Wardround 4viii6

This week’s two minute tutorials were about electrolytes:
Sodium Dr Mohan (excellent handout)
Creatinine Dr Joshi
Glucose
Calcium Dr Sykes
Magnesium MJM
This week’s prize goes to Dr Sykes. Would each of you post a sentence in the comments section about your subject please.

Next week's assignments are:
Clinical features of diabetic retinopathy (Dr Mohan)
Management of retinopathy (Dr Joshi)
Non-retinopathic eye disease in diabetes (up for grabs)
Two minutes please, keep it concise and precise and quote your sources.

The reading for this week was: Reassurance and the Warning on the Label. Jerome Lowenstein, from The Midnight Meal and other essays about Doctors, Patients, and Medicine (1997). In the essay Dr Lowenstein highlights the difference between advice and reassurance. We often attach warnings to advice given to patients along the lines of ..."we cannot predict whether it will work" or "we do not know what the effects will be". But reassurance must be free of such caveats since it is undermined by such additions. Do you agree?

The reading for Friday 11th will be "Stepford doctors": an allegory. GM Sayers. Medical Humanities 2006;32:57-58. Read and think.

The reading for Friday 18th is a description of the plague of Athens, written in 431BC by Thucydides in The History of the Peloponnesian War. If you click on the link it will take you to a copy of the piece. The web page begins with chapter VI, but you can skip down to chapter VII (unless you would like to read about the war). If you cannot find the right section, press ctrl-F and type in plague. The challenge is to make a diagnosis. You will have two minutes to make your case for the diagnosis of your choice. This will be in place of the usual two minute tutorials that week.

Interesting topics this week:
Hyponatraemia

MJM