A few bits of news

As I haven't updated in a while here's a few health related stories from our friends in the media biz.

US senators have passed the final Senate version of a historic healthcare reform bill.

The bill aims to cover 31m uninsured Americans and could lead to the biggest change in US healthcare in decades.

President Barack Obama welcomed it as offering "real and meaningful" reform, saying it was the most important piece of social legislation since the 1930s.

"With today's vote, we are now incredibly close to making health insurance reform a reality in this country."

As a nation, the US spent some $2.2tn (£1.36tn) on healthcare in 2007. That amounts to 16.2% of GDP, nearly twice the average of other rich, industrialised countries.

As costs have spiralled, millions of Americans have found themselves unable to afford health insurance and the cost to the government of providing care for the poor and elderly has risen hugely.

Tea and coffee drinkers have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a large body of evidence shows.

And the protection may not be down to caffeine since decaf coffee has the greatest effect, say researchers in Archives of Internal Medicine.

They looked at 18 separate studies involving nearly 500,000 people.

This analysis revealed that people who drink three or four cups of coffee or tea a day cut their risk by a fifth or more, say researchers.

The same amount of decaffeinated coffee had an even bigger effect, lowering risk by a third.

Fancy a cuppa?

Think small on new year's resolutions

Millions of people fail to fulfil their new year's resolutions because of a faulty approach, suggests a new study.

Prof. Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire conducted a study of 700 people who aimed to achieve several resolutions, such as losing weight, quitting smoking and improving their job qualifications.

He found that only 22 per cent were successful. Those who used commonly recommended approaches such as focusing on the negative implications of not succeeding, removing temptation, having a role model and visualizing about being successful, tended to be unsuccessful.

"Many of these ideas are frequently recommended by self-help experts, but our results suggest that they simply don't work," Wiseman said in a release.

Conversely, people who attained their goals thought small, rather than big, dividing up the steps to achieving their goals into small manageable chunks.

A little bit of something non-medical.

This is somewhat overdue but made me smile when I saw it. The evening before I started my course at medical school (That's right- the night before, my first class took place at 8am the next day) I sang in Handel's Messiah at the BBC proms with a choir I am very proud to be a part of - the RSCM Millennium Youth Choir.

In the audience for this event was one mister Stephen Fry and in the only review that mattered to us that evening posted on his twitter page "Just emerged from triumphant prom Messiah at the RAH. Fabulous young chorus, wonderful. Walking on air"

This was pride enough but even better was a few weeks later when another tweeter (morganritchie) made a drawing several of Stephen's tweets including this one from the 6th September 2009)


You too can follow stephenfry on twitter or visit his website at http://www.stephenfry.com/. Not a bad way to start a medical career methinks - it certainly gave a few talking points for the first week.

The Millennium Youth Choir will next be meeting in February to sing for the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace and then at Easter in Sussex to sing a number of events and record choral evensong for BBC radio at Arundel Cathedral.

A new year.....

The mini-medic has not vanished into oblivion! She has simply been adapting to the perpetual balancing act that is lifeand work as a medical student. As I revise for the first set of practical and written exams in a few weeks time and wave goodbye to the rollercoaster year that was 2009- it seems a good time to pick up the blogging 'pen' and reflect on my first 4 months in medic-land.

Referring to the title of this blog:-

LIFE - well yes, life goes on. Despite the temptation to disappear into a medic shaped bubble- relationships (of every sort- good, bad, romantic, family, new, old, local, long distance) and 'normal' activities (for me it's trampolining, choir singing, and ice skating) will continue and help to keep you sane- mostly!

THE UNIVERSE- Both in the medical world and also in all things, we must look beyond our own doorstep (ok not to the universe perhaps, but nationally and internationally times are a'changin). I still spend a great deal of time keeping up with the new health stories in the news. Swine flu has not wiped us all out as we seemed to expect. The new president is making headway to free healthcare for people in the USA and we'll see on our side of the pond how the NHS will change as a result of the economic state of the world and the effect of a 'possible' new government....

GRAY'S ANATOMY- well, all I can say for starters - there's a lot of it! Our anatomy professor gleefully informed us in week 1 of med school that we were going to double our vocabularies in 3 years with new medical words. In the first lecture alone we began to 'learn the lingo' with around 100 anatomy terms. Add to that all the biochemistry, embryology, and statistics jargon we've had thrown at us this term, the muscles, arteries, veins and nerves of the GI tract which by now should be old hat and I'm starting to believe that professor. Hopefully my brain doesn't have a finite capacity for new words - There's still a LONG way to go...

Oh yeah and then there's GREY'S ANATOMY- I started watching this a few years ago- long before medicine became a realistic possibility, soon to dismiss it as another american soap only loosely rooted in reality. However - looking for a mind-numbing release my boyfriend and I revisited it a few months ago and found it not only enjoyable but also occasionally poignant.
Sure the scripts may wander a little from medical fact but here are a few Grey's anatomy 'truths' that we have found.

• We too are at the bottom of a very long food chain.
• Consultants are there to make our lives hell - but only so we learn from it!
• As mentioned- you can't shut out the real world- personal and professional lives will intertwine in hopefully not too messy way!
• Everyone is keen to get into the 'real doctor stuff' asap - but equally terrorfied killing someone!
• Yes - most doctors are in a relationship/married to doctors!

Gotta love a bit of mindless soap sometimes :-)