The turning of the year...

...should always remind us of the richness of the past.

Happy 2011!

Oh, yeah!!
Merry, happy, and all that jazz!

Celebrate...

...the end of the session;
a new year;
the holidays;
the beauty of winter;
LIFE!

Enjoy the holidays!

"Come into my lab...

...and see what's on the slab."
~ Frank N. Furter, The Rocky Horror Show

Some of my students have never had a "lab practical" before! It's time they did! Not scary, rather fun....

One of the things that is hard to teach--but I try!--is that students in the health professions are "crossing over" from being a layperson to having the right--nay, RESPONSIBILITY--to go places they have not gone before. This is difficult in some of the "grosser" areas of study....Being a clinical professional is not for the squeamish.

But most difficult of all is tearing down the wall of personal space--literally and figuratively--that is particularly high and thick in the West. Asking personal--VERY personal--questions and seeing people naked is NECESSARY to being effective. It's all in how it's done; respect and grace and consideration are required, but in the end we must go where we must in order to help our patients.

The "slab" is in fact quite large....

Have a lovely weekend....

Humans actually tolerate cold better than we do heat....

The heart is"just" a muscle...

...but an and amazing and unique one.
The above is one of the most famous medical images in the world--the "EKG", more properly the ECG--the electrocardiogram.
What it represents is the flow of electrical energy through the heart as the latter does its life-sustaining job. Nerves and muscles come together to create a magnificent work of precision, strength, and endurance.
What most people don't realize is that the electricity of the heart--of all cells, in fact--is exactly the same as the electricity that comes from the socket. It starts as chemical energy, whereas household electricity starts as heat or kinetic energy, but they both end up as moving electrons--electrical energy.
In a very real sense, we are one with the lightning!
YOWZA!

Beautiful but lethal

<----Ebola virions

For reasons we don't understand, and for which we can only be thankful, this terrible virus has remained isolated in its locale and sporadic in its appearance. When it does attack, it does so with fearful virulence, killing most people it infects (which are often health care workers) by essentially causing them to bleed to death internally and externally. There is no treatment.

Homo sapiens is still just one species, and not a very hardy one at that. It behooves all of us to become as scientifically literate as possible, in preparation for the day when Ebola (or some other competitive species) breaks out of its current limited environment and comes for us.

I am thankful today for the nursing students who have determined to dedicate their lives to their fellows, despite the very real risk to themselves. You guys are the best!

Be good to your lungs...

...and they'll never leave you flat!
Ha!
Chest x-ray of a pneumothorax (collapsed lung)-->

Curioser and curioser

Arsenic eating bacteria? Easy.
Prions? Not so.
Prions are essentially self-replicating proteins that can cause disease (BSE, or "mad-cow" disease" is just one). They have no DNA, they don't seem to "metabolize", yet they reproduce and cause mayhem among eukaryotic cells. In the scheme of living things they don't qualify (by some standards) but I think they are alive. In fact, to me they are a further indication that "life" is an integral part of the "way things are".
There was a blurb on the internet over the weekend that suggested that the existence of arsenic-eating bacteria has some profound influence on our understanding of life. If that's the case (and I don't think it really is), prions got there first.
I love it when man's puny intellect is challenged...to me, that is strong evidence of the existence of REAL omnipotence!

Newer and newer....

Septillions of stars...arsenic-eating bacteria...each day the universe reveals the ridiculous-ness of our human arrogance, which led us to believe at the end of the 19th century that science was "done" and continues to dominate our perspective. In 12-Step work we say that there is a God and we are not Him. Nothing demonstrates that more, in my view, than science itself. Those who believe otherwise are not only arrogant but scientifically illiterate to boot. The UNIVERSE is fearfully and wonderfully made, and exists not within the context of our feeble skills and intelligence but within that of eternity and infinity. Rather than making me feel small and insignificant, it makes me appreciate what a blessing it is to live in and comprehend even our fantastic little cranny of that universe.

Way too much of a good thing (or good things....)?

Leukemia.

We would be dead at a very early age without our white blood cells--granulocytes, lymphocytes, macrophages. But with too many of them we are also at high risk.
Both types of death, ironically, are generally as result of shattered immunity.
Too much of a good thing, indeed, can be fatal. Leukemia pushes the rapidly dividing young white cells, which are not yet effective mediators of a proper immune response, out into the body, where they are useless and in fact predispose to infection.
Fortunately leukemia is a group of malignancies upon which much progress has been made in the area of therapeutics. It is survivable, and even curable in some cases.
But its treatment requires a serious balancing act between destroying the "bad" and not the highly sensitive "good".
Get your check-up. It may be the best way to detect leukemia early, and therefore at a stage that can be treated more effectively.

Don't call them "germs"!

At least refer to them as "microbes".
"Germ" is actually short for "germinate", which means to grow, and which is by and large a good thing (seeds germinate, for example).
Also, reproductive cells (egg, sperm, and their progenitors) are referred to as "germ cells", also good things.
And most microbial organisms are not harmful! In fact, were it not for many of them we would not have survived thus far.
If one wants to talk about nasty microbes, the best term to use is "pathogen", which is short for "pathogenic", meaning to cause disease.
Scientific literacy is about being specific as much as anything else!