Why, hello there, good looking! Today is Be Someone Day, and I was totally prepared to make some lame jokes about it until I broke with tradition and researched it and found that it’s a day to think about how to make a positive difference in a child’s life…and, more specifically, to commit to reporting… Continue reading Random Thursday: The Non-Wildlife Edition
Category: Medicine
Saving Sonora
The patient is in critical condition, surrounded by medical professionals who are frantically working in uncharted territory. The patient, just four years of age, has something in her bloodstream that is preventing it from clotting. The medical team knows what it is, but the patient’s unique characteristics are posing a challenge as to the right… Continue reading Saving Sonora
Missing the HIPPA Mark
I apologize for being unable to come up with my usual pithy yet insightful yet whimsical alliterative title for this post. If you can find a relevant alliteration to go along with “HIPPA,” I’d love to hear it. Here’s an equation that I recently developed while sitting in a medical waiting room. See if you… Continue reading Missing the HIPPA Mark
The $5,000 Meatloaf
You know, before we retired and moved to the Texas Hill Country a few years ago, I saw only two medical professionals on a semi-regular basis: a dentist and an optometrist. However, now that I’m living a healthier, more stress-free life in a much slower-paced community, I have — along with a different dentist and… Continue reading The $5,000 Meatloaf
Hospital Observations
The monotoned announcement belies the urgency of the message: Stroke team. Hospital. First floor. Emergency room. The announcement is repeated twice more. We’re unsure as to the reason of the specificity of the location, since the announcement is being made in the hospital. Perhaps it’s because there’s a walk-in clinic connected to the hospital, and… Continue reading Hospital Observations
Hospital Observations
The monotoned announcement belies the urgency of the message: Stroke team. Hospital. First floor. Emergency room. The announcement is repeated twice more. We’re unsure as to the reason of the specificity of the location, since the announcement is being made in the hospital. Perhaps it’s because there’s a walk-in clinic connected to the hospital, and… Continue reading Hospital Observations
The Beatless
I made a couple of jesting comments on Facebook and Twitter about this article describing the first documented case of something called beat deafness, wherein a man named Mathieu “can’t feel music’s beat or move in time with it.” But it’s a bigger problem than those researchers probably realize. I’m sure that complete beat deafness is… Continue reading The Beatless
Brain Dead Man Not – Or Not
Update: Some instances of so-called “Facilitated Communication” have been scientifically debunked. Here are some media reports on those debunkings. Particularly damning is this one detailing the results of a double-blind test in which not one of 180 FC tests yielded the proper response. By now, you’d have to be in a coma not to have… Continue reading Brain Dead Man Not – Or Not
Book Review: “Proust and the Squid”
…the goal of reading is to go beyond the author’s ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text. … The experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and, literally and figuratively, to a changed… Continue reading Book Review: “Proust and the Squid”
Non Sense
I have a friend who “sees” the days of the week as colors. If you ask him about having lunch on “blue,” he’ll check his mental PDA and respond with something like, “Thursday’s not good for me, but brown…I mean, Friday…will work.” His son “sees” numbers as colors, so I suppose its an inherited trait.… Continue reading Non Sense