Spring break is upon us here at UM. The next week I probably won't post anything. I'll probably be at home in Dearborn for most of the time. But many of my friends are going on vacation and we all know what happens on Spring Break. Since many of my friends are 21 and I wouldn't think of touching the stuff until I was of legal drinking age, this break-themed post is just to help them. Surprisingly, I found these links within the last few days without really looking for them. The first one is about why drinking faster gets you drunker. Everyone knows it happens, but why? Another article from the same blog is about sobering up in a way I've never heard of. And finally, great news for those of you who don't want to sober up over Spring Break or can't afford to.

I like the medical blog that the first two links of this post point to, so I think I'll put it up on the blog links to the right. The more I am into this blog phenomenon, the more I feel insignificant. Absolutely everyone seems to be doing it. On the flipside, that's a ton of information and entertainment, catered to every possible interest. I'll try to make one more post tomorrow, but that'll probably be it until March 7th or so. I know, some of you just slammed your fist in frustration, so I'm sorry. You and the rest of the 4 people that read this site will just have to deal.

This is old news, but new news to me. I was studying for a test when I came across a study that said almost a third of doctors withhold information from their patients, especially when discussing procedures that aren't covered by insurance. To read the article (Link) in the NYTimes, you'll have to do a quick free sign-up. Otherwise, you can read a doctor's summary and comments about it here.

There is an interesting article in the New York times talking about the plausibility of intelligent design. Link.

Today in medical sociology we had a guest lecturer who also lectures at the medical school on how to interact with patients. We watched a short video he had actually made (which is apparently shown at medical schools across the country). In it, a patient with brain cancer tells his story about getting help from the medical community. His story would have been sad in itself, but some of the treatment he got from different doctors was unfortunate. After being referred to some other doctor over and over again, he began to wonder if anyone would help him at all. He had headaches, vision problems, nausea, and dizziness, but one doctor he went to refused to believe anything was wrong with him. He was sent home, more discouraged than ever. Finally he was admitted to the hospital, but the tumor in his brain was already the size of a grapefruit. I think many people are complaining recently that doctors aren't listening to them. Because of easy access to information because of the internet, I also think doctors are seeing increasingly educated patients. That probably makes it more likely that the doctor could gain something by interacting with the patient and letting them voice their concerns rather than just questioning them. Unfortunately it is hard these days, as a doctor has an average of 10 minutes allotted to each patient.

The guest lecturer himself had had a similar experience. He was admitted to the hospital because his heart rate significantly decreased during chronic stress. In the end he was diagnosed with vagal response, the symptoms were also consistent with a possible heart attack. While in the hospital, he was treated by a resident who looked at his EKG and told him he had suffered a heart attack and he needed to lay down. The patient said "are you sure? I feel okay," but the resident was soon fed up with questioning. He finally snapped "shutup, you've had a heart attack," and pushed the patient to lie down. He was prescribed beta-blockers. That night, he was given the beta-blockers and his heart slowed down so much he could barely breathe. Every time his heart stabilized, he was given more beta-blockers. The next morning, the resident came in very embarrassed. Apparently, the name on the EKGs had been switched with the patient's roommate, who had had a severe heart attack. This life-threatening mistake could have been avoided if the resident would have taken the patient seriously, and took a few seconds to check the EKG monitor to see that it wasn't the same heart beat on the printout. It seems like a dumb mistake, but over the years, everyone makes mistakes. The pressure to do no more harm must be intense. I wonder if I could handle it...

In a related note, there is a new study out that claims older doctors are not doing as good a job treating patients as doctors recently out of medical school. Here's the link: Greater risk seen with older doctors. I thought I'd also advertise this blog of a primary care physician because I find it interesting, he updates often, and that's where I found the article above. I think I'll also start putting up blogs that I like on the right side of the page. That's all for now.

Happy Valentine's Day. Every year around this time, there seem to be a lot of people who complain about Valentine's Day, usually something to the effect of card/flower/chocolate/jewelry companies creating the holiday to make lots of money. There is a surprising amount of bitterness towards the holiday, which made me start to wonder about the origins of Valentine's Day so I did some quick looking around. Apparently it originated as a feast day of the Catholic Church. It may have become associated with romantic love in the middle ages, and come to America in the 19th century with British settlers. Hallmark, for instance, wasn't founded until 1910 or so, well after the custom of exchanging valentines had developed. More information for anyone interested: Link

It has been a while since my last entry. I've been pretty busy with school and related activities. I finally got a little break tonight. I've been studying like mad for my cellular biology exam, which I finished a few hours ago. It was pretty tough. I knew most of the material but there were a few questions that I wasn't sure about, and of course they were weighted heavily. It's a relief to be done and have a little time off to watch the big Duke-UNC basketball game. Too bad UNC...

On that note, we were knocked out of the IM basketball playoffs last night. The game looked like it was in the bag until their big man started raining threes. Oh well. The end of the game actually turned out to be quite entertaining. It was tied going into the last minute or so, but then the refs started making some terrible calls against us. At this point the game was out of reach so when the ref called the ball out on our team when no one had touched it, one of my teammates decided to pick the ball up and give it a swift punt high into the rafters. He was given a tech and ejected, almost before the ball hit the ground. But quite honestly, there was a smug feeling of satisfaction that we did not let the refs walk away thinking they had called a flawless game. I do feel bad for the refs, though. They take a lot of heat, even in intramural games. Apparently in the frat league near-fights are pretty common. Most of us playing are ex-high school athletes and I think that many of us hang on to the unique feeling one gets from competitive sports. That probably leads to putting more importance in the game than it deserves. That combined with refs that go through a one week training course can make some moments pretty maddening, not to mention watching the steep IM fees go down the tubes.

Enough of that. We've started reading Reefer Madness in american culture. I have only read the first section, also called reefer madness, but I highly recommend anyone to pick up the book and give it a try. It is an easy read, and it is pretty sensational writing in that it makes claims (substantiated I assume, since he is a reputable writer) about the american drug culture that I had no idea could be true. One focus of the chapter is the story of a young man who received life imprisonment for introducing men who then sold marijuana to each other. The book is meant to anger the reader; the author (Eric Schlosser) juxtaposes these extraordinary stories with facts like "eleven years and four months in prison is the average punishment for an American found guilty of murder."

As we finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed in my American Culture class, we've also started looking briefly into how much power Wal-Mart exerts over the domestic and global economy. As the world's largest retailer, it dwarfs giants like Microsoft and IBM in terms of sales. It was the first company to gross over $250 billion in a year, I believe. One quarter of a trillion dollars...wow.

They are still opening stores at an amazing rate. A source said (a few years back) that Wal-Mart hoped to open a new store every day by 2004. I'm not sure if that is the case right now but at the very least, every few days a new one opens. They are growing, but not quite as fast as the opening of stores might suggest. There are currently thousands of closed Wal-Mart stores around the country. Many people have suggested that their business model is to completely saturate areas, driving the competition into the ground. Once the competition is gone, they close some of the stores, still leaving enough stores open to service basically the entire country. They get into small towns even, shutting down mom and pop businesses. The promised money, new jobs, and even new roads to handle the traffic are some of the attractions for small towns to accept Wal-Mart into their community even though many of their businesses will go under.

On a global scale, Wal-Mart is still very influential. Many people shop at Wal-Mart, citing lower prices, but that isn't necessarily the case. An ex-Wal-Mart store manager revealed that the store's strategy is to make one item's price in each section lower than all the competitors, but the rest aren't. The prices that are displayed in big numbers on signs in the middle of the aisles are lower than competitors' prices and give the consumer the perception that all the prices in that area are also lower. That isn't true. The other items in the section are priced comparable to or higher than competitors. But Wal-Mart counts on the consumer seeing a more desirable product while they're in that section and buying it, thinking they are getting a lower price than they would from competitors. Because Wal-Mart brings in so many customers, many vendors need Wal-Mart to stock their shelves with the vendors' products. Wal-Mart has the upper hand because they can always get another supplier but the smaller vendor needs Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart can then make demands on the price paid to the vendor for the products. For instance, they can ask a vendor to decrease their price by 10% the next year and the vendor can either lose Wal-Mart's business (possibly sending the vendor into bankruptcy) or they can find ways to cut costs somewhere. This leads to Wal-Mart's global impact because those vendors are forced to move their factories to places like China where workers can be paid around 50 cents an hour. Some economists believe that this sends many American jobs overseas (as many as 1,000,000, according to one), but others believe there isn't any real job loss because the money American consumers save ends up creating new jobs in America. If what I said earlier about the pricing is true, it is hard to see how new jobs would be created that way.

The first month of philcopper.com is now archived on the menu. It went by pretty fast. With the semester flying by, I will have to start thinking about specific medical schools to apply to soon. Yikes.

I found this neat resource online called Webjay. It allows me to create playlists of free music anywhere on the web and stream them from the same site. I am going to start posting links to the playlists I create (or like) from my site on the right. The neat thing about the free music is that while most of it I don't like, it is different from what's normally played on the radio, and a lot of it is quite good. Additionally, bands will often post a few free songs for download on their website, and as far as I know, it's legal to add them to the playlist (it's just a link). I believe the playlists are in .m3u format and I use Winamp to play them. If you don't use Winamp, maybe there are other players that support .m3u files. If not, send me an email and let me know, I think there are a few other file options that use players like Real or iTunes. Not sure what to do if you're running Linux. So give them a listen, you might find something that you really like. If you are interested in more info, I'll generally try to post links to the site the artist/song is hosted. There is a ton of free music online and I've just scratched the surface so if you find something good that I haven't posted, please let me know. To start out, check magnatune.com and purevolume.com.
You won't be directed away from my site if you just click on the playlist.