Mastodon Pal-pourri Friday ~ Pallimed

Friday, June 20, 2008

Pal-pourri Friday

Just a few quick/fun things for your Friday:

1) Our new companion blogs
Thanks to all our visitors and subscribers to our new companion blogs.

Arts & Humanities has posted on palliative care films (almost 40 if you read the comments), art in a cemetery, a painting owned by Lenin, Hitler and Freud, and a song with instruments representing the last minutes of life in the ICU.

Case Conferences highlights some cases on several topics: intractable vomiting, denial of a cancer diagnosis, attendings with different prognosis. If you work with fellows, residents or medical students use these great cases from the University of Pittsburgh to prompt discussion on rounds or online.

2) Palliative Care Joke of the Week
(not likely to be recurring because of the lack of palliative care oriented jokes, unless you send them in)

As the recently deceased wait in line to get into Heaven, St. Peter sits at the Pearly Gates checking names of the lucky ones. All of a sudden there is a commotion at the back of the line and the noise moves up through the line. Eventually we see the cause of the restlessness of the line: a man with a white coat, stethoscope, and doctor's bag is hurrying past all of those queued up to enter Heaven.

"Hey, he's cutting in line!" one woman shouts. "That's not fair, just because he is a doctor, he thinks he is so important!" exclaims a frustrated man. St. Peter lets the man through the gates, and calmly reassures the crowd, "No, no that's not a doctor. That's God. Sometimes he like to play doctor."

(HT to Sid Schwab via Kevin, MD)

3) Doctor Constipator?

From the art-blog The Superest comes: Doctor Constipator to defeat the Beetleamster and his army of Dung Beetles. The premise of the site is that two artists compete back and forth to come up with superheroes/villains that sequentially defeat one another. Unfortunately Doctor Constipator was defeated by The Superstious Villagers: Every Mad Doctor's Nightmare. Even "The Superstious Villagers" is a better name then Relistor (methylnatrexone). Speaking of which...

4) New brand name for MNTX?

I took a suggestion (HT: JP) from a comment on the MNTX post for a new brand name for the opioid induced constipation medicine methylnaltrexone (MNTX) and made a draft logo for Wyeth to purchase from me so I can fund my palliative research institute. Incorporating the generic name and the function of the medication was a brilliant move by the commentator. And so, I unveil to you the new logo for the non-existent medication...MakiNTraXor.


5) Palliative Word Art

The web is wonderful for discovering cool artsy things, like this word generated art (via the TED website) called Wordle. You cut and paste words into a text box and it makes an abstract artistic representation of the words based on the frequency of use.

Here is an image of all the words on the main Pallimed page right now (not including this post and leaving out very common words like 'a', 'the', 'of', 'to', etc.).


Here is the result with Chochinov's article on Dignity Therapy from the journal of the American Cancer Society (free pdf):
Have a good weekend!

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