Surgery: Trauma Team, and Code White, Part 1
January 5, 1999 Wednesday Hello all and happy 1999! This is quite a belated greeting as I spent New Year’s Eve on duty and New Year’s Day trying to get enough ZZZZs to pay my sleep debt. But I’m getting ahead of my story. For the week of December 25 to 31, I was with […]
Finally Out of Surgery Wards
December 26, 1998 Saturday Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year! I had my last duty as a Surgery ward intern on Christmas Eve. No more PACU monitoring, at least for now! (PACU – post-anesthesia care unit; monitoring – checking vital signs). The best times of the past rotation at the surgery wards was when I got pulled out of duty to go Christmas caroling… wait a […]
Of Antacids and the Crazy Year of 2020
The article may be behind a paywall, but it offers commentary for the mental health issues as a secondary effect of the pandemic. TL, DR: There’s an increase in stomach acid when your body is stressed. The increase in stomach acid causes heartburn and reflux symptoms. A spike in heartburn and reflux cases at doctors’ […]
Surgery: Emergency Room and Outpatient Department
November 28, 1998 Saturday This is the journal for the first two weeks of Surgery. Surgery is gory and bloody and everything you’ve imagined – the most prevalent color here is blood-red. The Surgery-ER/OPD (Emergency Room/Outpatient Department) rotation consists of the first 2 weeks of Surgery (8 weeks). Interns are on duty at the ER […]
Pandemic Messaging: Words Matter
I read an article a few days ago about how using certain words can get messages about the pandemic more effectively than others. You can read the article from Axios here. It shows striking contrasts between “words used” and “words we should have used”. The “actors” in this study are the people giving the messages, […]
Training to be a Physiatrist (and Beyond)
I wrote some basic information about Rehabilitation Medicine in the first post for this category. You can read that here to refresh your memory. Specialty training in Rehabilitation Medicine occurs in residency (side note: it’s called “residency” because in the past, graduate medical education required the trainees to live in the hospital – thus they […]
How does a spinal cord injury affect your body? Part 1 of 4.
There really is no short answer to this question, but I’ll try my best to present this clearly, in bite-sized pieces and an organized manner. Mobility This is the most obvious clinical problem. Any part of the body above the spinal cord injury remains normal, while parts below the injury have no movement or altered […]
FAQ for SCI: Some Frequently Asked Questions about Spinal Cord Injury
BruceBlaus, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons We briefly tackled what an SCI is on the Resources for SCI page, but here’s a bit more in-depth information. To recap: the spinal cord can be thought of as an extension of your brain – it is made of nerve tissue that runs from the base of […]
Family Medicine (or: Waking Up from a Bad Dream)
November 14, 1998 Saturday Welcome to the Journal. Sorry about the lengthiness of last issue (4 parts). 10-weeks’ worth of experiences had to be written – catharsis? Anyway, I’ve just finished a 2-week rotation in Family Medicine. People say that the Family Medicine rotation is just like waking up from a bad dream (Internal Med […]
INTARMED Program (Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine)
I referred to the Integrated Liberal Arts-Medicine (INTARMED) program in a blog post about my burgeoning interest in the medical humanities, and I thought I’d write about it a bit more here. We’ll start with the basics first. Generally, Philippine medical schools require completion of a 4-year baccalaureate degree prior to entering medical school; the […]
