Information Service

As well as making you all laugh, every now and then we like to believe we're assisting in your education. Of course, there's the stuff you learn in school (Ox-bow lakes in Geography, fractions in Maths, how to play with ball-bearings in Physics, dates in History, and so forth), and the stuff you learn at University (in medicine, as discussed below, mostly TLAs which you will half-remember about a week after your exam and then mix up, because basically everything does everything), but there are also the valuable life lessons you pick up along the way (like it's not a Caius bop unless someone goes to A&E, don't pick a fight with a moving vehicle [it will always win]). In order to prevent you from having to learn one of these the hard way, and in order to ensure you've all seen this gem of knowledge, I refer you to the fourth page of "Things I Learn From My Patients" in Geraldine's last post.

Namely, to this entry:
"the painless chancre of primary syphilis, the cauliflower-like growths of HPV, the blisters of herpes, and the urethral discharge of gonorrhea/chlamydia can, indeed, all exist on a single penis."

This falls under the general category of: for the love of all that is holy, use a condom.

Thank you. STDs 101 is now at an end.

Love,
Felicity xx

Things We Learn From Our Patients

Just wanted to share this with you:
Things we learn from our patients
It'll reduce the chances of you waking up in A&E with one of us stood over you.

Laughing.

Confusion

We are, by now, quite used to learning vast amounts of what can be best described as scientific trivia about subjects we don't really fully understand. We have absolutely no problem when this means learning the names of things that follow a nice, simple, logical system, like if something is superioris then it's on top of something or higher up than something. We can also stretch to learning vast numbers of almost indentical TLAs (which, admittedly, were usually named relatively sensibly, but when the same molecule does about 20 different things, it gets a little more complicated). We are even capable of taken as read the weirder naming systems, such as the fact that the parts of the penis are named as if it is constantly erect. (We find this more disturbing than anything else, to be honest...)

We do however, hate things that are named as if completely by random selection, or at worst, entirely wrongly. Take this wonderful example from wikipedia and our homeostasis course:

'The structures that are usually called "apocrine sweat glands" actually secrete in a merocrine fashion.'

Right.

What actually happened was that some scientist genuinely thought they secreted as apocrine glands, and named them as such. Fair enough. However, people later found that they don't, and yet kept the name. I have absolutely no idea why- perhaps they thought it had a nice ring to it? Maybe they thought it would screw with our heads? Personally, I'm going with both, plus the fact that the original scientist would have been heartbroken had he been told he was wrong, so no one wanted to tell him.

Geraldine xxx

P.S. On a similar note, Douglas bags are really different from pouches of Douglas, but it's a bad thing to get fluid in either of them.