Wasting Time With Problem Patients
If you have oodles of spare time--or oodles of work that you’d like to avoid--read on. Here is a great way to fritter away the hours while improving your knowledge of the human body.
Your fritter strategy: searching sundry topics on the database known as Medline (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/), which lists more than 9 million scholarly articles from more than 4,000 biomedical journals. Tap in your keyword--”procrastination,” perhaps--and Medline will inform you of all articles on the topic. What fun!
For starters (though we would never be so childish as to try this), it’s surprising what you get if you simply type in words that should never be uttered in genteel company. Since we would never try this, we decided instead to explore what doctors think of us patients. Typing in the phrase “difficult patient,” we were shocked when Medline aggressively spat back more than 15,000 citations. Docs, are we really that bad?
After eventually figuring out that “difficult patient” also means “difficult case,” we then tried “malingerer,” “hypochondriac” and “heartsink,” a technical term for the type of patient who drives doctors nuts. For all three words, we found papers, indicating that research is going on on such topics--though we’re happy to report that the number was considerably lower than 15,000.
Good news! In one British heartsink paper, we read that there is now a “heartsink survival kit” for doctors who have issues with patients. But in another, we learned that many doctors think patients who bring lists of concerns to the doctor are “obsessional.” Whatever happened to “forgetful”?
Rags for Readers With Extra-Special Interests
You can also spend many merry hours at a university library perusing the medical journals and magazines directly.
The names alone are fun. There are Gut, Blood, Bone and Brain for folks who just like plain speech.
There’s Alcohol World, American Druggist and Advances in Sex Hormone Research for the fast-living, fun-loving folks among us, though we warn you you’ll be sorely disappointed by the content.
There are zingy titles like Disease-A-Month--do we get a vial of spores with each issue?--as well as Dental Cosmos, Dental Eclectic and Dental Dimensions, which make dentistry sound even more exciting than we’d imagined.
There’s even a journal for the conspiracy theorists among us called Chromosome Plot, which was missing from the USC library shelves when we visited. (What are they trying to hide?)
Curling up with an issue of Gut, we were struck by the attention Madison Avenue pays to gastroenterologists in drug ads. Never before have we seen so many artsy, tasteful depictions of the human intestine, and we thought the cartoon of the dead stomach-ulcer bacterium, on its back with its feet in the air, was ever so cute.
Check it out!
Dem Bones Are Just Full of Nutrition
We recently heard from a pal living in Beijing. Evidently his Chinese isn’t all it could be: After telling his hosts that he didn’t like bones in food, they took him, for a treat, to a restaurant specializing in bones.
“First a plate of pork ribs,” he recalls. “No meat on them. Then a huge plate of what looked like cow thigh joints. Just the bones, in some kind of gravy. Then some pigs’ trotters, still with hair growing out and bits of tendon hanging off. And it just kept on coming--plate after plate of assorted bones, big ones, small ones, broken ones--not a shred of lean meat in sight.”
Clearly, bones served this way aren’t a Western kind of thing (we’re sure there are many U.S. items that make overseas visitors bilious). And we don’t know if our pal was supposed to eat, or just gnaw, these various bones.
Still, it got us thinking. What are the nutritional benefits of bones?
Calcium, mainly. Canned salmon, with the bones crunched up in it, is a good source of calcium, as well as phosphorus and magnesium.
In fact, in countries where milk isn’t drunk much, bones can be a central source of calcium. Boiling bones in vinegar leaches out the mineral, creating broth with as much as 100 milligrams of calcium a tablespoon. Which is a lot.
We think we prefer the soup method.
