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| Middle Age Medical School |
| This site decribes my adventure as a middle age person trying to navigate their way through the daunting, arduous and somewhat ridiculous path to medical school. This site will either inspire other people who are way too old to apply to medical school or it may just scare the hell out of them. Either way I hope this site will provide some solace and useful info along the way! |
| Language: English |
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Statistics |
| Unique Visitors: 41 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 537723 |
| Visitors Out: 2585 |
| Total Visitors Out: 9469 |
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| Image of the Week - Fluorescence Diagnosis of Subclinical Actinic Keratoses |
| 2008-05-08 23:04:00 |
Photodynamic therapy is a noninvasive therapy for nonhyperkeratotic actinic keratoses and basal-cell carcinoma. Photodynamic therapy involves the activation of a photosensitizing drug by visible light to produce activated oxygen species within target cells, resulting in their destruction. Commonly used topical photosensitizers are aminolevulinic acid (ALA) and the methyl ester of ALA (MAL), which act as precursors of the endogenous photosensitizer protoporphyrin IX (PpIX). In addition to its therapeutic uses, fluorescence emitted by MAL-induced PpIX may be useful in providing a fluorescence diagnosis of cutaneous lesions. This permits the detection of otherwise occult areas of abnormal skin (Panel A). Tumor margins can also be delineated with the use of a Woods ultraviolet lamp before surg...
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| Doctors Shouldn't Marry Other Doctors |
| 2008-05-05 10:51:00 |
I found an article here in CNNMoney about a husband and wife who are both residents and looking at a huge amount of debt. I know it's early but it is something to consider later on down the road. I think their case is extraordinary because they are both training to be physicians and are shouldering a huge amount of debt from medical school. I love how all these articles always paint doctors as these hard luck cases..."such are the lives of medical residents: med school graduates getting years of on-the-job training, putting in brutal hours for salaries that, on an hourly basis, work out to a little more than they could earn stocking the shelves at Costco." I actually read that the average resident makes 12/hr given the amount of hours they work relative to the pay. And no I am not making t...
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| What Does it Take to be Good a Doctor? |
| 2008-05-01 15:39:00 |
According to the Texas Medical Association there are three personality traits and disorders common to physicians: narcissitic, obsessive-compulsive and antisocial. I think the main question here is whether these traits are endemic amongst medical pratitioners (i.e. the trait makes the physician who he or she is), or does it manifest itself in the individual as they are preparing to enter the medical profession. I believe the later is true. As a disclaimer I am in no way saying that all physicians exhibit these personality traits. I actually googled "what personality traits make a good physician" and this site came up."Three personality traits and disorders will be discussed in this module: narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive,and antisocial. These three are the most commonly found among p...
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| Image of the Week - Nevus Sebaceus of Jadassohn |
| 2008-05-01 11:01:00 |
"A 14-year-old girl came to the hospital with her mother, stating that a small birthmark on the scalp had recently started growing rather rapidly. It was increasingly pruritic and caused the patient considerable emotional distress. She was otherwise healthy. On examination a large multilobulated, verrucous lesion was seen on the scalp. The findings were consistent with nevus sebaceus. These lesions have a predilection for the scalp and typically appear early in life as a solitary, hairless patch or small plaque. Often they do not cause problems until the patient reaches adolescence, as hormonal factors induce a verrucous or nodular change and the lesion grows in size, occasionally rather dramatically. Given the size and location of the lesion and the risk of malignant transformation, espec...
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| How Smart to You Have to be to Become a Doctor? |
| 2008-04-30 14:29:00 |
All of us wonder this one time or another...how smart to you have to be to be a doctor? I actually think about this every hour of every day, but I am a little obsessive compulsive. Well that question came up in YahooAnswers not too long ago and I thought I would share it with everyone. Apparently answerer 2 thinks that you have to be the Gary Kasparov of math to become a doctor. I especially like answerer 1's suggestion that you can't gag when you see blood. And then there is self deprecating answerer 6 who suggests to our young inquisitor that he pursue a Caribbean medical school and even provides a website address...I think he maybe working for them. One person states that their brother was pretty much a complete idiot in high school and now he is a dentist "making loads of cash." I didn...
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| Residency Salaries |
| 2008-04-28 18:23:00 |
I started obsessing about how many years it takes to become an MD, so I was comforted by the statistics I found for the mean salary of residencies nationwide. It's not as bad as I thought. Although residencies are the equivalent of hell-week spread out over 3 plus years, at least we are compensated for our work. I found out there are also many perks besides just the salary. I know this is premature, but it is something to look forward to following four or more years of school. The 2007 Mean stipends in United States for a MD Resident (also called house-staff) from any specialty were as follows: 1st Year (PGY1 / Intern ): $44,0002nd Year (PGY2): $46,0003rd Year (PGY3): $48,0004th Year (PGY4): $52,000/-5th Year (PGY5): $54,000/-6th Year (PGY6): $54,000/- Note: These are means based on a nat
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| The Day in the Life of a Physician |
| 2008-04-28 11:42:00 |
It's really hard to grasp what a doctors life is like day to day. There are people out there that make it sound like your personal life is over once you are a doctor. You will have no time for family, friends, hobbies...nothing. It sounds pretty bleak right? I know that shadowing a doctor is supposed to provide a premed with an honest view of what it is like to be an MD, however, I doubt that any shadowing program allows you to go whom with the doc and see what their life is like outside of the hospital. We are made to believe that their entire life is the hospital when in fact we all know that there are doctors who have happy functional fulfilling lives outside of medicine. I grew up not knowing any doctors. I didn't even have a regular pediatrician because we moved around so much, so my ...
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| Daily Dose |
| 2008-04-25 10:04:00 |
Jay Reding.com — Why Universal Health Care Keeps Failing (GruntDoc)Follow the Money (M.D.O.D.)NPfIT: an update (DR RANT)Obey Your Doctor (The Happy Hospitalist)some things... (Med School and Beyond)I've never been good at quitting (Backboards and Band-Aids)Regular Please (Ten out of Ten)Gratis (Urostream)Baby Steps (Fat Doctor)Dr. Rob Good Humor (Kevin, M.D.)Photo Credit: http://bp1.blogger.com/__C0zeuMrITI/SBHswL8CwiI/AAAAAAAAArU/Xn141UcAsTY/s1600-h/spanking.jpg
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| Image of the Week - Babesiosis |
| 2008-04-24 11:09:00 |
"A 34-year-old man came to the emergency room with a 3-day history of fevers (peak temperature, 40°C), accompanied by shaking chills. Laboratory tests revealed a hemolytic anemia, with a hemoglobin level of 8.6 g per deciliter. Nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage IIIB, had been diagnosed 12 years earlier, in 1994, and the patient underwent splenectomy at that time. He had traveled recently to Massachusetts, Oregon, Hawaii, Florida, and Illinois and to South Africa and Costa Rica. The peripheral-blood smear shows numerous intracellular organisms in red blood cells, with nearly 3% of erythrocytes harboring parasites. Multiple ring forms are seen, as well as rare tetrads (thin arrow). These so-called Maltese cross formations are essentially pathognomonic of babesiosis, since they ar...
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| Student Admitted to Medical School Without Ever Taking MCAT |
| 2008-04-23 10:04:00 |
An extreme case of nepotism or a gross oversight? A student was admitted to the University of Florida School of Medicine by its Dean, Dr. Bruce Kone, "over the objections of the college's selection committee." Apparently not only did he not take the MCAT, but he "did not apply through AMCAS by the usual deadline - instead, he applied by special permission, given by Dr. Kone, in February." It is not clear what prompted the dean to make this kind of concession for one student, but the article suggests that it may have been political influence by Governor Charlie Grist that expedited the students admission. Governor Grist, who is a friend of the students father, wrote a letter of recommendation for the student when he originally applied to the UF's accelerated program in 2007 in addition to a...
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