Mastodon Grand Rounds Vol 6, No 3: The Art of Medicine and Nursing ~ Pallimed

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Grand Rounds Vol 6, No 3: The Art of Medicine and Nursing

Welcome to Grand Rounds, a weekly round-up of the best of the medical blogosphere.  We here at Pallimed (Drew, Lyle, Amy, Amber and myself) are honored to be hosting Grand Rounds for the 3rd time.  For the history books here are the 2007 (theme: prognostication) and 2008 editions.  The theme this week is "The Art of Medicine and Nursing" in honor of our sister blog Pallimed: Arts and Humanities

Art Theory
Last week's grand rounds was especially insightful courtesy of everyone's favorite Dutch medical librarian/blogger Laika (aka Jacqueline).  This week she has outdone herself with a wonderful post entitled Of Art & Medicine.  A must-read post especially for the fact you will always know the difference between Geneeskunst and Geneeskunde.  She deftly transforms "Art of Medicine" into "Art in Medicine" and "Medicine in Art"

Poetry
Dr. Rob channels his inner Theodore Geisel to give us a Seussian poem on Health Care Reform. A sample:

A plan that is public creates great distress,
Just growing the government won’t fix this mess!
Absolute power just leads to excess!
(But what’s their alternative’s anyone’s guess)
Dr. Maurice Bernstein of the comment magnet site Bioethics Discussion Blog shares a poem he wrote about doctors reflecting on the care they have given.  
There was a phone Call from Doctor Smith
Did I interrupt Mary
To take the call
As though more
Important?
Hospice chaplain Ken Bradstock of Rainy Nights shares a short poem about a pediatric patient. 

Humanities
Dr. Charles sent me one post but as I explored the rest of his blog I found a far more suitable candidate for grand rounds and substituted his post on the Dialogues with Darwin exhibit.
"I came away from the exhibit with a great respect for Darwin as a synthesizer of ideas. Among the disparate influences in his life that led to his unifying theory, one can count his grandfather’s poetry, his early training in geology and his correspondence with geologist Charles Lyell, his legendary voyages aboard the H.M.S. Beagle collecting and comparing biological specimens, his reading of Thomas Malthus and economic theory, and even his study of theology."
Cuisine
Cooking challenges the taste buds and if these three geriatric/palliative UCSF doctors from the blog GeriPal are willing to taste test Bowel Meds on video, then I would invite them to my test kitchen any day. By the way, GeriPal is one of the best new medical blogs out there, lots of comments and discussion with excellent topics. (Geripal is also hosting Palliative Care Grand Rounds tomorrow!)

Photography

Reading the rest of Dr. Charles blog allowed me to find this wonderful site from radiologist Steven N. Myers.  He features x-ray images of flowers and of course since this is Pallimed I wanted to feature this particular plant which has lead to great advances in pain control (and some problems too of course). 

Literature
17th Century author Sir Thomas Brown shared this reason why dealing with end of life issues is so difficult(via the excellent and highly recommended Medical Futility blog):
"The long habit of life indisposeth us to death."

Television
Grey's Anatomy utilized the DABDA theory as part of a recent show.  Don't know DABDA?  Angela Morrow at About.com's Palliative Care blog does. (Hint: Kubler-Ross)

Ink Art
Although lengthy the NYU Literature, Arts and Medicine Blog continues to reward patient readers with a post about Dr. Fleischmann and the Art and Medicine in Terezin.  This post is part of a larger exhibit:
"depicting the practice of medicine in one of the most notorious "ghettoes" of World War II.  Terezin (or Theriesenstadt) served as a "model camp," infamously shown to visitors who were impressed by the seemingly decent living conditions. But the inmates knew all too well its sinister alter-ego as a transfer point: a limbo between their former lives and their ultimate fate."
NYU also has the best online database ever for literature, arts and medicine.

Would you get the Wilderness Medicine Logo as a tattoo?  Paul Auerbach of Medicine for the Outdoors is considering it even after reporting on Mycobaterium in the ink for tattoos.

Paintings
Dr. Charles again with a post on colorblindness and gene therapy.

Fabrics
Dr. Ramona Bates from Suture for a Living made a quilt for the psychiatrist bloogger Intueri and sold it on Etsy to donate funds for the Multiple Sclerosis society on behalf on Intueri.  Medical bloggers are such cool people!

Graphic Design
Dr. Shock (Walter van der Broek, a Dutch psychiatrist) gives us a great breakdown of the ins and outs of PubMed's redesign.  Graphic design is so important in making something functional while still appealing to the eye.  Sadly it is under utilized in EMR's! Dr. Shock has some of the most wide ranging and interesting insights on medical issues IMHO.

Music
Dr. Wes describes 'The Final Opus' in an ode to the well-orchestrated maneuvers of a medical team.
"It was midnight and the Emergency Room door opened like a curtain on a Broadway. A lone man sat in blue at the countertop, writing. Behind him, the chorus, working feverishly on the protagonist - the script rehearsed a thousand times before.
Clothes off, Story?, facemask, C-collar, endotracheal tube, breath sounds, telemetry, IV’s, blood work, pulse ox, Stop."
Dance
Martial arts could be considered a form of dance if you consider all body movement a form of dance.  Frances Shani Parker of the Hospice and Nursing Home Blog highlights some seniors learning Cane-Fu.

Public Speaking and Debate
Yes this is a lost art in medicine given the ubiquity of Bad PowerPoint. So please all medical educators take some hints from Six Minutes: A Public Speaking and Presentation Skills blog with weekly Friday wrap-ups of the best speaking tips.

Things not to say in the ED if you want to be take seriously via Life in the Fast Lane blogger Peter Allely. Some good ones:
  • ‘I have a really high pain threshold.’
  • ‘I fell over in the shower.’
  • ‘I was painting in the nude.’
Best Off Topic Blog Posts (i.e I couldn't force an artistic theme on them)

DB and his Medical Rants picks off one of my favorite topics: Degradation of Medical Notes

Bongi of other things amanzi demonstrates creativity in getting Dermabond off eyelashes.

Dr. Wes with an excellent transmogrification of the legal profession and ICD-10 gives us ICLD-10 in his post "If Lawyers billed like doctors."

Marya Zilberberg at Healthcare etc. argues about what to do when the best evidence is not available to base your medical practice.
"But, let's not be fooled: most of the time what we end up practicing is absence-of-evidence based medicine. Question your doctors closely to distinguish between the two, as this distinction is the key to rational decision making."
Dr. Joel Topf of Precious Body Fluids (excellent blog name!) discusses one of the troubling consequences of hearing esteemed professors lecture on the Pharma sponsored circuit.
"It is illustrative of what is wrong with academic nephrology. Dr. Arruda hates the first slide in his deck. Why doesn't he remove/fix/change the slide? Because the slide deck has been vetted by the FDA and Otsuka's lawyers. He can't change it. He has signed a contract saying he won't change it."
CODA
Thanks for reading and thanks to all who submitted. You will find all other posts that were submitted but didn't quite make the theme in the first comment on this post.  Join us next Tuesday at Survive The Journey.

Pallimed | Blogger Template adapted from Mash2 by Bloggermint