Journey of a Laboratory Medicine Student

How does your body fluids shift based on the administration of IV fluids: isotonic, hypertonic, hypotonic?

D5W confuses many people. It’s Isotonic when it’s in an IV bag, but your body will metabolize that glucose rather quickly and it will lose tonicity in the body, becoming hypotonic.

090219

Last night I wen’t to the cinema to watch Captain Marvel. 

Very important part to me wast that Carol was always told to be in control of her own emotions. While watching her story we learn, that the only way for her to unlock her full potential is to use those emotions as a fuel, to embrace them and trust them. I think it’s very beautiful message for women. 

AT FIRST:

2 WEEKS INTO THE SEMESTER:

HIV Is Reported Cured in a Second Patient, a Milestone in the Global AIDS Epidemic

by Apoorva Mandavilli / NYTimes

For just the second time since the global epidemic began, a patient appears to have been cured of infection with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The news comes nearly 12 years to the day after the first patient known to be cured, a feat that researchers have long tried, and failed, to duplicate. The surprise success now confirms that a cure for H.I.V. infection is possible, if difficult, researchers said.

The investigators are to publish their report on Tuesday in the journal Nature and to present some of the details at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle.

Publicly, the scientists are describing the case as a long-term remission. In interviews, most experts are calling it a cure, with the caveat that it is hard to know how to define the word when there are only two known instances.

Both milestones resulted from bone-marrow transplants given to infected patients. But the transplants were intended to treat cancer in the patients, not H.I.V.

Read the entire article

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine got the flu.  Someone publicly recommended to her that she take Oscillococcinum for it.  Oscillococcinum is a homeopathic remedy; it’s sugar pills, into which duck liver has supposedly been dissolved.

The thing about this “medicine,” though, is that it’s diluted to 200c, which is according to Wikipedia a a ratio of one part duck guts to 10400 parts water.  To have a pill with ONE MOLECULE of the duck guts left in it would require more molecules of pill than the number of total molecules of ANYTHING in the entire universe.

The homeopath’s explanation for this is that the solvent “remembers” the duck guts. That it takes on some measure of duck-gutness, and that ghost of duck offal is what heals you when you’re sick.

Somehow, the water doesn’t remember being used to brush teeth, flush toilets, wash garbage down the gutter.  Somehow it’s supposed to know what specifically to remember. Because we want it to, or some other similar woo.

Basically, homeopathy is complete bullshit.

So I warned my friend off.  I said, don’t go to the pharmacy, maybe getting someone else sick with this flu or picking up a new illness yourself.  Stay home, rest, keep warm, drink lots of clear fluids.

And then, as the flu was just starting to go around, I went to my own FB profile and I mad a quick little post, linking to the Wikipedia page on Oscillococcinum and warning people that it’s not medicine, and that depending on it is useless.

And I clicked submit and I forgot about it.  Weeks passed.

And then last night, I get a comment on that weeks-old post from a complete stranger, who shares no mutual friends with me. I’m not even sure how she found it. And she starts in like that, that’s her first comment on this wall of someone she’s never met.

Before she deleted, she suggested that I should “read some articles” and educate myself, and keep an open mind, and here’s what I have to say about that.

I was raised by a homeopath. My mother was obsessed with herbal cures, and our bathroom closet was stuffed with sugar pills of fifty varieties, for nausea and sore throat, for headaches, for muscle aches, for fever and cold, and I grew up being told “raise your tongue!” so she could drop a couple of globules of chalky powdered sugar in my mouth, under the tongue, where they’d dissolve and make my teeth feel weird for twenty minutes.

I was raised by a woman who, when my brother went into anaphylactic shock after an insect bite, called her chiropractor.

When my five-year-old sister got bacterial strep, Mom decided to treat it with sugar pills. The sickness went systemic, and my sister–in the Nineties! In the USA!–got scarlet fever, and very nearly died of it. She tottered around the house as bent as an old woman, her skin plastered with the sign of the disease, and my mother, FINALLY having got her some antibiotics said “We’ll just have to see.” It was touch and go. Because my mother trusted pseudoscientific idiocy over taking her badly-fevered child to a damn doctor.

When at the age of eleven I started waking up at night with sharp, sickening stomach cramps, my mother treated it with strawberry tea, and yes, more sugar pills. This variety was called “nux vomica,” and if it there were actually any of the active ingredient left in the pills, it would be labelled “strychnine.” But of course, it was so diluted that there was no difference whatsoever between those sugar pills, and the sugar pills she made us take for muscle aches.  She treated my stomach cramps this way for two weeks, until abruptly I became delirious with fever and began projectile vomiting.  Later on, after my emergency appendectomy, I heard the doctor scolding her; if I’d been so much as twenty minutes later to the ER, he said, I’d be dead.

There are absolutely some herbal remedies which are helpful, in conjunction with modern medicine.  I drink chamomile tea on the hard days, I use Tiger Balm on my martial-arts-related aches and pains, I might drink marshmallow tea with honey for a sore throat. 

Gonorrhea (AKA The Clap) Is Excellent At Resisting Antibiotics

by Rina Shaikh-Lesko / NPR

People like to make jokes about gonorrhea.

Maybe it’s because this sexually transmitted disease is known as “the clap” (perhaps a reference to the French term “clapier,” meaning brothel, or to an early treatment – clapping a heavy object on the man’s sexual organ to get discharge to come out).

See More Images Of Neisseria Gonorrhea

As the old (and not very funny) joke goes, “if you spread it around, is it called applause?”

But a new study illustrates why this sexually transmitted disease is no laughing matter. Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, is developing resistance to the antibiotics that have successfully treated it for decades.

A global group of experts on sexually transmitted diseases published an article in the scientific journal, PLOS Medicine, outlining the challenges of drug-resistant gonorrhea. They surveyed 77 countries that participate in a global gonorrhea tracking program and found that more than 90 percent report some kind of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea.

That’s bad news for patients. Because while gonorrhea doesn’t have the death toll that untreated HIV does — annual deaths from gonorrhea are about 2,300 — it still causes incalculable suffering. About 78 million adults contracted the disease in 2012, according to the World Health Organization. Symptoms include painful urination, itching and a pus-like discharge from the penis, vagina or anus, or a sore throat (in throat infections).