Medical Student Blog

A few years ago I found myself speaking to many Ph.D scientists who want to leave science research.  Since my entire career path may be best labeled “alternative healthcare… plus!”, I am often contacted by life science professionals who are at the cross-roads of their lives and their careers, and wondering how to reconcile a career path for which they had invested decades of their lives with an increasing feeling of personal dissatisfaction.

Now, I find myself speaking to physicians who are stressed out both from their careers and from their imploding personal lives.  While I won’t stop hearing from my scientist colleagues anytime soon from exploring alternative career transitions, I anticipate connecting with more medical doctors in the next few years. Many of these doctors no longer recognize the profession they used to love amid the increasingly hostile healthcare environment.

What worries me more is that many of these doctors no longer know who they are.

When you have invested years of your life: about two decades worth of yourself and your life to schooling to become a physician, your career decision has been deeply ingrained (i.e. family heritage) or deeply personal (i.e. personal value around making a difference as a healer). After all, it takes courage and commitment to choose a career where, when you’re finally ready to “start”, most of your peers in other professions are in their mid-career journey.

No wonder, for doctors, it can be harsh and hard to walk away from an identity that has been decades in the making.

If you are a physician, try this: describe yourself without making reference to your profession; without saying “I’m a doctor” or what clinical tasks you perform on a daily basis.

What are you left with?

If you don’t like the answer, make a plan to create one that you can live with and be fulfilled by for the rest of your life. Too often physicians settle for a role (“doctor”) as their identity, and when that role becomes threatened, they find that their identity becomes threatened. They feel out of control with who they are, what they stand for, and how they live their lives.

Now is the time for physicians to start facing this consuming identity crisis before they no longer recognize their lives or worse – themselves.

Electronic Patient Health Records

Having just got back from a series of meetings in Cambridge this week at the “Healthcare Special Interest Group – ‘Meet the Clinic: Personal Health Records‘” seminar, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on electronic patient health records and the technology that is currently available and being developed. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive introduction, but just a summary of my understanding and opinion.

You may or may not have heard of Electronic Patient Health Records, or you may have heard of Electronic Health Records, or Health 2.0, or Health 3.0, or Patient Empowerment or even “the ability to securely and confidentially access your GP-held health” and you weren’t quite sure what that meant! It’s understandable, to be honest.

It’s a bit like Web 2.0, the term was used by every digital company going, every piece of marketing, every sales pitch; yet, when you asked someone to define web 2.0, it would usually follow with a long awful silence and some mumbling about big shiny font. Of course, now it’s ‘social media’, but anyway… that’s another story.

Some of you will probably be frustrated, shouting at the screen “Of course I know what electronic patient health records are! It’s my health record, in an electronic format”. You’re not wrong, but you’re not right either. It is your health record, the one your GP stares at on his/her computer screen–that computer screen that you always wondered what was on it, but the angle just wasn’t quite right for you to be able to see what was written about you; well, electronic patient health records now enable both you, and your doctor to stare into the computer screen and view your health notes, and more…

I’m making this sound really great aren’t I? and you want to know where you sign-up and login, don’t you?

Everything is a bit up in the air at the moment, certain groups are playing the thin line of bureaucracy whilst other are fighting to establish their dominance; and this is just within the NHS! Then we actually come to the digitalising of patient health records, which too is still being established and roles defined. So, for the moment I’m going to talk about where we are right now, today.

The BBC is reporting that repeated warnings regarding Melanotan I and II tan jabs, appear to be going unheeded in the UK. Evidentally Health experts have warned that using melanotan I and II could damage the immune and cardiovascular systems, whislt in some cases triggering other problems.
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To me online learning of clinical skills almost sounds like an abomination or contradiction in terms. You learn them knee deep in blood, saliva, urine you name it but not behind a computer screen.

Recently an article was published about the experience of developing an online learning resource that supplements the learning of basic clinical skills for undergraduate medical students. Supplements, so it doesn’t replace the learning of clinical skills completely. This got me interested about their experience with this kind of online learning resource. Mind you, this is not a randomized controlled trial but just some wise advice and clear instructions on how to make a video to be put online for e-learning.

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If you’re not familiar with PubMed, I recommend reading PubMed for beginners over at Student BMJ, authored by Mohammad Al-Ubaydli.

For those of you who are familiar with PubMed, I have written a Twitter Application that acts as a communication layer using NCBI’s Entrez Utilities and the Twitter API along with some other custom stuff too.

The application is still in Beta and not supported, approved, affiliated or anything else to do with NCBI — It was Sunday, the sun is shining and I figured the best way to spend my day was to write this tool.

To test the application, all you need to do is send me a message in the following format:

@pubmed your search term(s)

You will then get a reply with the first, most relevant result and a link to the article at PubMed.

If you’re getting unexpected or non-relevant results, this is not a fault of the application, please read PubMed for improvers, authored by Kirsteen Burton and Lorraine Toews.

PubMed is forgiving: it searches for whatever you ask it to. The answer you are looking for will probably be somewhere in those 645 papers. But being specific gets you the right answer quickly.

The application scans for new queries every two minutes so it should respond pretty quickly, however, I have implemented some restraints and there is a three second delay between each query to NCBI, as to be kind to their servers.

It’s also worth mentioning that I have integrated the Medical Abbreviations for Twitter from the wiki, which some healthcare tweeple have been working on. This allows the application in many circumstance to reduce the characters in the returned result and display more information.

As it stands the application currently only searches the pubmed database, however, in the next version I’m working on there will be an introduction of a new hashtag #db — which will allow you to utilise the entire NCBI including journals, structure, protein, taxonomy and all the many other databases available to you.