All Scrubbed Up

This All Scubbed Up series gets underneath the fake blood, fake smiles and excessive use of shock paddals… Who? Dr Gregory House MD His Playground? House MD An impersonal genius who harks back to the glory days of chauvinistic medicine. Hot or Not: [3 out of 10] – No better looking than Dr Cox. I might get hit with the cane if he doesn’t like this answer. Apparent Medical Skill: [8 out of 10] – A few good ideas, and a lot of luck. Excessive use of trial and error method. The bugger often treats up to 6 differentials - poor patients end up undergoing numerous cardiac arrests, seizures and anaphylactic reactions. Seizure hit-rate way too high for one doctor! Bedside Manner: [3 out of 10] – Issues with race. Obsessed with white boards and black markers. Patients would hate him. Students would be amused… and then terrified. No-one likes the guy who says what we’re all actually thinking. Horrible rash, Dr House. Well, that’s fine, at least he won’t have to live with it for more than a...

Spotted in The Saturday Star , a wonderfully non-investigative lambasting of Energy Drink Cocktails. Hold on tight - this one's gonna get tabloid. Firstly, let's state the obvious. People who drink a lot, don't remember what happens to them. Duh. Yes, by adding stimulants like caffeinated energy drinks, you're slightly masking how drunk you really are. But the cold hard truth remains, it's not the energy drinks causing young girls to wake up in a stranger's bed - it's the 7 vodkas that got mixed with it. Nothing has changed . You drink 7 vodkas. You get plonked. So, let's analyse. The article reads like a high-school scare poster. BIG warnings about drinking energy drinks, going to the bathroom in pairs an avoiding scary men... but coffee and espresso cause the same medical issues! If you suffer from high blood pressure or pre-existing heart disease, even a wild afternoon in the coffee shop can be as dangerous. What they say is vague and generic enough t...

This All Scubbed Up series gets underneath the fake blood, fake smiles and excessive use of shock paddals… Who? Dr Perry Cox. His Playground? Sacred Heart Hospital , Scrubs . With quotable quotes like: “ God? My brilliance is becoming quite a burden… ” Ol’ Perry is fighting for first tee-off in the I-Am-God-Fourball (with Gregory House MD… of course). Hot or Not: [4 out of 10] – He takes his shirt off all the time. Which is OK. But doesn’t lift him out of the realms of George Clooney’s ugly cousin. In fact, he’s not the eye candy I watch the show for ( Dr. John Dorian has those crazy eyes!) Apparent Medical Skill: [8 out of 10] – It’s a swoop in, swoop out, recite the diagnosis and the differentials type affair. He’s the typical Physician who knows his stuff. Has uncanny ability to impart wise teachings while belittling the life out of you. Make him your doctor. Don’t beat him at basketball. Bedside Manner: [3 out of 10] – Has strange ability to extend one word into unusual am...

So, Google Maps just opened its warm capitalist arms to South Africa. We took a quick trip to show the world of blogging... Baragwanath Hospital. Old Bara is apparently the biggest hospital in the world by bed count. It's also the most multi-cultural Doctor-fest around. SA Doc had a Russian, Yugoslavian, Pakistanian, Congonese, Indian and 4 South Africans... just in one unit! Feast your eyes ladies and gents. Note size of shacks bottom left and houses middle top. Just under 2km in diameter - no wonder the porters laze off.

This All Scubbed Up series gets underneath the fake blood, fake smiles and excessive use of shock paddals… Who? Meredith Grey. Her playground? Grey's Anatomy . Something about Meredith is just so flaky. I don’t know whether it’s the raspy possum-like voice used to narrate her way around the pitfalls of sleeping with her colleagues… Or, the mousy I- wish -I-was-the-girl-next-door looks. Let’s be fair. It’s just the first season. Hot or Not: [6 out of 10] – You kinda think she would look hot. And then she kinda does, but kinda doesn’t. I just don’t know with this one. It’s hot, but condescending I-went-to-a-better-private-school-than you hot. Apparent Medical Skill: [5 out of 10] - Maybe as a psychiatrist she’d get a higher score. Although definite minus points for having a cry while shagging the shy doctor (George). Was expecting a better performance out of dear Meredith. With that name, and those “mature” looks – she must have bummed around as a Chicken Licken sales lady befor...

A DSTV StreetPole ad recently caught my attention. In true DSTV style, it offered out some big words, some sexy pictures and a great special on decoders. It was the words that got me thinking. Score Big. Go Wild. Be Unfaithful. DSTV R599. The Be Unfaithful portion of that ad came complete with smacker lips Rihanna looking seductive (pretty sure it was her). You can't really fault the ad (can you?) - because then you'd have to fault every magazine cover and E! Entertainment programme this side of 1989. But it does get you thinking though. In public media, where do you draw the line between sexy, suggestive tease and promoting unsafe behaviour? We live in a country that is more uneducated regarding sexual issues than we care to admit. Just where and when, I wonder, should the public start asking questions? Or am I just turning into an HIV zealot?

It’s nearing that time of year again. Med Students getting sweaty, trying to cram 6 years of lungs, guns and antibiotics into a mind already warped by the smell of formaldehyde. They’re dosing up on whatever they can get there hands on (with the imminent promise of Schedule 5+ if they can just… get… through… this). That’s because, after November at the University of Cape Town – 6th year medical students become DOCTORS. The class of 2003 used to mark these momentous yearly occasions with their own brand of cleansing ritual. The whole class, dressed to theme (Doctors by Day, Victoria Secret by Night was my personal favourite), would flock to an arbitrary building on the side M3. They would quickly and clinically get themselves boozed… and flash the traffic. This wasn’t any ordinary flashing of the traffic. With stethoscopes flying, lab coats swirling and SA’s finest wiggling their jiggly bit – the event made KFM news 3 years in a row, and was responsible for more than a few dented bump...

Recently spotted on BodyHack , a Wired Magazine blog about medical stuff. Raised the heckles a tad, no? "In some cases the best way to fight a fire is to light a fire of your own. But could the best way to fight AIDS possibly be with AIDS? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are testing the idea that a modified strain of the HIV virus, called a lentivirus, could be turned into a sort of anti-AIDS guided missile that could directly target the HIV virus already in patients. Naturally safety was the primary concern. The Scientist reports: One safety concern with using lentiviruses as gene delivery vectors is that they might form replication-competent lentiviruses, but Levine and his colleagues found no evidence of this in any of the patients. Another concern is vector mobilization, which the researchers saw in the first 60 days after injection, but not after that. This mobilization probably doesn't mean the vector isn't safe, said Richard Sutton of Baylor College o...

And to end of this Tuesday with a bang (and because no-one died today, or ran around parading a venereal disease) - here's some rather chuckly medical "notes" blunders... Pilfered from Medical Jokes . I guess this is what happens when the bad handwriting thing gets out of control. Note to self: Idea for further blog posts... Scan copies of scripts / notes and have a handwriting competition. Stereotypes, my ass. 1. The skin was moist and dry. 2. Rectal exam revealed a normal size thyroid. 3. The patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch. 4. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life until 1989 when she got a divorce. 5. Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant. 6. The patient was in his usual state of good health until his airplane ran out of gas and crashed. 7. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function. 8. The baby was delivered, the cord clamped and cut, and handed to the pediatrician, who breathed and cried...

Nope. Not part of the Anarchy Cookbook on interesting ways to heat up an anti-inflammatory - but rather some pharmaceutical DRM (that's Doctor Relationship Management for those in the know). The Wicked Food Cooking School played host to the latest round of Novartis talks on Prixige's Lumiracoxib - the Cox2 inhibitor (not as rude as it sounds) to end all Cox2 inhibitors - or so they tell me. The introductory speech washed over me like morphine - very few intelligent questions from the nonDoc. Except one interesting case scenario: 56 year old banker. Presenting with Osteo-Arthritis in the knee. Panado just wasn't cutting it because the poor bugger was walking 5km, 4 times a week. Stop me when it's starting to sound like crazy talk... but what 56 year old South African banker has the time to walk 20km a week!? God is in the details after all. Turns out the answer was easy. Prescribe Lumiracoxib . (PS. That's why doctors are so smart... you can only prescribe Lumirac...

Ran across this video on YouTube... And instead of making up a thousand reasons why I should link to it, it kind of brought up the whole issue of medical ethics. Our friend, Ali, goes on about cloning, euthanasia and plastic surgery - with his own unique brand of "bedside manner". He leaves out one of the most important issues though, one that people don't really think about. Do doctors strike? Can they? A couple of months ago, a whole bunch of Zim doctors went on strike - evidently $57 million a month was just not enough. It seems they had to bring their own scalpals to work, which cost $58 million. Ah, what can you do? Seriously though. Good on them. And better on them for sitting in the hospital pub for all but the most critical of patients! Do our hospitals even have pubs? A quick search revealed basically nothing. The closest we get is a pub 226m underground in a mine shaft in Gold Reef City. That shaft, used to have a hospital. I digress. Medical ethics is such a...

Right. As promised... the second post - bringing this whole sticky argument to a head. Cough. If you weren't convinced last time - three more points to try and sway it. 1. You will have a proven, lower risk of contracting STD's - not harbouring crawlies under there will help. 2. You therefore have a lower risk of contracting HIV. Less microtears. And, you did know that STD's and HIV like to hold hands? 3. And finally, come on guys, it just looks better! The "extra inch" it adds is more than compensated by the apparent increase in girth. Not much more we can say, aside from thanks for the comments that are still coming in about the first post. It's obviously a touchy issue. Cough. Some interesting foreskin envy links: - Artificial Foreskin - The Fate of the Foreskin: A Study of Circumcision? - Would you rather be circumcised or uncircumcised? - Speaking of Uncut - The Unkindest Cut of All: Circumcision no longer a popular choice?

Wah! Is this a joke? Is this a viral campaign? Is she a virus? No-one knows, but recently spotted on CherryFlava was a Manto video for the Pronto Condoms brand. She dicey, she's quick and she's more slippery than Zuma in the shower. Pranto Manto. Get the video here !