Of course I don’t mean on the wards when the consultant is grilling you about various anatomical landmarks or the eight underlying causes of a myocardial infarction; the latter being the constant recitations of the fictional F2 doctor on Casualty ‘Yuki’ during his first day in the ED. Knowledge of basic and clinical sciences is of course a necessary and important prerequisite of being a good doctor.

I’m talking about your own health. The more I know about how my body works, the more I worry every time I feel the slightest possible (pseudo)symptom. It’s gone from extremely silly things like refraining from eating a third banana in a day for fear of becomming hyperkalaemic (raised blood potassium) and potentiating the risk of cardiac arrhyhthmias, to my own self-admission into A&E yesterday evening because I cut my toe rowing and was worried I may have become infected and possibly caught Weil’s disease (which to my dismay the A&E doctor in the Minor Injuries unit didn’t know about and had to use Wikipedia, I kid you not, to find out more about it!).

Thus it only occurred to me yesterday that the purpose of studying epidemiology of disease was, in fact, to put perspective on all the pathophysiology you learn in the pre-clinical years. So when the helpful doctor yesterday pointed out that, according to Wikipedia, Leptospirosis is a “relatively rare bacterial infection in humans” and that Weil’s is an extremely rare complication, it would therefore be extremely unlikely that, through the tiny 5mm cut on my big toe that wasn’t particularly deep (even if it was bleeding rather rapidly), I would have caught an infection. Perhaps I should pay more attention when I hear the word epidemiology in a lecture, else I may well have found the ninth risk factor for a myocardial infarction!

I’m talking about tradition. There are now five London medical schools (reduced down from fourteen or so due to various mergers) — Barts and the London (QMUL), Guy’s King’s and St. Thomas’s (KCL), Royal Free & University College (UCL), Imperial College (IC) and of course, St. George’s (SGUL). Each one of these medical schools has their own distinct character and with that comes the endless rivalry and banter that emerges at every inter-school competition!

As a rower, this was all too evident at Bumps. For those unfamiliar, the object of the game is to bump the crew ahead of you (to bump UP a place), but to avoid being bumped by the crew behind you (getting bumped DOWN a place!). It’s a tradition of the London medical schools that has stretched back for decades, but is one that still goes strong today.

The feeling of friendly rivalry and banter was not dissimilar to that experienced by the interhouse competitions you’d get at school, making the entire experience so enjoyable. At the end of the night, when the results were being announced, we all yelled our medical schools’ songs every time our medical school was mentioned and and booed hysterically when the other evil medical schools would be mentioned! This was all before, of course, the infamous afterparty that no-one seemed to remember very much of!

It just seems that this amount of banter and rivalry makes London probably the most ‘fun’ place to study medicine, than perhaps the other places around the UK without many schools in one place, and it’s why I love London!

I leave you with an excerpt of October 2004′s Medical Student newspaper, page 8-9, portraying the stereotypes behind each of the London Medical schools…

Imperial College School of Medicine: “The Nerds” (never seen without: prescription glasses)

Barts and the London: “The Morons” (never seen without: Bag o’ skunk)

St. George’s: “The Loners” (never seen without: rape alarm)

Guy’s, King’s and St. Thomas’s: “The Rudes” (never seen without: zig-zag sideburns)

Royal Free & University College: “The Dandies” (never seen without: scarf fluttering gaily in the wind)

……. and of course for completeness, the George’s song!

I don’t want to go to Mary’s
I don’t want to go to Bart’s
And they say the Royal Free, is not the place to be
And Tommie’s is a place for high-born fairies
UCL is a dump in central London
King’s is a hovel on the strand
I’d rather go to George’s,
Merry, Merry George’s
‘Cos George’s is the finest in the land ‘Cor Blimey!

… you love it or you hate it.

I deactivated my Facebook account for three whole days. That’s right, from the 21st of January until the 24th January, I pressed the deactivate button, making myself scarce around the website. Why would I do, what some of my friends would have called it, virtual suicide?

I was as close to an addict as one could possibly be. I’d sit down at my desk, flicking through my pharmacology textbook. After about five minutes, I’d think, what’s going on on Facebook? So I’d open my laptop, open Safari and navigate to the Facebook website. And then I’d see a plethora of notifications, app requests, photo tags, the list goes on and on. So I realised, it had to go if I had any hope of passing these formative exams that were coming up.

Maybe I’m just being a technophobe and I should be embracing the development of the internet, but sometimes you can’t help but wonder whether technology can go too far — whether Facebook (and other social networking sites for that matter) permit new social norms that wouldn’t exist in real life. However, anyone who knows me in real life would know I’m anything but a technophobe, sporting a Blackberry and relying on constant communication.

Facebook has created another world that rungs alongside real life. Gone are the days where communication was a private thing between two or more people — the advent of “wall-to-wall” enables your conversations to be broadcast to all your friends (and other stalkers depending on your privacy settings!). It’s like having conversations to each other using megaphones. Others can then look into your conversations. And now that the Facebook layout has changed, you get bombarded with people’s wall-to-wall conversations just by logging on!!

We’re now at a stage where people’s social lives revolve around Facebook. Events get advertised on Facebook. People create a profile for themselves which they present themselves to the world with — the new “first impression” (c.f. the traditional first impression from meeting someone in person). They then get tagged in various photos in all sorts of compromising situations (c.f. the embarassing rumours that get spread from person to person). Facebook is like an online virtual society that runs parallel to real life. It’s not healthy.

So why haven’t I left, I hear you cry? Because at the moment we’re in too deep. To be out of Facebook at university is like locking yourself in your room at halls. You miss out on planned events. You miss out on a vast channel of communication that you can exploit if you’re not personal enough to exhange phone numbers!

So I think I’ve found a solution that seems to work. I haven’t logged on to Facebook on the computer for a while yet I’ve still been in touch. Facebook on my Blackberry strips down Facbeook to the bare essentials — wall posts and messaging. It reduces Facebook down to a tool for communication, alongside E-mail and texting, stripping out the riff raff that comes with it — a gossip pool known as the “home page”, countless sheep-throwing requests, and the like.

Granted it’s not the most ideal solution and I do long for the day the Facebook craze passes, because frankly, while it was good in the beginning, I’m just getting sick and tired of it.

Someone please help me get back on track as these exams, unlike my previous ones, are summative – they actually count!!

Suggestions on a postcard… or feel free to comment!!

Ever played Metal Gear Solid? Remember the sound that played when you got caught by the enemy?

Set this as your ringtone whenever you receive a new text message.

Now try receiving one when you’re working silently in your room…

I lose the lid of my favourite pen that I bought from France (don’t mock, I love my stationary :p).

I miss the first couple of lectures and come in for the tutorial which I later realised I’m not a part of.

I had to fill in a form online detailing my comments on my exam performance during the last semester. I finished it, then accidentally pressed the back button. Surprise surprise, the boxes were all empty again when I pressed forward.

The night however is still young. These are all fairly minor annoyances which just all happen to be on the same day as Friday 13th. What on earth makes this day so unlucky anyway? Answers on a postcard please.

Obviously it’s important to recognise the relevance of psychological and social factors of disease as well as the underlying science behind it but I guess my beef lies with the fact it is worth too much of my final grade and shouldn’t be taught artificially and at the expense of basic medical and clinical sciences.

I may just be ranting though as it’s Friday afternoon, i’m hungry, and this lecture is really really boring!

Rules forcing internet companies to keep details of every e-mail sent in the UK are a waste of money and an attack on civil liberties, say critics.

From March all internet service providers (ISPs) will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year.

Human rights group Liberty says it is worried what will happen next.

The Home Office insists the data, which does not include e-mails’ content, is vital for crime and terror inquiries.

Some three billion e-mails are thought to be sent each day in the UK.

BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7819230.stm), Friday 9th January 2008

So the government now plans to store details of every single E-mail that is sent in the United Kingdom through the country’s ISP servers. This is alleged to be vital for crime and terror inquiries.

What on earth is going on in this country? With the ID cards, an infinite number of CCTV cameras, a DNA database and now the government snooping on every E-mail being sent, the government really are trying to curb every last right to privacy we have. The devils advocate would say that “if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide”. Frankly I am sick of this argument because it reverses one of the traditions that we fight so hard to preserve — innocent until proven guilty. It seems we’re getting closer to a world where we’ll all be guilty until proven innocent.

Besides, I wouldn’t want data about every E-mail I send to be stored on a CD that goes missing in transit…

Hopefully you haven’t stumbled across this blog from typing something controversial into Google. Well, by definition, you couldn’t have, as this is my first post, and I haven’t said anything too controversial (yet)! So why should you stay longer than the fifteen seconds of fame that you are witnessing by reading this post?

When I’m not busy digging into Gray’s Anatomy (and it hasn’t been happening that much lately), I tend to babble on about all things, medical or non-medical. As you do. So that’s primarily what this blog is for!

OK so it wasn’t exactly an enticing opening but maybe you should watch this space. Who knows? As a wise couple said on a hit Disney film produced not too long ago, “This could be the start, of something new…”