Torture still doesn't work

I expected the right to give all the credit of Bin Laden's death to Bush (even though he said he doesn't care about finding Bin Laden), but I'm pretty upset that they would try to rewrite history by saying the information leading to it was because of "enhanced" interrogation techniques. Torture is inhuman and the fact that half the country supports it is the most worrying sign about our future. This analysis shows how Cheney and the rest of the criminals in the Bush administration are completely wrong about torture helping the US get Bin Laden.

If your doctor is praying to heal you...

... you haven't got long to live (or you should find another doctor). Time to add to the list of science journals that have little regard for science. Here's a presidential address published in the American Journal of Surgery entitled "Can prayer help surgery." Unfortunately, the answer is "yes" (or more like, "No, but I'll say yes anyway"). Despite the fact that the author acknowledges that there is no scientific evidence that prayer works, he decides to add the old religious line of "What if those results are the will of God?" Really? Hell, I should have just responded to all the tough questions I got from reviewers by saying "It's the will of God. Who are you to question it?" This presidential address makes a mockery of science. The field of surgery is already decades behind the rest of medicine and Dr. Schroeder of St. John Hospital in Detroit (along with the American Journal of Surgery) just sent it back a couple of centuries. (uggh, I'll be working in a Catholic hospital next year, hopefully I don't run into these types)

Once again, I have to say that if any physician claims that their successfully treating a patient was God's doing, they should give up their salary.

Gotta bring back the Jesus surgeon picture. It makes me wonder why a surgery residency is 5 years. It must take that long to not get creeped out by Jesus giving you a shoulder message while helping you with surgery.

(PZ Myers has a better evisceration of the address and Orac discusses how ethically and scientifically inappropriate it is).

Stupider than I thought

I already mentioned how Arizona sucks... but this new bill (that was just passed) that requires presidential hopefuls to "prove" their US Citizenship to get on the state ballot is incredibly stupid. Accepted forms of proof includes a "long-form" birth certificate (because Hawaii only releases the short-form to the millions of nuts that have been asking for it) or, get this, at least two other forms of accepted proof such as early baptismal certificate or circumcision certificate. Are you serious? Some shady religious nut can forge those in a second. I keep on thinking this country can't sink any lower, but I get proven wrong over and over again. Let's hope that the next piece of legislation doesn't do away with the whole birth certificate thing and instead require a baptismal certificate.

Translation: A black man with a funny-sounding name couldn't possibly be an American.

House of God

With my time off, I recently started rereading Samuel Shem's House of God (must read for any medical type that hasn't read it yet). A novel about an intern learning the truth about how things work in the hospital. It has a lot of dark humor in it, but there's a lot that (even as a med student), I could tell is based on a grain of truth. For example, the type of patients you see at the hospital. You'd think that they'd be a cross-section of the population, but they aren't. I assume it's because those with repeat hospitalizations aren't exactly your average Joes. Upon meeting the patient who hides under the covers whenever his discharge is discussed or the patient that wants to keep his rectal tube in because he's too lazy to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, I was immediately reminded of the characters in the book. I wouldn't like to get to the point where I think about my patients as GOMERS or follow the Fat Man's Laws, but at least some of my experiences with medicine so far say that I may have to face days where it'll get close.

Here are the Fat Man's Laws (courtesy of Wikipedia):

1. GOMERS DON’T DIE.
2. GOMERS GO TO GROUND.
3. AT A CARDIAC ARREST, THE FIRST PROCEDURE IS TO TAKE YOUR OWN PULSE.
4. THE PATIENT IS THE ONE WITH THE DISEASE.
5. PLACEMENT COMES FIRST.
6. THERE IS NO BODY CAVITY THAT CANNOT BE REACHED WITH A #14G NEEDLE AND A GOOD STRONG ARM.
7. AGE + BUN = LASIX DOSE.
8. THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE.
9. THE ONLY GOOD ADMISSION IS A DEAD ADMISSION.
10. IF YOU DON’T TAKE A TEMPERATURE, YOU CAN’T FIND A FEVER.
11. SHOW ME A BMS (Best Medical Student, a student at the Best Medical School) WHO ONLY TRIPLES MY WORK AND I WILL KISS HIS FEET.
12. IF THE RADIOLOGY RESIDENT AND THE MEDICAL STUDENT BOTH SEE A LESION ON THE CHEST X-RAY, THERE CAN BE NO LESION THERE.
13. THE DELIVERY OF GOOD MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE.

I would really like to think that #12 isn't true.

The Scramble

So, luckily, on Monday, March 14th, I got a one-liner email (with the ridiculous subject of "Did I match?") that said "Congratulations! You have matched." But not everyone was as fortunate. The people who don't match, if they want to find a position for the next year, have to go through "the scramble", and it really is a scramble. I helped out someone with the scramble and thought I'd share (or more like remember it for myself by putting it here). Here's the timeline:

March 14th 6:30 PM - meeting with the dean of students. Very somber mood in the room. Some are near tears, others are angry, others are happy that they only have to worry about a prelim year and others (like me, who have matched and were there only to help) are trying not to look people in the eye. The dean goes through the process. Seems like a very involved procedure that depends on timing. Hard to know what'll happen at 10 AM the next day.

March 15th 9:30 AM - the dean hands out the list of residencies that had open spots after the match. The number of spots range from 1 in very competitive fields to hundreds for the preliminary surgery year. They're separated by specialty and by state. Everyone had 30 minutes to plan where they will call first. I helped my friend indicate which programs she is interested in on the centralized match website.

March 15th 10 AM - The scramble officially begins. We hit submit on the computer and simultaneously call places that aren't participating in the computer system. The computer system was very slow, so in about 5 minutes, gave up the computer and went to calling everyone. Calls went one of three ways: 1) Busy signal, 2) Answering machine or 3) actual person responds. If a person responds, we rattled off a prepared one-liner about who we are and what we want and asked what they need to consider us. The response was either to take our phone number and say they'll get back to us or (a few times) actually start a mini-interview.

March 15th 11:30ish AM - All the states my colleague wanted to match to were contacted, one promising phone interview was done, but no response yet. We started calling the less desirable locations (while redialing places that hadn't gotten back to us - and accidentally calling some places that already took our name down).

March 15th 12:00 PM - Got a phone interview (5 min) at a decent program in a not-so-great location. They want information faxed... quickly faxed over something like 15 pages.

March 15th 12:45 PM - Decent program gives my colleague an offer! Quickly look over the curriculum and location (seems like a decent part of the not-so-great city and the curriculum is actually pretty nice).

March 15th 12:50 PM - Accept the offer.

March 15th 1:00 PM - Still calling places while waiting for the contract to get faxed over.

March 15th 1:30 PM - Contract is in, it's signed and faxed back. It's official!

March 17th 11:00 AM - Go through the match and pretend to be surprised when you open the envelope.

Whew! It's a rush, but it's a mess. Students at our school was lucky because the dean had paper printouts of the open spots. Apparently, the centralized computer program was down, so many students across the country did not have access to the list until hours later. Some in this situation just cold called every program. Eventually, people were able to get a list emailed to them from the matching program. By then many of the more desirable open spots were taken.
It's a terrible system, but luckily, from what I've heard, it'll be more civilized next year. I believe they'll have mini-matches where, in a calm manner, students can research and take their time applying to programs and, just like the normal match, rank the programs they're interested in and the programs do the same. Later in the day another "match algorithm" is run and students get matched. Any that are left over go through a second round of it.

Matched

Match day came in went. Having it in the middle of the internal medicine sub-internship (where I get to pretend to be an intern) makes it hard to digest. I matched into a pretty decent prelim year. The only reason why it wasn't ranked first was because I didn't want to move twice. I matched into my first choice for radiology. Very excited to be stepping out into the real world.
On a side note, I got a chance to help out with "the scramble," where students who didn't match frantically call programs that didn't fill their spots in order to find a job. It's a bit chaotic and this year it was a disaster to many across the country. I'll go into it (and the sub-I) in future posts when I catch up on some sleep (5 hours in the last 65 is just not enough).

Another fake journal

Journal of Cosmology. Another fake science journal to make the list. As the title of the article reviewing it says "Aliens riding meteorites." Need I say more? OK, I will. Here's a description of the field of cosmology according to the journal's website:

Cosmology is the study and understanding of existence in its totality, encompassing the infinite and eternal, and the origins and evolution of the cosmos, galaxies, stars, planets, earth, life, woman and man.

Hey, I study something that fits in there, so I'm a cosmologist! Clearly everyone would be interested in this journal.

Not so:

The interdisciplinary Journal of Cosmology is devoted to the study of "cosmology" and is dedicated to those men and women of rare genius and curiosity who wish to understand more and more about more and more: The study of existence in its totality.

Man, now I kind of feel bad about putting PLoS One on my list.