I’ve got a really bad cold. Perfect timing. Didn’t ski yesterday. Legs fell off today. Twice. Within the first seven hours of being here, we’ve lost the each set of car keys twice, the condo keys three times, and the remote once. The remote is still missing. In the first two days, we’ve done four loads of laundry, gone grocery shopping twice, gotten two shoulder x-rays, suffered one head lac, harassed and/or physically threatened pretty much every single customer service representative we’ve come across, and fought amongst ourselves for about four hours total. Four double-blacks, seven blacks, a handful of blues, a whole lot of powder and powdery moguls—the worst kind—and five wipeouts. Five more days.

Taking a half day tomorrow to watch the Illini game. Go Illini.

Going skiing for the next week or so in Park City, Utah.

I’m not going to lie: I’m pretty damn excited. I haven’t been skiing for about 6 years, or since I was in really good shape. Here’s hoping my legs accompany me on the return trip. Also, here’s hoping there’s a return trip in my future. If my first experience skiing on a “real mountain”—which involved a tree, excessive velocity, the inability to stop, shattered brand-new goggles, and me—is any indication, it’s not looking good.

I came across a good online medical dictionary this morning, and it’s available from Merriam-Webster, the same Merriam-Webster of the regular old layman’s dictionary fame. It’s actually fairly competent as far as medical dictionaries go, which was a surprise to me. I had to refresh myself on the prefix “sial-” this morning, and sure enough it was in there with the definition, examples, and variants. I’ll definitely be using this great resource more often now, especially since it seems to work pretty well with only parts of words where most others fail.

Now all they need is a medical dictionary dashboard widget. Anyone know of one?

Another post is up at Medscape’s group medical student weblog, The Differential. Check it.

Graham has been keeping up with recent rants in the medical blogosphere regarding the apparent unpreparedness of medical students for the “real medical world,” and in particular how the business side of medicine works. Dr. Wes was the first, expressing his surprise when multiple students he was interviewing for residency didn’t know the difference between ICD-9 and CPT billing codes, or the difference between the numbers 99233 and 99244. (Thankfully he later blames this on the medical schools rather than the students themselves, but still. When I go on my residency interviews, I’m pretty sure I’ll expect it to be more about medicine than about business school topics or how to start up a practice of my own 10+ years down the road. That’s fair, no?)

Kevin MD chipped in with some support of his own, making the rather ridiculous assertion that all medical students should be required to get MBAs before starting medical school. Dr. Pho, I hope you’re joking. After all, I’m sure every MBA program in the country has extensive coursework in medical billing codes, not to mention the fact that most MBA programs won’t let you in without at least a few years of experience working in the business field. I bet MBA programs would love to make exceptions for premedical students and dilute their carefully-crafted class statistics with a bunch of green folks going through the motions of yet another prerequisite just for the chance to apply to medical school. Here’s a better idea: If you people think it’s so important that medical undergraduates know every intricacy of medical billing and starting up one’s own practice, take it to the medical schools. We only know what we’re taught, and I guarantee there are a whole lot of people in medical school who couldn’t care less about what the difference between 99233 and 99244 is, especially when they’re trying to judge whether people interviewing them for residency would be good to work with and under.

Dr. Wes, here’s a tip: You might consider assessing your interviewees in a more direct way rather than giving them a pop quiz and showing off how much more you know than they do. You’ve been in the real world for longer than they have—heck, you’ve been in it, period. They’ll like your program a lot better too, I’ll bet. I don’t ask people I interview for medical school how much they know about how to conduct clinical research or how to intubate someone because they haven’t learned that yet. You shouldn’t necessarily fault them for it, nor should you fault their undergraduate institution or premedicial studies as a whole. That’s why it’s called premedical studies, and that’s why it’s called medical school. And if they have learned that stuff, then great. They’ll be more prepared than the next guy.

I can’t necessarily say whether learning this stuff prior to residency is useful or not. Neither Graham nor I have ever been residents or attendings, so perhaps we’ll come to our senses in a few years (or decades, in my case). Shadowfax jumps in with a more reasonable solution:

It’s not too hard to teach students some universal concepts about the business of medicine. A few lectures on contract law, some talks on professional negligence, maybe a bit on professional liability insurance, the difference between ICD-9 and CPT coding, a primer on various forms of reimbursement and how it is determined, the concept of Accounts Receivable, and some info on the RVRBS and how it relates to reimbursement. You hardly need an MBA.”

Hey, I’m fine with that. If you feel we need to know this stuff to be better at practicing medicine, then some coursework during medical school and/or residency wouldn’t hurt. I sure as hell have never heard of anything that Shadowfax mentions here, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need to have some understanding of it eventually regardless of what I do.

Looks like Bill Foster has some serious support. And growing.

This is one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. I am absolutely blown away. Abbie used to babysit for a kid who could do the date thing in his head, but he hadn’t gotten to powers yet. Once I gave him a quick overview of squares and quizzed him a bit, and five minutes later he’d moved on to cubes. Quiz over, since I didn’t have a calculator on me. Plus he was busy trying to figure out how the remote worked.

He was 5.

By the way, if you’re not watching these TED talks regularly, you should be. Subscribe to the podcast version here.

Our dog ate an entire loaf of banana bread and a whole batch of chocolate-coconut-butterscotch-almond bars off the counter this week. You try eating 4 bananas and a few kilograms of fat in 1.27 seconds and see how solid your bowel movements are.

I saw a few granby-somersault-kung fu moves in there, but they should definitely go with half-nelsons more often.

I just received this email from a staff member here:

Dear Chicago Colleagues,

Please forgive me for using your work emails this once. The current situation in Washington is negative toward science, and President Bush will veto the next appropriations. This will definitely hurt science.

As you know former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has stepped down, and a special election will be held in three months. Illinois 14th Congressional District has the chance to elect a scientist with stellar credentials in his place. Bill Foster holds a Harvard PhD and is a former Fermi lab physicist. Leon Lederman has organized a Nobel support group of which I am a member. Dick Durbin has endorsed Bill.

The grad and medical students students and faculty at UIC, NW, and UC have a great opportunity to contribute to an important congressional election in Illinois. Bill is in need of volunteers and donors. Is it at all possible for you reconvene the groups from NW, UC, and UIC that I met in Chicago? It would mean a lot to me if my Chicago friends could extend their help to Bill. This would be a big coup for science to replace Dennis Hastert with a card-carrying scientist.

Please let Bill’s team know directly.  I feel that we really need to get behind Bill!

Best holiday wishes,
[name]

So I looked into this Bill Foster guy, whom I’d never heard of before this. After perusing his site and reading up on him a bit more, I’d like to announce that I hereby endorse Bill “Scientist, Businessman, Democrat for Change” Foster in the upcoming elections, even despite the really cheesy tag line. Science has become somewhat of an afterthought in Washington over the past 7 years—hell, all rational decision-making has apparently become an afterthought—and this guy seems to have his head on straight and appears to be as fed up with the current administration as anyone, which is refreshing compared to the democratic Presidential candidates who tend to tiptoe around the subject of Bush’s shortcomings way more than they should (or could get away with), in my opinion.

Regarding the science thing, I think that if Mike Huckabee is elected President, which is looking like more of a possibility every day, as a scientist I will seriously consider moving to another country to pursue my work (sorry honey).