THE ONION/FLU MYTH

There are lots of old wives' tales out there: carrying a pregnancy high means it's a boy, drinking water upside down cures hiccups, etc.

One rather odd one I didn't expect to hear quite so much about this year is how an onion will "draw out the illness" and turn black. I am a firm believer in the placebo effect, as well as the importance of optimism on patient health and outcome. Still!

Snopes has a page explaining the origin of the myth; apparently, the superstition has been around for over 100 years.  Not only is there no scientific evidence, there are no studies because it's SUCH a ridiculous claim! (It would go into the same category as testing unicorn horns for a cancer cure.)   Snopes quotes a Wall Street Journal article:

"Biologists say it's highly implausible that onions could attract a flu virus as a bug zapper traps flies. Viruses require a living host to replicate and can't propel themselves out of a body and across a room."

MYTHBUSTERS: RESIDENCY INTERVIEWS

MYTH: Interviewing for medical school, you have to sell yourself to them.  Interviewing for residency programs, they're selling themselves to you.

Generally, the big picture is fairly accurate. There are a LOT more candidates for med school than residency, and the further up the ladder, the stronger the application's correlation with good performance and success. Imagine looking at MCAT scores, college grades, and extracurriculars to decide if someone will be a good doctor one day.  "Lab assistant" could mean anything from washing pyrex beakers (me) or being first author on a publication (not me). Residency applications, on the other hand, are a slightly better representation of one's ability, focusing on medical board scores, clinical rotation grades and recommendation letters from other physicians. 

First, you have to understand the idea of cutoffs....

CHANGE OF PACE

Awhile back, my mom mentioned to me that changing my blog title to “No ifs, ands or buts” demonstrated how much I’d changed over the past few years. I was finally able to appreciate the humor in those trivial but frustrating situations that used to nearly drive me over the edge.

As I rapidly approach another big milestone in life (graduating from medical school!), I feel like it’s time for another change of pace (a pacemaker pun).  Also, I have one more week of vacation and I’m going crazy from boredom. My bizarre penchant for blank slates has now leached into other parts of my life- every few months I’ll buy a new calendar/planner just to start fresh, with one ink color. (I did that last week but only got about halfway through transcribing before I got bored, so now I’ll probably redo the blog.)

So, back to this coming year being full of exciting changes.

REFLECTION ON MORTALITY

People often comment about how close we are to death, as healthcare professionals. When I first started into medicine, I assumed that that constant exposure would make death easier to deal with- whether myself or those close to me. I thought it would be like exposure therapy in psychology, overcoming fear by incremental, gradual introduction.

Instead, it has done the opposite. My experience in medicine has made me feel infinitely more removed from death; paradoxically, because it is so routine. The problem is that I've been conditioned to assume that it's never me or my family. Death is always in the controlled environment of a hospital, and it's usually not unexpected or sudden.  I guess my mind has developed this corollary that if my family isn't in a hospital, then they are immune to death (but when I hear someone close to me has been taken to the hospital, I am immediately overcome with anxiety).

I'm always surprised to hear from others that a death was unexpected (of course there are exceptions, like a car accident)....