vitum medicinus ::: a life of medicine: A Pair of Warnings for Medical Students to Heed

Friday, October 06, 2006

A Pair of Warnings for Medical Students to Heed

You'll come across them. Old folks who, try as you might to explain there's nothing wrong with them, they'll continue to pop up in your clinic. We call them Gomers. It stands for, Get Out Of My Emergency Room.
- from House of God, I believe. The person I know reading this book told me, "I'm not sure if I can recommend it to you." Read the online reviews at the provided link and see what I mean...it's pretty intense.
There are two types of patients that you can tell right away are crazy:
First - the people who wear headphones. Old-school headphones. Usually crazy.
Second - the people with a tooth-to-tattoo ratio of less than 1. If they have 29 tattoos and 28 teeth...crazy. If they have 3 tattoos and 2 teeth...crazy.
- from the doc acting as a preceptor for my buddy's elective.

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Updated 7/07. If you have been my patient, identifying information about you will never be found on this blog. If you do think a story here is about you, I can assure you that is coincidental. After hearing about HIPAA and signing confidentiality forms of my own, and reinforced after I was quite stunned to read the news reports and medical blogging community response to a medical bloggers who have gotten in big doo-doo after accusations of breaching a patient's right to confidentiality in their blogs, I've decided to reaffirm that while my hospital and med-school experiences allow me to get an idea of what happens in medicine, those experiences do not end up here as they actually happened. In order to protect the identity of the patients I interact with, and to protect the opportunity for me to continue blogging, any patient and situational information published here (for example, complaints, diagnoses, age, occupation, definitely names, possibly outcome and heck, even gender) is fictional and has nothing to do with the patients I see. Most accounts written on this blog are inspired by real medical experiences but have been changed to the point that they are entirely fictional; if a post reminds you of an experience you had with a doctor, that is coincidental. I have programmed Blogger to give me a reminder to never compromise the identification of patients that I've seen whenever I am about to write a new post. You wouldn't want your personal info being posted on someone's blog in a way that a reader could figure out that it was you, and you wouldn't want to be entirely open with a physician if you knew s/he was just dying to run to his computer and tell the world about your secrets. You are welcome to read this blog as if the events depicted actually happened, since that's probably more exciting, but the patient encounters you read here never did happen.
This blog is not meant to be a substitute for consultation with a qualified medical professional. E-mail addresses I'm provided with through e-mails or comments are never distributed, sold, spammed, or abused by me. Contents are indeed copyright: this means they're the author's property, and you need prior express written consent from the author to do any of these: distributing, broadcasting, copying, copying and pasting, transmitting, altering, selling, presenting, and the like. Especially the like.

Friday, October 06, 2006

A Pair of Warnings for Medical Students to Heed

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