Tag Archive | Medical Research
Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide: The Dark Knight Falls
From Aaron’s last blog post: Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide. A year younger to me, and yet, he’s achieved ore than I could imagine achieving in my whole life, and at the untimely age of 26 years, he has gone […]
Literature Search Workshop at UCMS: Extra-Curricular Academics at the MEU
The Medical Education Unit at the University College of Medical Sciences, where I am now doing my residency, is a small, but super-active group of people, and they presented today a workshop on Literature Searching and Reference Management. Although the target audience was mainly the Residents, there was some spill-over as well. There were students […]
eThesis: A Continuous Narrative Experience
Our thesis protocols were submitted today and most of us had a bit of running around in circles to do before the closing bells chimed at 1 PM. I was especially peeved at the amount of paper that goes into the making of such a protocol. And given the fact that we had to submit […]
Protocol Writing Workshop 2012 and Falling in Love… with UCMS!
As residents, one of the most important things that we have to do is complete a dissertation, or thesis in course of our training. This is one of the credits we need to have obtained in order to be eligible to sit for the final MD exams. The basic aim of doing a thesis is […]
Indo-Pak Medical Students Romance the Border: A JPMS Initiative
From the press release of the Journal of Pakistan Medical Students, an endeavor worth the accolades: A Peace Initiative: A Group of Young Researchers And Doctors of India and Pakistan bridges the Divide KARACHI: The idea of publishing a medical research journal had been sparkling in the minds of many young researchers from India […]
Charles Beevor: The Sign of a “Bloody” Jerk
Forgive the hyperbolic title. Do not take offense and read on before hating on me. Please note the post script for added justification for this inflammatory title, if you so feel. Thanks. Now on with the main show! Not the best known of neurologists, history has not been very kind to this amicable gentleman, who […]
OAW 2011: So You Hit A Paywall?
This is in celebration of the Open Access Week, which is celebrated all across the globe between October 24 – 30 every year. This year, since I am no longer in medical school, I will not be able to organize an event on the grounds but will try my best to see if I can […]
What Flies in KVPY: A Sample Project
I have been getting a deluge of requests to post some examples of the type of projects that have been selected. While it is a bit of a chore to track down the folks who got through and ask them for their project abstracts (most people are not so open minded about handing out unpublished […]
House MD 8×02: Transplant
As big a fan of the House MD show I am, let me start off with the disclaimer that I consider this to be one of the worst ever episodes of House MD to come on air. EVER! And that is not just because of the sucky medical mystery, but also because of the very […]
Medical Student Research: The First Year Quandary
The problem with the Indian Medical Curriculum is that it is too intense, as it should be, no complaints there, but it offers no leeway to people who want to test out the waters in the fields like medical student research or public health or other associated streams not directly fed by the MBBS course […]
National Conference on Students’ Medical Research
The Community Medicine department of Medical College, Thiruvananthapuram is organizing the 5th National Conference on Students’ Medical Research. The theme for this year is: Translational Medicine. Their website has more details. Here is their brochure: Their website (which is very chic, easy to navigate and user friendly, something we are not accustomed to while browsing […]
Inquizitive: The Medical Quiz
Medical Quizzing is a tool for medical education that employs multiple skill sets, both creative and analytical, to crack the code of questions. First popularized by Dr. Krishnendu Mukherjee, a prominent surgeon of Kolkata, a proud alumnus of my alma mater and of course, a teacher par excellence, this remains one of the most grueling […]
Researching: A Foundation Workshop
Click pic to go to registration site. Undergraduate Medical Education in India sorely lacks any initiation into research knowledge. While I agree this MBBS training is supposed to equip people with clinical and therapeutic skills, in a world which is fast moving towards evidence based medicine, one needs minimal research skills to be able to […]
Answer: MediQuiz #2: The Rhythm of Life
Yeah, once again, almost everyone got it right. There are few songs that tend to stick in your head as much as stayin’ alive does, and indeed, it is just the right beat to make your CPR go along with. Some people are also of the opinion that Another one bites the dust by Queen […]
KVPY: 5 Reasons To Apply
Well, this might seem like a stupid question to ask, but yesterday a medical student contacted me and posed before me several important queries as to the merits of busting one’s… erm, neurons… in winning the KVPY scholarship when the pressure of medical school was already too much to handle. That got me thinking, and […]
Are patients really “worse off” with older docs?
In what appears to be a largely counter intuitive result, research by the American Journal of Medicine has unearthed that patients end up faring worse when treated by older doctors or more experienced doctors. This Reuters article delves into the issue and discusses several aspects of the study in great lengths. This study has also […]
Aaron Swartz and the Open Access Civil Disobedience
Aaron Swartz has been formally charged with a set of violations based on his hacking the MIT mainframe in order to get into JSTOR’s archives and downloading a large segment of JSTOR’s published materials with the purpose of distributing them through one or more file sharing sites. Ars Technica has run a blow by blow […]
Aaron Swartz: The Robbing Hood of Open Access?
Let me make it clear at the very outset that I am aware that AS is being indicted for hacking by the federal government on charges of “wire fraud, computer fraud”, etc and not for downloading too many journal articles off JSTOR (4.8 million, to be precise). Here is what the prosecution had to say: […]
Tasting A New Open Access Journal: Flavours
Although it sounds like the name of a multi-cuisine eatery owned by an imaginatively impaired person, Flavour is the name of a new Journal being launched by the BioMed Central folks. The introduction email says: The recent explosion of molecular gastronomy has brought the worlds of the laboratory and the kitchen closer together, with science […]
Workshop on Mesenchymal Stem Cells
Manipal University has been one of the leaders in bringing research to Indian Medical Students, so it was no surprise that they were initiating a novel workshop on Mesenchymal Stem Cell with hands on skill development. Slated to be held in Bangalore in July, this seems like a wonderful way to wade into the future […]
The 20% Time Rule
For understanding the purport of the rant that is about to follow, you need to take a look at this 20-odd minute long TED talk by Google Gods Sergey Brin and Larry Page first: So now that you are caught up with the 20% time rule, let the rant commence! <rant> This talk is from […]
Knowledge Compression and the Beauty of Data
I stumbled onto this fantastic Ted Talk given by “data detective” David McCandless via a Tweet on the @BMJ_latest account: Editorial brainstorm today with "data detective" David McCandless http://fb.me/Di4njr4o— BMJ (@bmj_latest) April 13, 2011 If you are like me and like crunching numbers or at least, trying to pry out hidden information from datasets, then […]
Get That Heroin Rush, Safely
Clinical observations and lesion based studies have long shown that the brain is an important adjunct for sexual functions. Although the role of the brain in ejaculation and orgasmic sensations is not well understood, the impairment of these functions in patients with strokes or parkinsonism have long shown that the brain has some role to […]
Buck-teria!
First up, a disclaimer. I know one of the researchers who conducted this short study personally and professionally. I admire their work and what they have done to further the cause of promoting research by medical students in India. So, this post may be a little biased, but anyways, I decided to go ahead with […]
Sex and the Senile
Geriatric sexuality is a very sparsely explored domain in the medical arena. With the developing world getting top heavy on the age pyramid, this has become a rather timely question to ask. This study conducted in Australia takes a look at the prevalence of sexual activities in people ages 75 years and above (upto 95 […]
KVPY: 10 Tips to Succeed!
So it seems like I am on a reblogging roll today! This time I resurrect another one of my favorite and popular post from my long dead old blog pointing out the 10 virtues of a research project which may help you to get selected for the Interview stage. When you get there, do read […]
The Final Frontier: Acing the KVPY Interviews
So, yet another repost of a popular article from my now fossilized old blog. I was getting a lot of questions regarding how to handle the KVPY Interviews and how to write a project report that gets the approval of the same. So, I decided to go ahead and repost those articles so that at […]
The Retraction Blog (via Retraction Watch)
I stumbled upon this group following a discussion on an online email discussion group regarding repositories of retracted papers. Whilst that discussion raised an important question: how does the retraction of a paper affect the metrics of other papers citing the retracted work, this post is not about that. (I hardly know anything about that […]
House MD and the professional guinea pig (via Humanities and Health)
A very interesting post with a poignant question to round it off: A must read for all concerned with health policies and the like. Whilst this post is not intended to be an answer to the question raised here, I must say that someday I intend to come back to it and write about it, […]
Florbetapir: Making AD A Costlier Affair
The FDA has conditionally approved the novel contrast agent, Florbetapir, to help in the diagnosis of amyloid beta plaque build up in the brains of Alzheimer’s (or, for that purpose, any damn dementia) patients. Now there are several reasons why I am not over the moon with this, but I will come to them later. […]
