Doc in Training Learn Medicine with a Medical Student

A Nifty Email Sender

While managing college groups in college, one of my most cumbersome tasks was sending all our new recruits personalized emails. I found that instead of a blanket mass-mail, personalizing the email to each user led to higher retention rates. This was also useful in publicizing events.

The program that saved me was Atomic Mail Sender, an easy-to-use program coupled with a lot of power. They have a free demo with most of the functions.

If you're in a situation where you need to send lots of customized emails but want more than Microsoft Office's built-in mail merge, then I encourage you to try it out.

TV and Medicine

This evening Neal Baer, producer of and writer for ER and Law and Order: SVU, lectured on the doctor's role in exposing medicine to the public. He envisioned his role as an agent for social change by dramatizing medical issues. He gave an example of a young female patient (in ER) who contracted Human PapillomaVirus (HPV) through unprotected sex. As you may know, this virus significantly increases the risk of developing cervical cancer.

By surveying viewers a while after the program, the show found that 60% recalled something about HPV and its risk for cancer, and 12% sought medical expertise directly as a result of the show. With a viewership of 50 million and syndication, Baer reasoned that an episode of ER could effect a tangible change in social behavior, this time regarding a virus and sex.

This is a great example of how the oft-secluded field of medicine can reach broadly to the public through popular media. This also means that there can be devastating effects from misrepresentations of medicine and science. The forensics drama CSI dazzles viewers with promises of DNA evidence pulled from every crime scene, magical clarifications of fuzzy video image. Here are two humorous parodies of the show's out-of-this-world technology.

While captivating, these misleading investigations have had a detrimental effect on evidence consideration in court. Jury members under the eponymous "CSI effect" are harder to please with forensic evidence gathered with realistic limitations.

Medical and scientific advisers to these shows therefore have a great responsibility to report accurately while employing dramatic license to gather an audience. Make the show too saucy and it can have a detrimental effect; make the show too dull and there will be no one to educate.

Medical Fact of the Day – How Can Smoking and Coffee Be Good for You?

Smoking is probably the single largest preventable cause of deaths worldwide, increasing the chance of lung cancer, emphysema, atherosclerosis, and hypertension. But how can it be good for you?

In several studies, patients who smoked or consumed caffeine daily were significantly less likely to have Parkinson's Disease. Furthermore, increasing the smoking or caffeine dose further decreased the risk.

Of course, this is not to say that one should smoke purely to avoid Parkinson's. But it does raise the question of the mechanism of this effect. Parkinson's is a deficiency in dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is essential in maintaining reward (which is mainly why smokers become addicted) and muscle movements. Take away dopamine, and you no longer have smooth muscle movements, showing Parkinson's symptoms.

So might it be that overusing the reward circuit has a protective effect on dopamine-producing cells? Or are there other chemicals in smoking that prevent dopamine-producing cells from dying? To find this out, a scientist might investigate whether any other addiction showed decreased risk of Parkinson's. Clarifying interesting mechanisms like this one can lead to new treatments.

This man might not get Parkinson's.

Bonus: I came across this site claiming many more benefits of smoking, some with more dubious data. The organization behind that site wishes to rid government intervention in "personal lifestyle choices" of diet and habits. In the case of smoking, intervention was clearly needed to dampen the effects of secondhand smoke. But it's often  useful to try to understand opposite viewpoints and critically evaluate evidence.