Medicine and life, Life and medicine

I think a sensible start is to say why did i become a med reg. My background is haematology, always loved it and don't see myself doing anything other than that, luckily haemtology doctors in training or non training jobs don't do med-reg on-calls, that was kind of the silver lining that kept me going. The problem is, as i was trying to run away from my first shitty post as SHO (i have a huge blog entry about, that i am still contemplating whether to publish or not, given how negative it is), the only offer i got straight away as i had no intention to wait or look around was medical registrar in acute medicine. I was a bit scared to take that up in the UK given my perceived notion of the massive amount of responsibility attached to that post. I say perceived as a med-reg in my previous trust does a lot more and has way more responsibilities and duties, than where i am now. Also looking at haematology applications, having a background in Emergency medicine or acute Medicine w...

A very dear friend of mine once said, if anybody failed the PLAB 1 exam, while he has access to the 1700 questions source, he or she then should stop all further plans to go to the UK or anywhere else cause that just shows he doesn't have the IQ to do it. Now before you rush to judging me or my friend, that only means one thing, that the exam itself is copied and pasted from that source. EVEN the choices in the MCQ exam is copied and pasted. This isn't in any way or form attacking those who fail, we all have got our shares of failing and in stupid exams (i should or shouldn't, in this case, be the one to talk, LOL). I started preparing for the PLAB exam about a month before the exam. It was a series of rash decisions, taking the IELTS and paying for PLAB1. On the other hand, what made me take such decisions easier, is that I have already passed MRCP1 and MRCP2 written, the year before, so I thought I would be able to hold my ground in the internal medicine part of the PL...

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn’t had to look very hard. Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age. Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the ca...

My first contact with online CMEs was in 2012. There was a post on Facebook at that time of a friend of a friend who shared a screenshot of the certificate she got from "Harvard medical school". Just seeing the word Harvard made my heart thump :D :D and still do, to be honest, I am always in awe of those big institutions. Anyway, I started looking for it and found the links to that and if I remember correctly, the cost was about 20$ per credit hour but lucky me, it was for free for people in developing countries like mine, good old Egypt. Anyway, I did quite a few and was quite happy with them, but when I was searching I found that CMEs were quite well known, whether online or live ones. At that point in time, I was a bit embarrassed that I found out about them so late and didn't tell anybody assuming that everybody knows. Harvard medical school CMEs were quite limited and the longer ones weren't for free. So I started looking around and that's when I found ...

Since the plan is to keep the most unlucky of you to keep reading to the end of this Blog, so I am going to tell you, ladies and gentleman, about my uneventful unplanned only trial with IELTS and how did I get the required dreadful score of  8 overall, with no less than 7 in any individual testing area. Firstly, my German teacher (I know what you are thinking, the best way to start talking about a great approach to IELTS is to start with German right?!!), anyway my German teacher, and i have to say a simply awesome one at that, told us one time in the class that the BEST way to learn any language is to read a lot. The trick is to know what you are reading for. So always ask yourself, are you reading to improve your reading? listening? or writing? If you are reading to improve your reading, then always to sort whatever your reading into paragraphs and like have a heading for each and try to understand the idea behind each one and the general idea of the whole piece. Does h...

I have read somewhere that some professional writers can take several months to start their writing project, even if they have the general idea of what they want to ay and how to say it. I think it makes sense. When a lot hangs on whether people are going to keep reading whatever you wrote or they will never pick up something with your name on it, then a lot of weight is put into the opening statement. At least to capture them enough to show your ideas. Good thing at this point I really don't care if someone (you) reads this or not. Actually, to be honest, I prefer that nobody reads it :D. Well, why then write it in the first place if I prefer that no one reads it? Ok, I will be frank with no beating around the bush, I was looking for new work and in my line of work, it was in many of the desirable criteria to have something with general writing. I have been thinking about starting a blog a long time ago but never had the real motive to. I think it is because I consid...