Docs and Dark Humor

Greetings, all! It's Sunday, and I'm sitting at my computer here in Manhattan, watching the rain come down. I was supposed to go camping this weekend, but the Weather Channel foiled my plans. They were prediciting Armageddon out there, five and six inches of rain with severe thunderstorms and major floods. As a doc with wilderness medicine training, I decided it would be foolish to head out with that sort of weather on the way. Well, actually, I decided it would be embarassing to get caught out in it, get hit by lightning or washed away in a torrent, and wind up on the front page of the newspaper. I could just hear fellow camping enthusiasts going "that idiot, should have known better..."

So here I am at home, watching what's little more than a light drizzle, no thunder or lightning, sun peeking through now and then, and I'm thinking evil thoughts at the meteorologists.

Anyway.

Since I'm in a dark mood, today's post will deal with dark humor: the painful, even cruel, things that make docs fall over laughing.

It starts in med school. Everyday activity and conversation deal with things you'd never imagine saying or doing in the ordinary world. When reviewing for exams in the local coffee shop, one's anatomy textbook invariably falls open to the pages on penises. The shape, smell, and quantity of feces--important in diagnosing certain digestive problems as well as some cancers--becomes a topic of dinner conversation.

And then there's anatomy lab. Death ceases to be a frightening mystery and becomes a part of daily life. And nothing can remain sacred when you deal with it every day, not even a corpse. Confronted with the visceral horror of severed limbs being carried past on the way to the sink for a good rinse... it wouldn't be cool to shrink away or cry. It's not macho to run away screaming. Remaining silent somehow doesn't seem an option. And so we laugh.

We laugh at each other. We assign psychiatric diagnoses to ourselves, our friends, our teachers. We laugh at our textbooks. We make fun of the writing, the photos, the descriptions of microscopic findings and major diseases. And we laugh at our patients. "He said what?" "You won't believe what this guy did." We even give them nicknames. I still giggle every time I see a garden gnome.

After med school? It just gets worse.

If you've never worked in the medical field, I doubt you can imagine some of the things we laugh at--or why we think they're funny. Sometimes I get up from rolling on the floor with laughter and think, "my god, I can't believe I find that amusing."

Want a better idea of what makes doctors pee our pants? Check out the Placebo Journal, a monthly mag created by a doc and filled with contributions from doctors, dentists, nurses, paramedics, and other health professionals. Just remember: it's for us, by us. Don't come after me--or them--if you're offended. It's not that we don't care about you, or that we take disease and suffering lightly. It's just that laughing is what keeps us sane.

Urban Legends and Other Hoaxes

I'm all moved in to my new place in New York! The boxes are unpacked (well, all except for that one in the corner), the kitchen organized (except for the fact that I can't reach anything on the top shelves), and the curtains up (although later today I have to see about hanging blinds, because I'm not QUITE sure my sheer white curtains aren't transparent from the outside). In general, though, I'm now officially a New Yorker!

Now, on to those medical "facts" that are floating around the internet and shared at dinner tables everywhere.

How can you tell if a medical story is true or just an urban legend? Should you believe that e-mail from your best friend's mom? What about the story you heard from your neighbor, or the medical disaster that supposedly happened to your co-worker's cousin? I know of two web sites that do a great job of tracking modern myths. They print the original e-mail, article, or story and then reveal what is or isn't true. Both sites cite their sources, so you can double-check their research.

When I get one of those "health warning!" emails, I usually turn first to the Urban Legends page on About.com. I almost always find the story I'm looking for, along with a well-researched response. I've noticed some lower-quality entries lately, with information I felt the need to double check--but since the articles offer links to other reports and experts' sites, About.com is still a good place to start.

Snopes.com is maintained by a husband-and-wife team who've made it their mission to track and investigate urban myths. The site owners check the stories' validity and provide all their sources at the end of each article. The site is extensive, and the writing is good and usually feels balanced. If there's some truth to the story, Snopes.com will let you know.

Scambusters.com, which publishes a free newsletter on internet fraud, also has a section on Urban Legends. The site claims to tell you if a story is true or not. It's a fun place to visit if you're curious about what's out there, but the entries are brief and no sources are given.

By the way, in case you were wondering... No, you're not likely to contract necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria) from imported Costa Rican bananas. Yes, there actually is a reported case of someone dying as a result of eating outdated pancake mix. It's in the September, 2000, issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. As for the rumor that deodorant causes breast cancer... the truth is, researchers aren't quite sure if there's a connection, or what it might be. Check here for the National Cancer Institute's take.