Michael

The purpose it serves is scope-of-practice. It's a euphemism for "fracture," which, as a diagnosis, is disallowed to certain license-levels. It is to be spoken with a twinkle in the eye that says "You and I both know what I'm not allowed to call this." Does anyone still say YMMV?

Why is it called a shop? Because that's where you go shopping. Then why is it called a store? -- I do my storing in the cellar. ~ Winnie the Pooh

You're surely right about the first point. As to the second, some people find a difference between funds that are donated and those that are coerced from the supplier. Say, who'd like to PM me a lesson on how to quote multiple times and intersperse comments between the quotes? Looks so nifty when I see y'all doing it. But maybe that's ALS.

A man was convicted and fined for calling a police officer a donkey. After he had paid his fine, the man asked the judge, "Your Honor, am I to understand that I am forbidden to call a police officer a donkey?" "That is correct," replied the judge. "Well, Your Honor, am I also forbidden to call a donkey a police officer?" "You may do so if you wish," replied the judge. "Very well," the man said, and as he turned toward the door of the courthouse and passed the officer who had arrested him, he tipped his hat and said, "Good day then, Mister Police Officer."

(Only kidding.)

Hammer considers women to be problems?

Very nice! Thanks, Anthony. All of it sounds great to me, except When I see someone doing this, it makes me sick. It is so obviously a technique designed to manipulate compliance, used by salesmen and others who acquired it from training. Seeing it in a healthcare provider it would generate the "halo-effect" of causing me to suspect insincerity in everything else they say and do, and thus provoke the very opposite of a therapeutic effect. How to elicit noncompliance? Monkey do. But maybe that's just me (though I know it's not). As Emerson said of raising children, "I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which he is totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough." There. My first rant. Please don't anyone imitate it! :wink:

Profanity is the miser's epi-pen.

NY Times May 21, 2006 Diagnosis Flower Power By LISA SANDERS, M.D. 1. Symptoms Dr. Jon McGhee, a second year E.R. resident, casually greeted the patient and her fiancé as he entered the darkened hospital cubicle. "So, what's going on?" he asked the patient, who was also a doctor and a friend. The two had suffered through their internship year together — an experience that is the start of many enduring friendships. She looked O.K., the resident thought to himself, a little relieved. But her heart was racing — 150 beats per minute. Her blood pressure was high, and she seemed anxious. But she didn't look sick. Then she began to speak. A wild river of words poured from her. Random words, meaningless sentences. There were snatches of sense scattered throughout, but they were drowned in the rushed torrent. McGhee looked at the young man, who nodded. This was why they had come. The patient had been fine all day, the fiancé explained, but after dinner she started saying that she felt queasy and lightheaded. Within an hour, these symptoms began to worsen. She felt weak, she told him, sick and hot. Then she began crying uncontrollably, and when she spoke, she made no sense. That had really scared him. + The patient was 27, had an athletic build and no significant medical problems. The year before, she fainted a couple of times, but an extensive cardiac work-up hadn't revealed anything. She was taking an antidepressant, Paxil, and occasionally used another antidepressant, Elavil, to help her sleep. She didn't smoke, rarely drank, never used illicit drugs and jogged daily. When the doctor turned on the light to examine the patient, she cried out. The light had been bothering her since they got there, her fiancé told him. McGhee turned the lights down and began to examine the patient. She had no fever. Her mouth was dry, and her skin was quite warm though not sweaty. The rest of her exam was normal. An EKG showed no abnormalities beyond the rapid heart rate. 2. Investigation McGhee thought carefully about his friend. For almost anyone with a change in mental status, illicit drugs had to be on the list of possible causes, as unlikely as it seemed in this case. In addition, she took Elavil, which could cause many of these symptoms when taken in large quantities. Could she have taken an overdose? That could cause the rapid heart rate and confusion. But the most dangerous side effect of an Elavil overdose is dangerously low blood pressure. Hers was dangerously high. Perhaps the patient was bipolar and had moved from depression to mania? Or could it be something different? Could she have too much thyroid hormone? The thyroid is the flesh-and-blood version of a carburetor, regulating how hard the body's machinery works. Too little of this hormone, and the body slows down. Too much, and it speeds up. He questioned the patient's fiancé. Had she shown signs of mania? She had a history of insomnia, and sleeplessness was one sign of both mania and thyroid overload. How was she sleeping? Until this evening she had been fine, he insisted. She had been depressed, but not since starting the Paxil. And her sleeping was no worse than usual. He paused. There was one other thing: after dinner, he had felt a little funny, too. Not as sick as the patient, but his heart had been racing, and he had felt nauseated and jittery, though he felt fine now. They had eaten some lettuce from their garden that night. Could their symptoms be related to that? The resident immediately thought of a recent patient who had almost died from pesticide poisoning. He had been delirious like this patient, but had not had the elevated heart rate or blood pressure and had been sweating profusely. Still uncertain, the doctor ordered a few routine blood tests to look for the presence of an infection or an abnormality in her blood chemistry or thyroid hormone. He also ordered a urine test to look for illegal drugs and Elavil, the medication she used for sleep. As he waited for the results, the patient became more agitated. She kept getting out of bed and walking into the chaotic hub of the emergency room, putting on gloves and picking up charts as if she were at work. At times, she seemed to hallucinate. Over the course of the night, the patient's test results trickled in. The blood tests were normal. Her thyroid hormone wasn't too high. The drug screen was completely negative. What was going on? By dawn, the patient's blood pressure came down. She was less confused. Her speech cleared. But she was still far from normal. Was this part of some underlying illness? Could it be linked to her earlier fainting spells? Was she having tiny strokes? Was she showering her lungs with little clots? Her symptoms weren't typical of any of these, but they didn't seem typical of anything else either. Her cardiologist and a neurologist were consulted. She had an M.R.I. of her brain to look for a stroke and a CT of her chest to look for tiny clots. Normal. After four days, the patient recovered, and she was discharged, her diagnosis still unknown. 3. Resolution At home, the patient worried about her brief descent into madness. That afternoon, she wandered out to the garden to do some weeding when her attention was drawn to an uninvited guest growing there. Among the green and purple lettuce she had planted were several strikingly beautiful white and yellow flowers. Blossoms that hadn't been there before and that she was certain she had never sown. Before it had flowered, could this plant have been mistaken for lettuce and ended up in her salad? She pulled the plants up by their roots, put them in a baggie and drove to a nearby nursery. As she pulled the plants from the bag to show the owner, the woman exclaimed: "Don't touch those! They're highly toxic. That's jimson weed." Also called the devil's trumpet and sometimes locoweed, this plant has been known for centuries to cause a temporary kind of madness, the woman explained. The symptoms caused by this class of plant are well known, and a mnemonic is taught in medical school to identify them: Mad as a hatter, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet. As it turned out, the patient had had all the classic symptoms. The plant's toxin affects the eyes because it dilates the pupils and makes them very sensitive to light. She was also quite flushed, according to her fiancé, though both these symptoms were missed by McGhee, it seems, because he had turned down the light for his friend's comfort. He noted that her mouth and skin were dry and the madness was clear, but alone they weren't enough. By the time the other doctors saw her, most of these symptoms had resolved themselves. The doctor was being kind in keeping the lights low, but I think there's more here. McGhee didn't insist on being able to see — the way he would have insisted on drawing blood or getting the CT scan — because in this age of high-tech medicine, I think we no longer really believe that the physical exam can be an important diagnostic tool. Too often we simply go through the motions, never imagining that what we can observe will provide the kinds of answers that our machine-driven tests routinely do. Ultimately, that loss of faith can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this case, the patient did fine without a diagnosis. She figured it out herself. I asked her recently why she thought she had been so much more affected by the jimson weed than her fiancé. "I'm not really sure," she answered. "Maybe I ate more of it. Or maybe it was the plant plus the Paxil. Antidepressants can cause some similar side effects." She told me that she hopes to publish her story as a case report in a medical journal. If you have a solved case to share with Dr. Sanders, you can e-mail her at LSanders@pol.net. She is unable to respond to all e-mail messages. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company http://images.google.com/images?q=jimson+weed&hl=en

...and of course a follow-up, starting in 2019, on those who will be looking back and recalling, "I got my start when..." Congratulations!

Why does everyone treat AK as if his having an ovary carried some sort of stigma? http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos581/gyonecium1.gif

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/16/man_slinger/

Better hurry: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

Others have seen that too, prompting all sorts of inflammatory inferences... http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...i_3187182/print http://blackinformant.com/index.php?p=215 http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:kY8HJh...=clnk&cd=14 Ancient heroes wept freely. I don't know why or when it became * sniff * taboo.

http://tinyurl.com/mt27a

I nominate 8 Official Conscience of EMT City's Message Board! Which prompts me to relate that when training anyone to call emergency services, I've learned it's good to refer consistently to the phone number as "Nine-One-One" rather than "Nine-Eleven," in order to avoid underaged and/or overstressed callers wasting their valuable limbic time searching even a few seconds for a nonexistent eleven on the phone's keypad. This also makes me wonder how well five-year-olds can distinguish the 911 we telephone from the 9/11 of the year of their birth.

Crusader Rabbit. So there.

Becasue our http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005OTZ...ce&n=284507 is going to modern Mesopotamia in the hope of keeping it, and us, from re-entering the stone age.

Make that ancient Mesopotamia.

And if any of them have are nicknamed after vacuum-cleaners, threaten to deport them to modern Mesopotamia if they don't behave.

I just phoned an early-childhood expert who had her hands full (as they often do), but she will try to get back to me, and I to you, before your hands are full. By the way, your audience will have nothing to compare your "performance" to, they don't vote, and they won't remember anyway, so relax. Meanwhile, meditate on the avatar to the left of this message.

Puppets can help.

Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. Well, three out of four will be just fine. Actually, Rev. Dust, you've generated more prayers than many a revivalist preacher, and that was before your announcement. So give 'em purgatory, get back safe, and return with your micturation and vinegar undiluted, eh? :thumbleft:

Apparently contagious, whatever it is: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/travel/stor...1769274,00.html

Or http://www.answers.com/topic/banzai-attack kittens. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be terminal athazagoraphobia (fear of being ignored): http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/ent.../206809/1/.html