What should your doctor have learned in medical school. What should medical schools teach? Physicians I’ve talked to have said medical school is brutal. The amount of knowledge that students need to learn is immense. According to a recent poll up to 25% of medical students are thinking about quitting. One of the biggest stressors is the sheer volume of material that students must master.
Author: Devon Herrick
Drowsy Driving is a Public Health Hazard
By now everyone knows that driving under the influence is bad. Indeed, nearly one-third of all traffic fatalities involve a drunk driver. More than half (56%) of drivers involved in an injury or fatal car crash were on at least one drug (including alcohol) at the time that impaired their ability to drive. When I took flying lessons, we were warned that OTC cold medicines and flying is not allowed. The FAA has an explicit list of medication types that pilots cannot ingest while flying. An FAA study found the most common drug in the body of pilots involved in fatal aviation accidents was diphenhydramine (brand name Benadryl).
Why Not Make Daylight Savings Time Permanent?
During the Summer months there are roughly 15 to 16 hours of daylight in the Continental United States (13 hours in Hawaii and 24 in Northern Alaska). When you get home from work you have at least three hours of daylight left. In Winter there are only nine to ten hours of daylight. Depending on where you live in the U.S. your daylight hours are five to six hours less in Winter. So how does the U.S. government deal with this Winter daylight disparity? By moving the clock back an hour so Americans get one hour less daylight in the evening during a time of the year with reduced daylight. That makes little sense.
Doctors: AI is Not Ready for Prime Time (But it Soon Will)
The New York Times talks to doctors who worry about whether artificial intelligence (AI) is up to the job of assisting in patient care.
In medicine, the cautionary tales about the unintended effects of artificial intelligence are already legendary.
There was the program meant to predict when patients would develop sepsis, a deadly bloodstream infection, that triggered a litany of false alarms. Another, intended to improve follow-up care for the sickest patients, appeared to deepen troubling health disparities.
AI is being tested in various ways. There is no Doctor AI yet, but the algorithms are embedded in decision-support software and even hardware that analyzes mammograms.