consumption and Table B: The demographics of tobacco.) About 50% more. According to a rough calculation, almost 450 million of them. They smoke 1800 cigarettes per person every year. That’s almost 5 cigarettes smoked daily in China per person. Not per smoker; per person. One-third of the world’s annual cigarette consumption. These figures don’t even include kids who are exposed to their parent’s (or, if they’re really screwed, parents’) secondhand smoke, which in some countries is upwards of 80% of children.
This makes the WLF’s prediction entirely believable.
What is perhaps more alarming is the rate of smoking among health professionals in various countries. 42% in Turkey; 35% in Spain(!); 32% in Ecuador; 28% in France(!); well over 50% in Bulgaria and Armenia.
What is perhaps even more alarming is that in every single country above, which is not an exhaustive list, these rates are several percentage points, if not dozens, higher than in the general public. In some countries, health professionals are twice or even thrice more likely to smoke than the lay population.
Clearly, this is not helping things. This makes the WLF’s prediction entirely believable, if not utterly undershot.
Things are not much better at home. While “only” about 21% of Americans smoke every day or some days, and “only” around 3% of health professionals smoke regularly, the CDC reports that the progress we were once making now seems to have stagnated:
Most notably, funding for comprehensive state programs for tobacco control and prevention decreased by 20.3% from 2002 to 2006, and tobacco-industry marketing expenditures nearly doubled from 1998 ($6.7 billion) to 2005 ($13.1 billion).”
Pair this with the fact that, when this survey was conducted, 45% of smokers had tried, unsuccessfully of course, to quit smoking within the previous 12 months, and you’ve got yourself a nice little public health problem that’s not going away anytime soon. They are winning, and we are losing.
There is some respite in all of this, though. A new study out of UCSF showed that a nicotine reduction strategy could reduce smoking addiction pretty effectively, with a quarter of the subjects quitting entirely and a huge chunk smoking significantly less after the study. I like it.
By ironic, I mean laughable:
President George W. Bush today vetoed a $151 billion spending bill to fund the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, and other health and education programs in 2008, calling the measure fiscally irresponsible.”
Fiscally irresponsible. Surely not the $102 trillion variety of fiscally irresponsible…
Agree to disagree, I guess. Only 15 more months, only 15 more months…
…and if you smoke a hell of a lot of it, it may even be worse than plain ol’ cigarettes.
I wrote previously about a study that claimed one joint of marijuana causes about as much damage to your lungs as a handful of cigarettes. I argued, though, that most people probably smoke a small enough amount of weed for it not to have as great an effect on overall lung health as the typical smoker could expect. Now, Christian over at Med Journal Watch has found a similar study in support of the same—even more lopsided—conclusion. This one says a single joint is equal to up to a whole pack of cigarettes! The difference here, though, is that median number of marijuana cigarettes smoked daily by subjects in the latter study was six. Six joints a day! Median! Meaning someone potentially smoked much more than that! Otherwise they probably would have just used the mean! And this was for almost nine years on average! 19,272 joints! How expensive must that be?
Emphysema and secondary pneumothorax in young adults smoking cannabis.
Beshay M et al. Eur J Cardiothoracic Surg. doi:10.1016/j.ejcts.2007.07.039Background: We observed a remarkable increase in the number of young patients who presented with lung emphysema and secondary spontaneous pneumothorax (SSP) at our institution for over a period of 30 months; most of them have a common history of marijuana abuse.
Study design: Retrospective case series.
Methods: Seventeen young patients presented with spontaneous pneumothorax with bullous lung emphysema were systematically evaluated over a period of 30 months. All were regular marijuana smokers. Clinical history, chest X-ray, CT-scan, lung function test, and laboratory and histological examinations were assessed. We compared the findings of this group (group I) with the findings of non-marijuana smoking patients (group II) in the same period. The findings of this series were also compared with the findings of 75 patients presented with pneumothorax in a previous period from January 2000 till March 2002 (group III).
Results: In group I, there were 17 patients: the median age of the patients was 27 years (range 19-43 years), 16 males and 1 female. All were living in Switzerland. All but one smoked marijuana daily for a mean of 8.8 years and tobacco for 11.8 years. CT-scan showed multiple bullae at the apex or significant bullous emphysema with predominance in the upper lobes only in two patients. Only two patients had reduced forced first second expiratory volume (FEV1) and one reduced vital capacity (VC) below the predicted 50%. This correlated with the subjectively asymptomatic condition of the patients. All but two patients were treated by video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) for prevention of relapsing pneumothorax. Histology showed severe lung emphysema, inflammation, and heavily pigmented macrophages. In group II, there were 85 patients: there were 78 males, the median age was 24 years (range 17-40 years), 74 patients smoked tobacco for 13.4 years but no marijuana. CT-scan in 72 patients showed only small bullae at the apex but no significant emphysema; other clinical, laboratory, and histopathological findings showed no significant difference in group I. In group III, there were 75 patients: there were 71 males and 4 females. Mean age was 25 years (range 16-46 years). Six smoked marijuana daily for a mean of 3.2 years, and 62 smoked tobacco for 14 years. CT-scan done in 59 patients showed few small bullae at the apex but no significant lung emphysema. The presence of lung emphysema on CT-scan in group I was significantly different than in groups II and III (p=0.14). No significant difference was found among all groups in the form of clinical, laboratory, and histopathological findings.
Conclusions: In case of emphysema in young individuals, marijuana abuse has to be considered in the differential diagnosis. The period of marijuana smoking seems to play an important role in the development of lung emphysema. This obviously quite frequent condition in young and so far asymptomatic patients will have medical, financial, and ethical impact, as some of these patients may be severely handicapped or even become lung transplant candidates in the future.”
Remarkable Finding #1: Either females rarely smoke in Switzerland, or they almost never get smoking-related pneumothoraces as a sequela of emphysema.
Remarkable Finding #2: This study is a piece of crap. There is zero rationale given for how this 1 joint:1 pack ratio was calculated, and there is very little analysis of their data beyond reporting the clinical findings. Did they control for tobacco smoking in the cannabis group? Not really. Why did the non-cannabis-smoking group present with spontaneous pneumothoraces if they didn’t have emphysema? Who knows. Maybe they all got stabbed. Why did the cannabis smokers in the third group not get emphysema? How much cannabis did they smoke? How much tobacco did they smoke? No clue. I think I have an explanation for why the cannabis and tobacco smokers developed emphysema while the tobacco smokers didn’t: They smoked more. What are those “histopathological examinations” examining exactly? Cannabis smokers? Tobacco smokers? Can we have some comparative slides please? I think we all know what emphysema looks like histologically and radiographically.
Remarkable Finding #3: Smoke a lot of anything, and apparently your lungs die. I think we knew this already.
Every month, roughly five days after my credit card bill payment clears, I receive a letter in the mail from my bank, Citibank, that reads:
Dear BENJAMIN D FERGUSON:
Your Citibank statement is now available at http://www.citicards.com. This notification is part of the All-Electronic Program you enrolled in to receive your statements online only instead of in the mail.
…
We hope you enjoy the many benefits of the All-Electronic Program.
Sincerely,
S. Larson
Customer Service”
So let me get this straight. I’m enrolled in the All-Electronic Program, a program that presumably eliminates anything non-electronic—the one in which I enrolled to “receive [my] statements online only instead of in the mail.” And I am sent a letter in the mail to notify me that my statement, of whose availability I am notified electronically and whose balance has long been paid off, is now available. Also, to ensure, via snail mail, that I am enjoying the All-Electronic Program, the program that presumably eliminates anything non-electronic.
No, Citibank, I am not enjoying the program. It isn’t working for me. I think I might want to start receiving paper notifications.
Oh, wait.
