UK researchers say the video game Tetris may work to reduce Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, BBC news reports:
The Oxford University experiment works on the principle that it may be possible to modify the way in which the brain forms memories in the hours after an event.
A total of 40 healthy volunteers were enrolled, and shown a film which included traumatic images of injuries.
Half of the group were then given the game to play while the other half did nothing.
The number of “flashbacks” experienced by each group was then reported and recorded over the next week, and those who played Tetris had significantly fewer.
The study was recently published in the online, open access journal PLoS One.
View full text of original article (free).
From protecting our genetic information from discrimination to constructing an entire bacterial genome from scratch, here’s a round-up of the top stories in science and medicine for 2008:
Science Magazine names Reprogramming Cells the “Breakthrough of the year”; exoplanets & cancer genes make runners-up.
The NIH open access policy and GINA get a mention in Rick Weiss’s Top 8 Science Policy News Stories of 2008 at ScienceProgress.org.
Time Magazine went whole hog with it’s Top 10 of Everything, but we’re more interested in their Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs and Top 10 Scientific Discoveries.
Amazon editors selected Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin the best science book of 2008. Customers used their wallets to push My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor above Shubin; Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach sounds pretty interesting as well. (2008 was also the year of the colon, apparently.)
For you skeptics out there, The Quakometer offers his take on the best books about quackery, scepticism, complementary and alternative medicine and its effects on society for 2008.
Whether it’s your first H&P or fifty-thousandth, medical students and other health care professionals will find A Practical Guide to Clinical Medicine useful.
Created by Charlie Goldberg, M.D. and Jan Thompson at UCSD School of Medicine, A Practical Guide to Clinical Medicine is designed eye towards clinical relevance. Each section is constructed to answer the question: “What do I really need to know about this area of medical care?” and the material is presented in a concise, ordered fashion with color photographs that should be readily applicable to the common clinical scenarios seen in day to day practice.
Detailed descriptions of how to function in clinical settings are included. If you’ve ever wondered about oral presentations, patient write-ups, outpatient clinics, functioning on an inpatient service or clinical decision making, there are sections describing exactly that.
A Practical Guide to Clinical Medicine is freely available online for anyone.
Wandering around Learningradiology.com today, I stumbled across “22 Must-See Diagnoses for Medical Students“. It’s a great review if you have 12 minutes to brush up on your radiology skills.
LearningRadiology.com has a ton of multimedia radiology resources, from interactive quizzes, and cases of the week. There’s also video podcasts available to download to your iPhone or mobile device too.
Have a favorite radiology site? Post here, and we’ll add it our radiology links page.
A North Carolina State University engineering professor has come up with theories on how Santa Claus can travel around the entire world in a single night (“exploit the space-time continuum”), how he carries all those presents in his sleigh (nanotechnology), and how he makes his list of naughty & nice children (antennas & radar).
Consider buying your grandparent video games. Health Day recently released a report font size=”-1″>(link removed) about a December article in Psychology & Aging which stated that playing video games can boost the cognitive ability of older brains. The research wasn’t even funded by the gaming industry.
But maybe Grandpa isn’t really ready for GTA or Halo.
As you may remember the Library converted its links to a Delicious Account back in August. In October, we posted about the social bookmarking phenomenon. The Delicious Links continue their dyamic growth with over a dozen new sites added in the last month. My particular favorite? The Virtual Stethoscope Project. from McGill University.
A report from the Institute of Medicine released on Tuesday morning proposes revisions to medical residents’ duty hours and workloads “to decrease the chances of fatigue-related medical errors and to enhance the learning environment resident training.” The report does not recommend further reducing residents’ work hours from the maximum average of 80 per week set by ACGME in 2003, but rather recommends reducing the maximum number of hours that residents can work without time for sleep to 16, increasing the number of days residents must have off, and restricting moonlighting during residents’ off-hours, among other changes. The committee, which was chaired by Dr. Michael Johns of Emory, estimates that the cost for additional personnel to handle reduced resident work could be roughly $1.7 billion annually.
Read the full report here
Thanks Ram Paragi, for the publication alert!
The Global Library of Women’s Medicine is a new free resource featuring over 442 peer-reviewed, full text, searchable chapters on women’s medicine.
“The Global Library of Women?óÔé¼Ôäós Medicine is a unique web library incorporating a range of detailed clinical information across the whole field of women?óÔé¼Ôäós medicine. It consists of 442 main chapters and 53 supplementary chapters, supported by more than 40,000 references, which will be kept permanently up-to-date. The chapters have been written by more than 650 specialists and will reflect some of the very best worldwide opinion. The website has been developed from the six-volume, encyclopedic textbook Gynecology & Obstetrics, which was first published in 1934 and has been edited for the last 30 years by professor John J. Sciarra.”
Though the site is available to the public, medical and health professionals can register for extra features, such as the ability to comment on the text, submit new material, and access videos, medical atlases and laboratory tests.
GLOWM was created in honor of the publisher’s daughter, Abigal Bloomer, who died of breast cancer at age 31.
Thursday isn’t just Thanksgiving. It’s also the 5th annual National Family History Day, as declared by Acting Surgeon General Steven K Galson, M.D., M.P.H. National Family History Day is part of the Family History Initiative which provides access to a web-based tool called, “My Family Health Portrait.” This tool helps users to organize family history information and then save their history information to their own computer and even share family history information with other family members.
If you have no idea why we?óÔé¼Ôäóre pondering that question today, go brush your teeth real quick and grab a drink (orange juice, iced tea, beer?óÔé¼ÔÇØanything except water). Awful, isn?óÔé¼Ôäót it?
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/19516
Google announced on Tuesday that it was launching Google Flu Trends which will combine flu-related searches that it receives along with information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to estimate flu cases in all 50 states. The CDC offers information on Flu Season for consumers as well as Seasonal Flu information for health professionals, parents, and teachers.
According to Google Flu Trends, incidence of the flu in Louisiana is still low. And they even offer a flu shot locator by zip code, courtesy of the American Lung Association.
Auscultation is the technical term for listening to the internal sounds of the body, usually using a stethoscope. The links below offer a number of websites that contain heart, lung, and breathing sounds.
Auscultation Assistant
http://www.med.ucla.edu/wilkes/inex.htm
Cardiac Examination / Heart Sounds
http://www.blaufuss.org/tutonline.html#
CardiologySite.com
http://www.cardiologysite.com/index.html
Heart Sounds and Murmurs
http://www.texasheartinstitute.org/Education/CME/explore/events/eventdetail_5469.cfm
Heart Sounds and Murmurs
http://depts.washington.edu/physdx/heart/index.html
We’ve also indexed these on our links page.
November is American Diabetes Month according to the Centers for Disease Control. MedlinePlus offers a great deal of patient information on Diabetes that supplements the CDC page.
The CDC has created The Ounce of Prevention campaign to give health educators and consumers practical and useful tips. The website offers a variety of resources, including information on food preparation, wild animals, and antibiotics.
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