Mexico Medical Student |

Today is Pharm Free Day, a day where the shackles of the pharmaceutical companies–chaining physicians with their clever wiles–are finally broken in a day of defiance, of revolution! It’s a day where David beats the Goliath of Big Pharma, where we find that the Lipitor pen is not as mighty as the sword. It’s a day where refusing to eat a catered lunch to listen to deceptive statistics bought and paid for by the company giving the presentation sends a message that we will not be controlled!

Give me a f-ing break. I hate this Pharm-free shit. The reason I love the fact that today is Pharm Free day is that maybe–JUST MAYBE–my inbox won’t be so polluted for a while with all this crap. Trust me, at least as far as AMSA has been concerned, there’s been this tantric build-up for weeks that hopefully will find its release today so people can go back to writing with their Zocor pens on their Avandia clipboards while writing patient instructions on the Toprol XL Post-it notes.

What bothers me most about the whole “No Free Lunch”/Pharm Free zealots (truly the PETA of the medical community, and like PETA, are full of people who can’t even see their own hypocrisy most of the time) is the inherent lack of respect that says that a physician will be swayed without their even realizing it by using the drug tchotchkies, that somehow a physician will lose the ability to become objective by having eaten a P.F. Changs lunch paid for by Pfizer or have his/her brain slowly affected by the Cymbalta laptop bag. This will lead down the Dark Path^tm, first attending a nice dinner to hear a speech, then to eventually becoming a Big Pharma minion, where said oatmeal-for-brains doctor-whore is now mindlessly giving talks FOR them, having sold his soul by allowing the drug company to slowly own more and more of his life with a cruise, a new car, and on and on…

Of course there are unscrupulous doctors who will do anything for a little somethin’-somethin’, and of course, the deep pockets of the pharmaceutical industry can do some heavy damage. But these self-riteous guns should be aimed at removing direct-to-consumer advertising–that’s the real evil. Unsuspecting patients (mostly) don’t have the background to see through the bullshit to the heart of the medical matter, being swayed mainly by the woman running through the field having been cured of her depression with a pill. To lump trained physicians in that category as broadly as these people do is insulting. They have replaced one Big Brother with another, having a less obvious agenda.

Side effects from reading this post may include drowsiness, apathy, flatulence, depersonalization, uncontrolled fits of anger, and constipation. If you have an erection that lasts for more than 6 hours, call your doctor.

Grand Rounds 3:08 is up at Rumors Were True, a fellow expatriate medical student studying in the Carribean. Read Topher’s pre-rounds interview, too.

From the “Eicosanoids: Prostaglandins, Thromboxanes, Leukotrienes” chapter of Katzung’s Basic and Clinical Pharmacology:

Intracavernosal [ie, penile] injection or urethral suppository therapy with alprostadil (PGE₁) is useful in the treatment of erectile dysfunction, especially in spinal cord injury.

I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Ignorance is bliss.

This Week’s Grand Rounds is up at MSSP Nexus Blog.

Starting this week and from now on, I am announcing Grand Rounds and other medical blog carnivals as individual entries when new editions come out. I always had the info in my sidebar and would replace with the current info every week; however, posting the announcement not only highlights the new edition, but more importantly for me (because that’s what it’s about ) the new category assigned below allows me/anyone to see an archive of what was posted when.

Check out Rita’s site and her pre-rounds interview. (registration required)

Or so says personaldna.com:

I think 90% of what my personalized report says is very much on the mark. I don’t post all the little web quizzes you see everywhere because most of them are trash, but this one was very innovative using graphical response techniques, so I thought it should get special mention. It allows for a literal sliding scale to the answers, making the response process more natural and intuitive, which in the end, makes the test more reliable because the person taking it has less of a chance to “overthink” the answer.

Check it out!

This is true–although their existence has been known for some time now, the data is finally confirmed that these two entities are indeed black holes, the most powerful physical phenomenon in the known universe. The gravitational force exerted by a black hole is so massive, that not even light traveling at velocity of over 186,000 miles per second can escape. The two entities are currently named MySpace and YouTube. If light can’t even escape, imagine the crushing power exerted on one’s time!

But seriously, I have enjoyed YouTube ever since it came out, but like most people, only to watch little ditties people forward me and get a good laugh. I had no idea that there were soap operas and all sorts of things broadcast via people’s webcams–like I care about the dating life of some chick who’s known only as “T1f4nny.” Please. However, I discovered a phenomenal thing that has been sucking up all my time recently–vintage classical music videos and other rare performances. (yes, this is where you guffaw mercilessly at my geekiness) I’m talking rare footage from the 50s or 60s of Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, or David Oistrakh not previously seen outside the (then) Soviet Union or, on the other side of the spectrum, pristine (as much as YouTube can handle) footage from a live concert in Japan last year of Arcadi Volodos from someone’s camcorder. 99% of you have no idea who these people are, and that’s OK–trust me when I tell you that these are giants of their respective instruments (and yes, they are all Russian, but that’s usually the way I roll, musically).

To see what I mean, go here to watch a clip of Volodos from somebody’s frickin’ living room for crying out loud, playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Nights’ Dream (arranged by Vladimir Horowitz and Volodos). All those words will mean nothing once you hear the first few notes, but please keep watching at least past 1:20 because that’s when the fireworks start. Now what kind of chance would I ever have had to see Arcadi Volodos in the first place much less be privvy to a private performance?! Thank you Internet, thank you YouTube.

As for MySpace, up until a few weeks ago, all I knew of it was “where the kids hang out online” and that it was always associated with various pedophile scandals since, obviously, that’s where the “kids” hang out. After hearing enough comments from some people in class about what they read, I finally logged in expecting to see nothing but teenage crap. Oh. My. God. 1/4 of the planet has a profile on MySpace, and now I do too (which is pretty irrelevant considering I never go there, but you need to create one to see much of anything). I think perhaps HALF of my medical school class actively maintain their MySpace profile, and within a week of signing up, I got a random email from a person who went to my high school asking if I remembered him (I didn’t). I had no idea so many “older” folks actively frequent MySpace. I have enough problems keeping up with blogging and emailing, so I’ll leave the MySpace to others, but from what time I did spend on there, it was obvious it had complete “black hole” status, following so-and-so’s friends, comments, etc. It’s similar to blogging in a kind of LiveJournal or Blogger way in it is a pre-built community, but SOOO much deeper and bigger. And far more hideous. I swear people’s MySpace profiles look like a scary glimpse into a schizophrenic mind.

As much as finding/following profiles of pathetic pop star wannabes on MySpace is loads of fun, I’ll stick with YouTube.