somehow mdphd?

When the fuck did they switch from clostridium to clostridioides?

CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS

CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS 

CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS 

They don’t meet the qualifications for life. Some call them androids.

They can’t keep any homeostasis, they don’t grow, they aren’t made of cells, and they can’t create their own energy.

Hell, it is entirely possible humans will go down that path, requiring technology to replace the womb.

Sure, we will keep both systems running for a while - but at some point, it is pretty easy to imagine future humans editing out biologically based reproduction as being redundant and distasteful.

Still, perhaps the emergence of artificial intelligence will make the question of “what is life” seem pointless.

If humans lose any of the criteria for being living we won’t be classified as living anymore. Easy peasy.

In which case we won’t technically meet the requirements for being living.

No, they are studied because life is a concept that predates biology and only vaguely corresponds to it.

Biologists don’t study fire, despite it affecting living creatures. Heck, it even reproduces.

If every virus disappeared, other life forms would continue. If the same happened with proteins, nothing we now regard as life would continue. So it is easy to see why proteins are included in biology classes.

But why virii? 😁

Why are viruses traditionally part of biology? Why do other biologists class them as life?

“If humans lose any of the criteria for being living we won’t be classified as living anymore.”

By whom? If we only reproduce by artificial means, we will be the ones writing definitions - and we will always see ourselves as being alive. Even without natural reproduction. Even if we not longer use cells or proteins.

“ we don’t consider infants sentient”

You mean sapient. But in this case, it would be a group of beings who can loudly and clearly dispute you. You can call them androids and they can call their lawyer. Or if a group fully embraces the transhumanist path, maybe they will be the ones defining you as non-sapient.

Biologists do study fire, and again, how it affects life (burns, forest fires, house fires, smoke production, so on).

If viruses disappeared life would be heavily affected, and those effects would be studied and needed to be countered, and it could be catastrophic, because viruses target bacteria as well as our own cells.

Because of how they affect living things.

We used to see ourselves as the only sentient creatures, the only creatures to use tools, and superior in every way. Things change, yet the definitions stayed the same. It’s okay to be or not be something.

No no, I said what I meant, which is sentient. Sentience has criteria, one of which being self awareness, which infants do not have.

If you’re ever in a class and you feel like you are only getting through it through sheer memorization, most times it’s due to lack of time to digest material or the way the material is presented.

Unfortunately the rememedy is usually finding the time to digest things fully. Looking through additional material outside of those given in class. A favorite method of mine is going through the material and generating easy, intermediate, and harder questions to answer myself or ask in office hours.

I never call an adult patient by their first name on my initial interaction with them. Everyone is Ms/Mr Last Name when we first meet. Once we get to know each other better I may switch to first names if they’re ok with it.

If a patient calls me by my first name, I don’t typically correct them (though my MA will sometimes), but if they ask what I want to be called, I tell them Dr. LastName. Likewise, I will call a patient by whatever name they prefer.

I saw that several people mentioned they would expect to call their doctor by their first name if the doc called them by their first name. Or that they wouldn’t see a doctor who asked to be called Dr. Lastname. I’ll go ahead and say I do prefer to be called Dr. LastName when I’m in the office. It’s not about authority or social status though. If I see you at the grocery store I probably don’t want you to know I’m a doctor. I’m certainly not going to tell you because it doesn’t make any difference to our interaction in the produce section. But for me as a young (I am still considered young, right? I’m Tumblr Old ™ but irl young) who doesn’t wear a white coat and who often is mistaken for a nurse, I feel it’s important that patients know my role in the office or hospital.

I also have never once heard a male colleague be addressed by his first name by a patient. Even in my hospital I commonly hear other doctors refer to male doctors as “Dr. LastName” and females docs as “FirstName”. In a recent meeting of all the primary care doctors in our system, the doc leading the meeting called one physician by their first name and called everyone else Doctor. That one exception was a female doctor who is Chief of Medical Staff and of anyone in that room she should have garnered the highest respect. I’m not trying to be argumentative or be an angry feminist here. I just would like to be afforded the same respect that my male colleagues are given automatically.

I’ve told patients before that if they see me at church or the grocery store feel free to call me by my first name because I’m not in my doctor role at church. The ladies in my spin class certainly don’t call me Doctor, nor do I expect them to. But when I’m doing your Pap smear I think it’s important to keep that title for the sake of professionalism. Additionally, I did earn the title with many years of training and though it doesn’t make me better than anyone I do appreciate the acknowledgement of my training in my field. Similarly I would call a preacher Pastor or Reverend and I’d call a cop Officer and a judge Your Honor out of respect for their training and position, even if they have no authority over me personally. Unfortunately English doesn’t have a lot of honorific titles for various jobs but other languages do, particularly for teachers and lawyers or even generally for elders. I wish there was a good title for PAs and NPs and PTs (the ones without doctorates) besides Ms./Mr. too.

If you’re applying spring 2021, then taking the MCAT either march 2020 or summer 2020 shouldn’t be different by all that much. I did a very very quick search to see if there are pending changes to the MCAT from 2019-2021 that might make people change the date of their test and there don’t appear to be any. The only advantage I can think of would be to prolong their time to study for the MCAT. 

Best,

Hi anon!

You ask an interesting question that led me to look into the history of the white coat ceremony, which I actually knew very little about! 

-Apparently this is a relatively new fangled ceremony which started only in the 1990s

-No longer just for MD or DO students, this ceremony has been extended to other healthcare professions as well like pharmacy

You ask if it would make more sense to do it at the end. Based on what I am understanding from the original intention of the ceremony, it sounds like it would not. Arnold P Gold, the neurologist who originally came up with the idea, appears to have wanted to use this ceremony to highlight the start of the students’ journey in the medical profession by ceremonially giving out a medical student’s short white coat; to remind them of the responsibility and privilege of their positions as medical students about to undergo rigorous training. 

Of course, we could then suggest various ‘start points’ of one’s medical career. One might argue that the start of the medical profession is when one interacts with patients; however, work with patients now also starts in the first year of medical school for many in US med schools. It could also be said that the start of one’s medical career begins with licensure; however, that would not occur for most physicians until after their intern year and by then you’re probably taking on more and more clinical duties during your third and fourth year as a medical student and feeling more and more likely a practicing physician of some type. 

That all said, it depends on where one logically feels a medical career starts, to give the short medical student white coat. And I think most people do still feel that the start of medical school marks a huge life event. I would agree with Dr. Gold’s belief that your life changes dramatically with the start of medical school in a way that should be acknowledged. But hey, this is a relatively young ceremony. And it’s just a gesture. If it makes no sense to you, it’s cool. 

Good question, I had fun learning more about this ceremony, thank you!

A 25-year-old student has just come up with a way to fight drug-resistant superbugs without antibiotics.

The new approach has so far only been tested in the lab and on mice, but it could offer a potential solution to antibiotic resistance, which is now getting so bad that the United Nations recently declared it a “fundamental threat” to global health.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria already kill around 700,000 people each year, but a recent study suggests that number could rise to around 10 million by 2050.

In addition to common hospital superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), scientists are now also concerned that gonorrhoea is about tobecome resistant to all remaining drugs.

But Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.

“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”

The research has been published in Nature Microbiology, and according to Smith, it’s already being hailed by scientists in the field as “a breakthrough that could change the face of modern medicine”.

Before we get too carried away, it’s still very early days. So far, Lam has only tested her star-shaped polymers on six strains of drug-resistant bacteria in the lab, and on one superbug in live mice.

But in all experiments, they’ve been able to kill their targeted bacteria - and generation after generation don’t seem to develop resistance to the polymers.