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Vitualis' Medical Rants: Volume 2 VITUALIS’ MEDICAL RANTS THE MUSINGS OF A JUNIOR DOCTOR… YES, A TORTURED SOUL AND QUITE POSSIBLY A DISTURBED MIND. Volume 2 Collection: July 2005 to December 2005 First Edition Dr. Michael Tam, B. Sc. (med), M.B., B.S. (University of NSW) vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 :: dedication :: To all my readers, many thanks for your support; and to my lovely wife, whose patience made this book possible. ii Published by Lulu.com 2005 © 2005 by vitualis Productions, Michael Tam. Some rights reserved. License Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work in the BY: manner specified by the author or licensor. Noncommercial. You may not use this work for $ commercial purposes. No Derivative Works. You may not alter, = transform, or build upon this work. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. iii vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 iv Preface n the second half of the year 2005, an evolution in the character of the “vitualis’ Medical Rants” blog took place. I Although initially reborn in October 2004 as a mostly biomedical news blog site, there were also articles on technological developments as well as some on ethical issues and current affairs. In this half year collection, “non- biomedical” issues are numerous and there have progressively been more frequent articles on international politics, US foreign policy as well as law and justice. During the period this book was created, there were no particularly outstanding biomedical discoveries or advances. Perhaps the most significant development during these 6 months was the explosion of public and media awareness of the H5N1 avian influenza (i.e., “bird flu”) and its trickle of human casualties across South-East Asia, and gradual spread in bird populations into Eastern Europe. The other rather exciting news was that the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was won by two Australians, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall for their work on Helicobacter pylori. The focus on political topics was somewhat reactionary to what I perceived to be ever more questionable practices and attitudes by the governments of the “coalition of the willing” of the Iraq war; specifically, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. As such, many articles were devoted to criticisms to v vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 such practices as “extraordinary rendition” as well as the detention without charge of the Guantanamo Bay “illegal combatants”. Similar to the previous releases and versions of “vitualis’ Medical Rants”, a digital version in Adobe PDF format is available on-line. Unlike the printed first edition of the Volume One, which was only available in soft cover, Volume Two has been released in both soft cover and hardcover formats. This second volume was particularly enjoyable to compile and write and I hope that you, dear reader, find my collection of articles interesting and hopefully, thought-provoking. Yours sincerely, & Dr Michael Tam B.Sc.(med), M.B., B.S. (UNSW) 24th December 2005 vi vii vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 viii Original preface to volume one A brief history of the universe? f “vitualis’ Medical Rants” were the universe, it would be a strange and twisted world that we live. But would it be I any more bizarre than it already is? “vitualis’ Medical Rants” is a “weblog” or, the more commonly used vernacular, “blog”. And what is a “blog”? Well, according to Wikipedia, ‘A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web- based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of web application software is now a typical aspect of “blogging.”’ My blog started out in April 2003 as a semi-regular journal with anecdotes of the weird and wonderful people and situations encountered by a junior doctor. It was as much an excuse to try out a new technology called “blogger” (http://www.blogger.com) which I had heard about (being a bit of a technophile) as to contribute to the ever growing literary junk that was filling cyberspace. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Unlike the exciting and dynamic life seen in television series such as “ER” or “Chicago Hope” or “Scrubs”, 95% of a junior doctor’s job is menial (and ix vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 possibly demeaning!), routine and frankly boring. I quickly realised that vitualis’ Medical Rants is there was not much hope for a blog created with blogger.com that states, “Not much happened today… another 2 patients admitted with pneumonia” or something to that effect for the vast majority of the time. On the few occasions when something cool did happen in hospital, I was inevitably too tired to type it out. And so, “vitualis’ Medical Rants” was abandoned to cyberspace for approximately six months. In October 2004, reinvigorated with a new sense of purpose (which may had been an undiagnosed episode of mania), I decided to lift my site out of the obscurity of the cyber-gutter and transformed “vitualis’ Medical Rants” into a biomedical / sometimes technological / at times ethical / on occasion “rage against the system” news site. At around this time, Pyra Labs (which owned and created blogger.com) was bought by Google and a new beta version was out. I’m not entirely sure what changed, but a number of new site templates were released which gave “vitualis’ Medical Rants” a much need face lift. To celebrate this renaissance, this book compiling the news articles as well as copies of the original source articles was created. At the time of publication, an Adobe PDF (portable document format) e-book version was available for download. It is planned that biannual collections will be created in the future. x vitualis’ Medical Rants – December 2005 xi vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 xii Who is vitualis? uite possibly a disturbed Q individual. ;-) His not-so-secret alter-ego is Michael Tam, currently a “doctor-in-training” in the General Practice training program in NSW, Australia. Michael Tam studied vitualis' real face is too medicine at the University of New frightening to show the world. South Wales, Sydney Australia and graduated at the end of 2002. Internship and residency years were in the Illawarra Area Health Service – mainly based at The Wollongong Hospital and Shellharbour Public Hospital. Michael has worked in Emergency Medicine, General Medicine, Orthopaedic Surgery, Psychiatry, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, General Surgery, Neurology/Stroke Unit and Rehabilitation Medicine. At the first publication of this book, Michael was a senior resident/General Practice registrar in Paediatric Gastroenterology at The Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick. From 2006, Michael will be working in General Practice registrar in community General Practice. Michael’s professional interests include primary health care and public health, as well as aged care and rehabilitation medicine as well as chronic pain management. Recreational interests include digital imaging and video, technology and computer sciences. He is a moderator at the xiii vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 forums of Videohelp.com, the largest on-line discussion forum on general home video editing and authoring. Previous printed publications include “photographic profundus”, an album of natural photography and traditional Chinese proverbs, as well as the previous volumes of “vitualis’ Medical Rants”. xiv xv vitualis’ Medical Rants – Volume 2: July 2005 to December 2005 Table of Contents Preface........................................................................................................... v Original preface to volume one ................................................................... ix Who is vitualis?.......................................................................................... xiii July 2005 Mysteries of Saturn....................................................................................... 2 Palm ditches Cobalt ...................................................................................... 6 GDNF – uncertain future for Parkinson’s drug ........................................... 8 Effective Lassa fever vaccine developed!..................................................... 11 Vitamin C does not prevent colds................................................................14 Hubble spots Sauron in the sky...................................................................17 Are we headed towards a technological “dark age”?.................................. 20 Terrorist attack in London ......................................................................... 26 Rubbery photo longevity
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