Monday, February 28, 2011

Dermatology, or "The class to which I'm most likely to lose my lunch"

I haven't posted here in forever. Mainly because who wants to hear about how I sit on my couch 8 hours a day and look at pictures of colons and cancers (Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--Of cabbages--and kings).


But here are a couple random observations from my dermatology notes: 

1. A little political commentary with our fascinating discussion on Rosacea...


2. The first two years of medical school are all about staying as far away from patients as humanly possible. The point is to learn, in theory, everything there is to know about medicine in the classroom (or on my couch, since I no longer actually go to class). In an effort to keep all their students from dying of sheer boredom, professors like to put lots of pictures into the PowerPoint's. It's all well and good until you have 1500 slides to memorize for a final, at least 16 of which are pictures of freckles. Seriously? If I needed  that many pictorial reminders of what freckles looked like, should I still be in med school? 

Fun medical fact of the day: the medical term for freckles is ephelides. My new favorite medical term, along with dysdiadochokinesis.

There are bazillions of pictures on the Internet that doctors have taken of their patients' weird-ass disease manifestation. I'm not exactly clear on how it doesn't violate HIPAA to put these pictures on the Internet. Maybe that's why they do this...
Because obviously those creepy black ovals over the patient's eyes totally protect his right to privacy. Now he just looks like a demon with really bad acne. But at least his identity is safe.


Here's some free medical advise from me to you: when the doctor comes in waving around a camera, and an expression on his face akin to that of someone who's just won the lottery: Say no. Because as soon as you leave he's going to call all his other doctor friends over to brag about whatever rare medical phenomenon he just witnessed. And then he's going to upload it onto Google.

Also, I feel the burning need to share that I wasted way too much time today reading all the insane things that Charlie Sheen has been saying. The man is bat-shit crazy. His narcissistic personality defect is overshadowing the crisis in the Middle East, which is just pathetic. If he truly is only "high on Charlie Sheen" as he so eloquently put, then maybe he should take one for the good of humanity and call his dealer.