DundeeChest 3.0

Over the Summer Vacation David Smith, one of the new 3rd year medical students, spent 6 weeks working on an interactive tool to improve awareness of ionising radiation doses associated with commonly requested radiological investigations.

The tool is now viewable here. This is a fantastic resource – I wholly recommend it to medical students, junior doctors and even consultants as a refresher!

Well done to David, on a fantastic piece of work.

With less than a week to go before the start of the phase 2 program, DundeeChest is starting to warm up a wee bit. Last week saw over a thousand hits to the site from over 300 different individuals, so perhaps some of the new second year are getting in a bit of early work?

Today we have nearly completed the transfer of all the lectures on to the calendar for download prior to the lectures, and we’re working on getting the formative assessments put up on the site, or links put up to assessments already on BlackBoard.

If you want to get ahead, you can always check out the links section of the site, and see what else is out there. My recommendation for this week is the Podmedics podcast available for download on iTunes. This month they have been concentrating on respiratory medicine, with a 105 minute lecture broken up into smaller digestible segments on CXRs, ABGs, Spirometry, and some other stuff.

If you find anything useful out there, post it up here, and I’ll check it out, and put it on the site.

See you all on Monday.

In preparation for the phase 2 respiratory block, more lecture material is being made available on a daily basis. Today you can visit the respiratory infection page to find Dr France’s 2010 updates to his ever popular infection lectures. Or head over to the lung cancer materials page to see his lung cancer lectures.

The new BTS pleural guidelines have been published – they can be viewed here

If you want a short instructional video on how to aspirate an effusion, or put in a drain, here’s the BTS ePOD video, or at least, a section of it.

We find the ultrasound machine to be so useful in our practice on the wards – frequently the “obvious pleural effusion” turns out to be collapse, consolidation, elevated hemi-diaphragm, or a combination of them all. I’ve also found it incredibly useful for vascular access, and lymph node sampling. But here is a great example of how USS scanning can avoid life threatening “simple intervention”.

The Premier League starts this weekend, so the 2010-11 Fantasy Football League starts too. Join DundeeChest in the Ninewells League:

Use the code 1238397-256319 after picking your team to join the league. Click Here To Register Your Team

Lifted (due to its genius) completely from the Onion website.

RICHMOND, VA—Executives at Philip Morris USA this week unveiled Marlboro Earth, a new eco-friendly cigarette that gradually eliminates the causes of global warming and environmental destruction at their source.

“By killing off the No. 1 threat to the environment, new Marlboro Earths will have a long-term effect on the overall health of our planet,” Philip Morris spokesperson Janet Weiss said. “If everyone in America does their part and joins our new green-smoking movement, then together we can eradicate man’s destructive practices once and for all.”

According to a press release from Philip Morris, the new environmentally friendly cigarettes work by employing powerful carcinogens that accumulate in the lungs of smokers, slowly breaking down their vital organs and eliminating the danger posed to the overpopulated planet by the human race.

Because Marlboro Earths take decades to work, the company stresses that people should start using them as early as possible, ideally during childhood or adolescence, in order to maximize the product’s effectiveness.

“We’ve got to get everybody on board, the sooner the better,” said Weiss, stressing that nothing less than the fate of the planet was at stake. “It doesn’t take much. As few as two packs of Marlboro Earths a day can make all the difference in the world.”

“Go ahead,” Weiss continued. “Light up, breathe in, and help save Mother Earth.”

Although industry research indicates people do offer some secondary benefits to the planet, such as recycling programs and wind power generators, studies have concluded these efforts fail to offset the disastrous potential of humanity.

According to Philip Morris, Marlboro Earths are the first green product to address that threat head-on.

“Wildlife habitat encroachment, climate change, the exploitation of precious natural resources—they can all become a thing of the past,” said James Freedman, a member of the marketing team tasked with branding the new product. “Smoke these cool, clean Marlboro Earths every chance you get, and you’ll reduce your carbon footprint to zero in no time.”

Added Freedman, “Plus, you’ll look really sophisticated and glamorous while doing it.”

The new cigarettes, released in limited test-market cities over the past two months, will be ready for a national rollout in mid-June. An ad campaign with the slogan “Marlboro Earth: Saving the Environment One Customer at a Time” has already been launched, and the product’s iconic new packaging, which is similar to the traditional Marlboro design but also features a tree, is reportedly testing “through the roof” with consumers.

In initial product trials, the eco-cigarettes have proven popular among smokers.

“I leave work three to five times a day to stand outside and help the environment,” said longtime smoker Sam Davies, an office worker in Raleigh, NC. “And the best thing about them is they make saving the planet incredibly addictive. After only a few hours, I get the uncontrollable urge to go out and help the environment some more.”

Philip Morris executives stressed that the new cigarettes, which contain the same great taste smokers have come to expect from Marlboro, but with nearly three times the tar and carbon monoxide, could make a huge difference in as little as 40 to 50 years, cutting down on urban sprawl, overpopulation, and eventually helping to enrich the soil with powerful fertilizers.

Whilst Jamie Oliver concentrates on getting school dinners back on the government’s agenda, I’ve been slaving away on some formative assessments for the upcoming second year respiratory block. There’s only three of them there just now, but it’s a start, and there’ll be more once I get around to writing them. Currently there are EMI questions, but we’ll expand that into MCQ, short answers, best of 5, that sort of thing. Hopefully this will become a useful bank of questions for you all. I know that one of the new 3rd year students is setting up a website dedicated to collating past paper questions, I’ll link to her site once she has it up and running.

Like those who sit outside Apple shops waiting for the latest flat shiny “Jabscreen”, respiratory physicians have long awaited the publication of the BTS Bronchiectasis Guideline. I would venture however that the online rumour mill was less frenetic, few will pose to be photographed unwrapping it from the cellophane, and as far as I am aware it will work if you hold it in your left hand. I’ll admit I haven’t read it yet, but I know from previous seminar sessions that it is likely to highlight the weight of evidence that is lacking as much as give sound guidelines. Now that is all a bit dry, and, you know – clinical. So here is an animation based on the medical illustrator Fritz Kahn which is much more entertaining….

No I’m not a militant vegetarian, I wouldn’t be able to cope with all the hemp and Tofu. I just love the eye-catching nature of this piece from a consumer health blog about choking hazards – “About 17 percent of food-related asphyxiations were caused by hot dogs.” Despite the original press release from the American Academy of Pediatrics mentioning nary a word about processed pig snouts being the biggest killer since smallpox, there has apparently been a move to redesign the hotdog. As one statement author Gary Smith put it, “If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” One could only assume they would be working for Dr. Evil in this task.

Perhaps we simply need to encourage increased use of condiment lubrication and practice  our skills at removing these pig fingers from the right main bronchus? If nothing else, I’m sure our great british press will be able to torture this information into assuring us that Cumberland rings are better for your health.

“If meat is murder, is Quorn just wasting police time?” Armando Iannucci