Medicine: Keep Up!

I love how fast this field moves, and grows. It is refreshing, and it keeps me on my toes, and it demands: if you’re not ready for change, you’re not ready for MEDICINE! Three years ago, during a Family Medicine rotation, a young Zimbabwean girl came to us for removal of a stick-like thing in

The Ultimate Book at the Start of a New Era in my Medical Career [Review]

What I thought this book would be about:

Doctors are too paternalistic, patients know better than doctors, FREEDOM TO THE PEOPLE YO, doctors are obsolete, welcome our overlords the computers who will heal you now.

What this book was about:

The inevitable changes in medical science that give us the choice: adapt or die. (Spoiler alert: adaptation is usually the preferable option.) Awesome technology! Awesome ethics! Incredible advancements! Medicine is NOT stagnant! Awesome peer-reviewed research!

Does New Data on Patient Confidentiality Change Anything?

The recent NPR-Truven Health Analytics Poll data illuminated some interesting data. In this poll, 3,000 Americans were interviewed about their concerns (or lack thereof) regarding their health records. Surprisingly, by the responses it seems at first glance that American patients are not all that concerned about the confidentiality of their health records. As per the

The Medical App You Should Get NOW (and an exam PSA)

Figure 1 might not be new to my international readers, but I am SO EXCITED to share that today the app launches in South Africa! I’ve been using the app a bit longer because I have access to an American iTunes account, but now it’s officially here and we can share some of our awesome medical images too! It is available on App Store and Google Play and you can download it here.

Armchair BEA: More Than Just Words

I’m joining Armchair BEA for the first time this year by participating in a few discussions. My dream is one day to attend the real deal… but till then, this will suffice. Today’s discussion is about books that are “more than just words”, and to this end I’m sharing three mini-reviews for books I recently received

Read Around the World with Google Maps

For a while now, it has been important to me that readers read widely. Bookworms will tell you that reading opens your mind, widens your world, allows you to travel when plane tickets are expensive and holidays in short supply. But I think, to some extent, there is a clause to this. I don’t think

Demystifying Women’s Health

If you want to rile me up, you should talk about women’s health. Even the word, Women’s Health, annoys me. Why should only issues relating to my genitalia and my baby-making organs and my female hormones be referred to as Women’s Health, but the rest of me is… what? Men’s Health? And for that matter, why

A little rural funny

Apparently one gets talking medical equipment these days. Talking BP monitors and talking sats monitors and so on. I’ve never seen one of these, of course, but apparently when a new rural hospital was built recently, the local government decided to splurge a little.

Book Review: The Emperor of All Maladies

In 2012 I participate for the first time in a bookish challenge. Click here to see the different catagories.  For the History category I read The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The Emperor of all Maladies is a biography: not of a person or a company, but of a disease – one of the most

Book Review: Steve Jobs

As a rule, I do not review non-medical books on this blog, unless it forms part of a Top Ten Tuesday. However, since my recent discovery of the myriad of book blogs, Goodreads and the ability to read while maintaining my schedule has led to me rather bravely attempting a bookish challenge, I have decided