Brad the Memorious
Borges thought it a fantastic nightmare, but it turns out that a perfect autobiographical memory just nets you second place on Jeopardy and an inability to forget family vacations.
May 17, 2008
February 10, 2008
January 20, 2008
Random bits:
1. I don’t have much to say on it, but a nice paper in the NEJM looks at publication bias in antidepressant trials — most negative trials get squashed or spun into positive results, positive trials almost all get published. Robin Hanson is unsurprised, and Scott Aberegg gives helpful hints for the skeptical clinician.
2. Elsewhere in the Journal, a nice piece on foreign medical graduates, who face tremendous discrimination without much evidence supporting the usual attitude that they’re worse doctors than the rest of us.
3. I missed that Slate had taken on the forced rectal exam lawsuit last week. Here’s GruntDoc on the same, plus real world experience (HT: KevinMD).
4. One thing I don’t understand is the so-called primary care crisis. If people want it, they’ll pay for it. If they don’t they won’t. It’s only a crisis if you think you should be payed to do something nobody wants to pay you to do.
5. Now reading The Logic of Life. Interesting bit from ch. 1 — men who have a family member with HIV/AIDS are less likely to report attraction to or sex with other men. Why wasn’t this bigger news?
January 16, 2008
Theodicial offertory
A recent piece in Pharyngula mocks gullible Michigan students falling for the positive power of prayer. Loads of people have jumped on this, pointing out that if prayer worked, surely Michigan’s football season wouldn’t have been so disastrous (it’s a triteness to point out that by battling great melancholy and social ill, we’ll not lessen the quantity of suffering, but merely increase the triviality of it).
Anyways I give you Genesis 50:20: “As for you, ye devised against me evil — God devised it for good, in order to do as [at] this day, to keep alive a numerous people.”
Useful Misery
When he was only nine years old, his father fell from his horse and died the next day. A few years later, his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Though Keats nursed her assiduously, sitting up with her all hours of the night, cooking for her, reading to her, she died in 1810, during Keats’s 15th year. Keats was assigned to a guardian and soon after taken from a beloved boarding school and required to apprentice as an apothecary. He found the work tedious, for during these years, his late teens, he was awakening to the grandeurs of poetry, especially the verse of Spenser and Shakespeare. To complete his training, Keats had to learn surgery. Day after day, he toiled in a hospital, malodorous and bloody, where he witnessed nothing but suffering. As he was turning from surgery to poetry, his first substantial poem, “Endymion,” was published in 1818. Two of the leading literary magazines of the time attacked the poem for not making sense.
Around this time, Keats’s brother Tom died after a long and painful illness. While attending Tom, Keats met the love of his life, Fanny Brawne, and became engaged to her. However, he soon realized that he would never be able to marry her because he himself was doomed to fall prey to the same disease that killed his family members. He knew he would die without ever consummating his ardent love.
One would think that Keats’s life would have fostered bitterness in him, but he remained generous in the face of his difficulties. He didn’t flee to the usual 19th-century escapes: Christianity or opium, drink or dreaming. Though he unsurprisingly underwent pangs of serious melancholia (who wouldn’t, faced with his disasters?), he nonetheless never fell into self-pity or self-indulgent sorrow. In fact, he consistently transformed his gloom, grown primarily from his experiences with death, into a vital source of beauty. Things are gorgeous, he often claimed, because they die. The porcelain rose is not as pretty as the one that decays. Melancholia over time’s passing is the proper stance for beholding beauty.
So writes Eric Wilson in the Chronicle, part of a longer article questioning whether we are medicating away “good” melancholy along with “bad” depression. I don’t particularly want to address that question, but rather to focus on a specific tradeoff implied above. I suspect that the return on scenarios where a child must lose his father to accident, and then mother and sibling to the same illness that will sap his strength and claim his life before he is able to consummate his love is relatively low in terms of producing great poets, therefore I’d be willing to trade Keats — of whom I am fond — for an assurance that children don’t have to go through that ever again. But I think many people would disagree.
Nobody likes mistakes
From the Archives of Internal Medicine
Most respondents agreed that reporting errors improves the quality of care for future patients (84.3%) and would likely report a hypothetical error resulting in minor (73%) or major (92%) harm to a patient. However, only 17.8% of respondents had reported an actual minor error (resulting in prolonged treatment or discomfort), and only 3.8% had reported an actual major error (resulting in disability or death). Moreover, 16.9% acknowledged not reporting an actual minor error, and 3.8% acknowledged not reporting an actual major error. Only 54.8% of respondents knew how to report errors, and only 39.5% knew what kind of errors to report. Multivariate analyses of answers to hypothetical vignettes showed that willingness to report was positively associated with believing that reporting improves the quality of care, knowing how to report errors, believing in forgiveness, and being a faculty physician (vs a resident).
December 29, 2007
In which my past is marginalized.
The inexplicable behavior and poor judgments teens are known for almost always happen when teens are feeling high emotion or intense peer pressure, conditions that overwhelm the still-maturing circuitry in the front part of brain, Giedd said.
Curious, how a field full of nerds seems to forget that some cliques managed to survive high school with a much lower temporal discount rate.