Medical detectives must keep in mind, always, the possibility that a cat entered into the chain of events that brought a human patient to seek treatment. This newly published case hints strongly at that principle: “The Case of the Neighbour’s Cat Causing a Symptomatic (Mycotic) Aortic Aneurysm and an Infected Endograft,” Ahmed Shalan, Nicky Wilson, […]
Tag: medicine
Medical uses for paperclips
Paperclips are widely acknowledged to be excellent devices for temporarily fastening together sheets of paper, but it should also be noted that the imagination of medical practitioners has, over the years, generated quite a number of alternative and original uses for them. Here are but a few examples: 📎 Paper Clip Localization: Easy Technique for […]
“Learning to love the secret language of urine”
Dr. Jonathan Reisman writes, in the Washington Post, about his professional love affair with a body fluid: Many physicians are actively drawn to a particular bodily fluid, intrigued by its unique diagnostic mysteries. Each fluid that runs through the body is a language in which diseases speak to physicians, telling them what is wrong with […]
Animation of a man who methodically cracked his knuckles for 60 years
A Chinese animation of 2009 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Dr. Donald Unger, who methodically cracked the knuckles on one hand for 60 years:
Strawberry scrotum, the doctors’ delight
Doctors are, sometimes, fascinated by scrotums and by strawberries. Studying scrotal symmetry – or its lack – yielded an Ig Nobel prize in 2002. As discussed on this blog previously, the strawberry is used extensively as an analogy in medical practice. The scrotum and strawberry have a lot in common, for example, their distinctive skins. The […]
Eat Powdered Mummies for Good Health [podcast 69]
Nowadays, powdered mummy may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for many years it was just what the doctor ordered, as you will hear in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg — tells about: Powdered mummy — ‘“Good Physic but Bad Food”: […]
‘Culinary terms are used to describe genitals colloquially’
A quartet from Washington and San Francisco writes, in the American Journal of Medicine: “Although culinary terms are used to describe genitals colloquially, medical terminology has avoided such comparisons.” Dr Nicholas Mark and his colleagues survey the medical literature on diagnostic clues in urine, stool, sputum, etc. that — in at least some respect — resemble drink […]
Enders’s “Darm mit Charme”: What’s what about the gut
Giulia Enders gave seven-minute talk (at Science Slam Berlin) about being a medical student studying the gut. The talk got people talking, and got a a book publisher offering a book contract, and got Enders writing a book, and got lots of people reading that book after it was written. Here’s video of the talk, in German, […]
Cheap quasi-repeat of a dear study of cheap-versus-dear fake medicines
A new, celebrated medical paper echoes the beloved study that long ago earned an Ig Nobel Prize for medicine. The Los Angeles Times summarizes the new study, with the headline: “‘Expensive’ placebos work better than ‘cheap’ ones, study finds“. The new study is: “Placebo effect of medication cost in Parkinson disease,” Alberto J. Espay [pictured here], MD, […]
Medicine is sprinkled with metaphorical crumbs
My colleague Lisa Kipersztok (a final-year medical student at Tufts University) and I (Gwinyai Masukume, at the University of the Witwatersrand) have collected and arranged a new feast of medical food metaphors. We follow in the footsteps of hungry giants. In the late 1970s Terry and Hanchard in their seminal paper, titled “Gastrology: the use of culinary terms in […]