In the remote jungles of a distant planet, the companion and her mother run through the dense growth. As they glance fearfully behind them they can barely detect the shimmer of Daleks with camouflage metal skins -- upgrades skilled at seeking, locating, exterminating, and now...climbing stairs. In front of them a muscled man with a long scarf appears. In his hands is a small device. He waves them forward, anxiously, and says:
I'll second that -- been with them for twenty years or so. Banking is good - free checking, they cover ATM usage fees (up to $10 a month) and you can use your scanner at home to deposit checks, which saves loads of time. Bill pay is good too.
As an added bonus, my wife says that police seem nicer to her when she gets pulled over and shows her USAA proof of insurance:)
First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation"
This is not universally correct. For a run-of-the-mill prostatic adenocarcinoma (your garden variety prostate cancer) there is actually the concept of active surveillance, where the patient gets yearly biopsies to track any progression. If the biopsies show cancer involving more than it should (where should is defined by a variety of factors) then treatment becomes more aggressive (read: prostatectomy).
In your defense however, AFAIK this is one of the only types of cancers were this is true, as the lifetime chance of a male getting prostate cancer verges on 100% (if they live long enough). Certain brain tumors may take a watch-and-see approach as well since their progression is not as well understood and the morbidity associated with various brain surgeries can be pretty high.
Agreed though in that not all cancers are created equal. Knowing which is which though is, as they say, the rub
FYI - skin is an organ (as the liver, brain, etc... are organs) so you don't really say that cervix or urethra has skin. For these areas you would talk about their mucosa or alternatively epithelia. The cervix has (in part) non-keratinizing stratified squamous (skin has keratinizing stratified squamous epithelium). The urethra is lined by a different kind of epithelium -- namely urothelium (or transitional epithelium, both terms are used).
HPV infects keratinocytes -- the cells that make up the squamous epithelium. For the record, HPV likes keratinocytes everywhere on the body -- skin, throat, cervix, etc... and you get HPV infections in all these areas (on the hands, you would just call them warts or verruca vulgaris, if you want to sound fancy). Different strains of HPV are linked to cancer -- common warts (HPV types 4, 6, 8) are not known to cause cancer while other types (HPV 11, 16, 31, 33, etc...) are. The vaccine targets these high risk types.
The mechanism for oncogenesis is very interesting and has to do with the viral inclusion into the genome that interferes with tumor suppressor genes expression, ubiquitin mediated proteolysis, and disruption in cell cycle (the Nobel prize in chemistry a while back was given to research into ubuiqitin mediated proteolytic pathways and is quite a fascinating subject). These disruptions lead to squamous cell carcinomas.
As far as the difference between penile and cervical cancer, if they are both squamous cell carcinomas (which is what HPV causes -- but you can get different kinds of non-HPV cancer in both places) then it doesn't make much sense to talk about the differences between the two cancers, in and of themselves. Treatments, prognosis, morbidity, and mortality may of course vary due to the different sites of the tumor.
However, non-ionizing radiation could conceivably cause inflammation due to localized increase in heat.
Except that increased heat by itself does not cause inflammation. Rather - it is the reverse. Namely, inflammation causes increase in heat (through a variety of different mechanisms including cytokines, changes in vascular permeability, etc...). True, if you get heat high enough then you can destroy cells which in turn will induce an inflammatory response to clean things up. But those temperatures required would be ones that would be able to essentially burn cells to death, which is not a micro-increase in heat. In any event, your body does have heat shock proteins (HSP) which helps protect against thermal changes (and do a variety of other things as well, including some aspects of cell signalling (such as testosterone localization to the nucleus, IIRC)).
Now, if your hypothesis is that micro variations in heat can cause fluctuations in cellular signalling that could make oncogenic changes, well that is testable and may or may not be true. Apply for a grant for that and see where it goes.
I had a similar conversation with my undergraduate mentor. She essentially said that the value of the Phd was that it shows you can work through complicated problems. And also, that you should be the world's expert on whatever you do your Phd on (for a brief period of time, at least).
The book "The Windup Girl" takes this idea of GM foods and their impact in the future to an extreme end. Its a great read (Sci Fi -- it won the Hugo and Nebula award). Definitely worth the read if you enjoy post-apocalyptic stories based on crop gene manipulation....
This is pretty old news. There are papers from 1980 that talk about chloramphenicol resistant (a really strong antibiotic) bug transmission from dairy farm to human. (An epidemic of resistant Salmonella in a nursery. Animal-to-human spread. Lyons RW, Samples CL, DeSilva HN, Ross KA, Julian EM, Checko PJ.JAMA. 1980 Feb 8;243(6):546-7.)
A serious question for you: from what you have written it appears that you have set a threshold for chance of injury for your child to be 1:10,000. If this is the case, then do you allow your children to be in cars? What about other risky behavior where the chance of injury is high (contact sports for example)? With respect to Guillain-Barre, this can also be caused by food poisoning from campylobacter jejuni. C. jejuni poisoning most commonly occurs with chicken (which carry the bug). Do you forbid your children from eating chicken?
It would seem that to be logically consistent you would need to curtail these activities. However, in the talk about risk to children from vaccination, there are other much more prevalent (and immediately deadly) risks to which parents seem to have no problem exposing their children. As someone who apparently has made the choice about acceptable risk for your children, how do you logically reconcile foregoing one
(extremely debatable) "risk" versus allowing many other well documented and serious challenges to your children's life and limb?
Again, I am not attacking your beliefs (although I do not agree with them). I am wondering at the thought process behind your beliefs in the context of other risks that you willingly put your children through.
Besides, there are better ways of transmitting sensitive data than cell phones or encrypted radio traffic. Around here (small town in the midwest)
Hmmm...in the small town I am in, sensitive information is transmitted via a protocol known as the GrapeVine (no relation to the Banyan VINES). You think that binary exponential backoff is pretty cool? Check this out: GrapeVine appears to defy Einstein's theories as people are able to know if something happens BEFORE it occurs!
Another issue is that residency training (which is basically where doctors learn to take care of people) is funded for the most part via Medicaire. Without that money (which is substantial) hospitals cannot afford to train doctors. So even if there were sufficient medical students in the system, under current licensing laws (which require at least 1 year of post-graduate residency training) the bottleneck would be on residency positions and funding.
This is a common misconception but is not true. Which imaging modality to use depends on the clinical scenario. MRIs have the downside of taking a long time, requiring the patient to be relatively still during this time, and being in an enclosed space (which some patients refuse to go into - hence the development of "open" MRI patients). And yes, they are expensive. CTs in contrast (pardon the pun) are quick, much cheaper, and do an excellent job of visualizing things like blood which is important in stroke management, trauma, etc...In the acute setting, your patient might die in the MRI machine while a CT scan would give you all the information you need in a much timelier fashion.
I went back to school after a 10 year hiatus and the school (medical school) had a similar deal with free electronic versions of many textbooks. Unlike your experience though, mine was pretty positive. Yeah - the software could be slow sometimes, but it was quicker (and more thorough) than going to the bookshelf, looking up what I was interested in in the index, and then going through the references one by one. I could also copy and paste from the electronic book to my notes (although yes, it would add an attribution to the pasted material, which actually was helpful in many cases when I reviewed the material and wanted more context from the book).
At any rate, going from my pure dead-tree undergrad to my pretty much all-electronic med school -- there is no way I would go back to all physical books. The searching capability by itself is worth it. Additionally I had much more convenience with studying as carrying around 14 or so medical school textbooks is pretty much impossible if they are physical books. This meant I could actually leave the library/home and work with other students easier. And don't get me started on how awesome google desktop + openoffice is for note-taking. I doubt I could have managed the amount of information that I did without my electronic resources.
So true. I remember when I was younger wishing that I could remember everything and never forget anything. An older me is now very thankful for the capability to forget. In all seriousness, forgetting is not a bug, it's a feature.
As your post contained that same data, you my find your was to the same database. Just to ensure national security I'm sure someone at DHS is recording every IP that viewed the dangerous information and is preparing a round of illegal wiretaps. Hey look a black helicopter, what's with this strange red dot?
You had the whole set up but missed the punchline:
...Hey look a black helicopter, what's with this strange red dot? At any rate, I highly douQ!##0!XQ. ATZ+++ NO CARRIER
TRWTF is the name of the company...Somethin' Else. Someone should get sacked for that name. And then the person who sacked them should in turn get sacked (and so forth).
Slashdot Mirror
LEAKED SCENE
In the remote jungles of a distant planet, the companion and her mother run through the dense growth. As they glance fearfully behind them they can barely detect the shimmer of Daleks with camouflage metal skins -- upgrades skilled at seeking, locating, exterminating, and now...climbing stairs. In front of them a muscled man with a long scarf appears. In his hands is a small device. He waves them forward, anxiously, and says:
"Run! Go! Get to the chopper!"
I'll second that -- been with them for twenty years or so. Banking is good - free checking, they cover ATM usage fees (up to $10 a month) and you can use your scanner at home to deposit checks, which saves loads of time. Bill pay is good too.
As an added bonus, my wife says that police seem nicer to her when she gets pulled over and shows her USAA proof of insurance :)
Agreed. This is slashdot. It should have been a car analogy. Acceptable alternatives would involve Natalie Portman, statuary, and/or hot grits.
First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation"
This is not universally correct. For a run-of-the-mill prostatic adenocarcinoma (your garden variety prostate cancer) there is actually the concept of active surveillance, where the patient gets yearly biopsies to track any progression. If the biopsies show cancer involving more than it should (where should is defined by a variety of factors) then treatment becomes more aggressive (read: prostatectomy).
In your defense however, AFAIK this is one of the only types of cancers were this is true, as the lifetime chance of a male getting prostate cancer verges on 100% (if they live long enough). Certain brain tumors may take a watch-and-see approach as well since their progression is not as well understood and the morbidity associated with various brain surgeries can be pretty high.
Agreed though in that not all cancers are created equal. Knowing which is which though is, as they say, the rub
FYI - skin is an organ (as the liver, brain, etc... are organs) so you don't really say that cervix or urethra has skin. For these areas you would talk about their mucosa or alternatively epithelia. The cervix has (in part) non-keratinizing stratified squamous (skin has keratinizing stratified squamous epithelium). The urethra is lined by a different kind of epithelium -- namely urothelium (or transitional epithelium, both terms are used).
HPV infects keratinocytes -- the cells that make up the squamous epithelium. For the record, HPV likes keratinocytes everywhere on the body -- skin, throat, cervix, etc... and you get HPV infections in all these areas (on the hands, you would just call them warts or verruca vulgaris, if you want to sound fancy). Different strains of HPV are linked to cancer -- common warts (HPV types 4, 6, 8) are not known to cause cancer while other types (HPV 11, 16, 31, 33, etc...) are. The vaccine targets these high risk types.
The mechanism for oncogenesis is very interesting and has to do with the viral inclusion into the genome that interferes with tumor suppressor genes expression, ubiquitin mediated proteolysis, and disruption in cell cycle (the Nobel prize in chemistry a while back was given to research into ubuiqitin mediated proteolytic pathways and is quite a fascinating subject). These disruptions lead to squamous cell carcinomas.
As far as the difference between penile and cervical cancer, if they are both squamous cell carcinomas (which is what HPV causes -- but you can get different kinds of non-HPV cancer in both places) then it doesn't make much sense to talk about the differences between the two cancers, in and of themselves. Treatments, prognosis, morbidity, and mortality may of course vary due to the different sites of the tumor.
However, non-ionizing radiation could conceivably cause inflammation due to localized increase in heat.
Except that increased heat by itself does not cause inflammation. Rather - it is the reverse. Namely, inflammation causes increase in heat (through a variety of different mechanisms including cytokines, changes in vascular permeability, etc...). True, if you get heat high enough then you can destroy cells which in turn will induce an inflammatory response to clean things up. But those temperatures required would be ones that would be able to essentially burn cells to death, which is not a micro-increase in heat. In any event, your body does have heat shock proteins (HSP) which helps protect against thermal changes (and do a variety of other things as well, including some aspects of cell signalling (such as testosterone localization to the nucleus, IIRC)).
Now, if your hypothesis is that micro variations in heat can cause fluctuations in cellular signalling that could make oncogenic changes, well that is testable and may or may not be true. Apply for a grant for that and see where it goes.
Perhaps they would have invested more in floating cars that could cross rivers without bridges.
I'm a little hazy on your car analogy. Could you put it in terms of text editors or perhaps operating systems?
I had a similar conversation with my undergraduate mentor. She essentially said that the value of the Phd was that it shows you can work through complicated problems. And also, that you should be the world's expert on whatever you do your Phd on (for a brief period of time, at least).
Usually it is "Abandon all *scope*...." and thus starts the deathmarch.
The book "The Windup Girl" takes this idea of GM foods and their impact in the future to an extreme end. Its a great read (Sci Fi -- it won the Hugo and Nebula award). Definitely worth the read if you enjoy post-apocalyptic stories based on crop gene manipulation....
This is pretty old news. There are papers from 1980 that talk about chloramphenicol resistant (a really strong antibiotic) bug transmission from dairy farm to human. (An epidemic of resistant Salmonella in a nursery. Animal-to-human spread. Lyons RW, Samples CL, DeSilva HN, Ross KA, Julian EM, Checko PJ.JAMA. 1980 Feb 8;243(6):546-7.)
A serious question for you: from what you have written it appears that you have set a threshold for chance of injury for your child to be 1:10,000. If this is the case, then do you allow your children to be in cars? What about other risky behavior where the chance of injury is high (contact sports for example)? With respect to Guillain-Barre, this can also be caused by food poisoning from campylobacter jejuni. C. jejuni poisoning most commonly occurs with chicken (which carry the bug). Do you forbid your children from eating chicken?
It would seem that to be logically consistent you would need to curtail these activities. However, in the talk about risk to children from vaccination, there are other much more prevalent (and immediately deadly) risks to which parents seem to have no problem exposing their children. As someone who apparently has made the choice about acceptable risk for your children, how do you logically reconcile foregoing one (extremely debatable) "risk" versus allowing many other well documented and serious challenges to your children's life and limb?
Again, I am not attacking your beliefs (although I do not agree with them). I am wondering at the thought process behind your beliefs in the context of other risks that you willingly put your children through.
Hmmm...in the small town I am in, sensitive information is transmitted via a protocol known as the GrapeVine (no relation to the Banyan VINES). You think that binary exponential backoff is pretty cool? Check this out: GrapeVine appears to defy Einstein's theories as people are able to know if something happens BEFORE it occurs!
Coming soon: Cloud Forever. It will be available on your Phantom gaming system Some Day Soon.
Another issue is that residency training (which is basically where doctors learn to take care of people) is funded for the most part via Medicaire. Without that money (which is substantial) hospitals cannot afford to train doctors. So even if there were sufficient medical students in the system, under current licensing laws (which require at least 1 year of post-graduate residency training) the bottleneck would be on residency positions and funding.
This is a common misconception but is not true. Which imaging modality to use depends on the clinical scenario. MRIs have the downside of taking a long time, requiring the patient to be relatively still during this time, and being in an enclosed space (which some patients refuse to go into - hence the development of "open" MRI patients). And yes, they are expensive. CTs in contrast (pardon the pun) are quick, much cheaper, and do an excellent job of visualizing things like blood which is important in stroke management, trauma, etc...In the acute setting, your patient might die in the MRI machine while a CT scan would give you all the information you need in a much timelier fashion.
FTW! Bravo, sir. Bravo.
I went back to school after a 10 year hiatus and the school (medical school) had a similar deal with free electronic versions of many textbooks. Unlike your experience though, mine was pretty positive. Yeah - the software could be slow sometimes, but it was quicker (and more thorough) than going to the bookshelf, looking up what I was interested in in the index, and then going through the references one by one. I could also copy and paste from the electronic book to my notes (although yes, it would add an attribution to the pasted material, which actually was helpful in many cases when I reviewed the material and wanted more context from the book).
At any rate, going from my pure dead-tree undergrad to my pretty much all-electronic med school -- there is no way I would go back to all physical books. The searching capability by itself is worth it. Additionally I had much more convenience with studying as carrying around 14 or so medical school textbooks is pretty much impossible if they are physical books. This meant I could actually leave the library/home and work with other students easier. And don't get me started on how awesome google desktop + openoffice is for note-taking. I doubt I could have managed the amount of information that I did without my electronic resources.
At any rate, just my $0.02.
So true. I remember when I was younger wishing that I could remember everything and never forget anything. An older me is now very thankful for the capability to forget. In all seriousness, forgetting is not a bug, it's a feature.
You had the whole set up but missed the punchline:
...Hey look a black helicopter, what's with this strange red dot? At any rate, I highly douQ!##0!XQ. ATZ+++ NO CARRIER
Chapeau.
Baseball: where the definition of a perfect game is one where nothing happens...
Bychance, was this a midwestern based telco whose name happens to be the same as a popular track and field event?
In medicine we would say "Seldom wrong, never mistaken".
TRWTF is the name of the company...Somethin' Else. Someone should get sacked for that name. And then the person who sacked them should in turn get sacked (and so forth).