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 […]
Tag: medicine
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 […]