This afternoon, I’ll go into clinic for the second time. I’ll observe a student dentist (or hygiene student) go through a full patient appointment. You have to check the patient’s chart, understand underlying medical conditions, scan for drug conflicts, meet the patient, find out why the patient is there, determine recent changes in their medical history, consult with specialists about treatment plans, possibly do some treatment, take radiographs, explain things to the patient, obtain consent, plan the time of the next visit, and on and on.
I definitely feel confident in my hand skills… but that’s a small part of the entire visit. There is so much to learn.
I’m nervous for the first time I do this solo, which could be within a week. I’m not good at small talk… but I still need to practice. So, “yes” to small talk… but not too much, since I could put myself in a conversational cul-de-sac. I feel a little low on the knowledge required to do a great job at this. I realize that’s why we’ll be doing this for the next 2 and a half years… but I really would prefer to get some more observing experience in before I see my first patient.
Oh, and if you do want to come in for an appointment with me, send me a message and the school will get you in.
Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry
about my hair; it’s always been that way.
I enjoy both Leno and Conan (additionally, Jimmy Fallon’s show could mature into a great asset). But NBC has royally screwed up their entire late night schedule. If Leno wasn’t ready to retire, they should’ve let things be for a while… Leno at 11:35, followed by Conan… and then they chould have put Jimmy Fallon on after that. But this quagmire looks like it is going to kill off the institution of ‘The Tonight Show’, Conan’s career, and poor Jimmy Fallon’s show (still in its infancy). What a mess.
Gail Collins is quite funny; more so than I realized. Take a look at her recent column “The Wizard With a Bad Plan”
I would like to offer two comments about this. One is
that professional athletes should not Twitter. I got this
thought from Ashley Mayo, a student at the Columbia
Journalism School, who showed me an essay that she had
written on the subject, which included a tweet from one
of the Indiana Pacers containing the good news that he
had begun the day with a triumph over irregularity.
In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients
with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief
from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using
advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the
connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and
their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers
feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost.
Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the
future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only
the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests
that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits
of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses
of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.
Elliott Marcus, an associate commissioner of the health
department, said that he knew where the trouble spots
were. “It’s these high-end places for people who think
that the rules don’t apply to them,” he said.
Let me tell you about a mistake I’ve made: at some point in your life, you’ll think the rules don’t apply to you. This is probably not true. It certainly wasn’t for me. So don’t get cocky.
I always love these articles about “costly signaling” — the pursuit of real, not-fakable signals of your mating fitness. Take a look at Sex and shopping – it’s a guy thing - New Scientist (emphasis mine):
The results here were equally clear: men in the mating
condition, compared with the non-mating condition, said
they would spend more money on the conspicuous luxuries,
and that they would actually spend less on the
inconspicuous necessities; there was no effect on female
consumption decisions. In contrast, women in the mating
condition, compared with those in the non-mating
condition, said they would spend more time on conspicuous
pro-social volunteering, but no more time on the
inconspicuous pro-social activities. Again, there was no
effect on male volunteering.
In the age of advanced makeup and cosmetic surgery, physical fitness is still a great example of costly signaling. Consider men: “Hey look, I have the time, money, baseline health, and motivation to take care of my body” is quite obvious to even the casual observer and can not be faked by gastric bypass weight loss surgery. Or consider this: ownership of expensive things can not be faked… at least not in the long run. For women: you can’t fake volunteering — it’s a binary thing, you’re either out there or you aren’t.
I don’t think the conclusions of these four studies should be taken as final, gospel truth, but they are a good starting point for thinking about the different ways women and men signal one another. A particularly interesting conclusion from one of the studies: women looking for a short term relationship are swayed by the car a man drives, but those looking for a long term partner tend not to care about the care he drives.
Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult
education, she says. Instead, continued brain development
and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump
up against people and ideas” that are different. In a
history class, that might mean reading multiple
viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by
reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view
of the world.
Confronting people with whom you disagree will only raise your blood pressure — but absorbing, internalizing, and critiquing ideas that run orthogonal to the “well-trodden paths in [your] synapses” will keep your brain’s abilities honed.
HTMLGIANT’s Grammar Challenge, courtesy of David Foster Wallace, is composed of ten of the most difficult grammar questions I have ever attempted to answer. Mykala and I worked on it together and got… some answers correct. If the sentence “I only spent six weeks in Napa” looks wrong to you, then take a look at the remaining sentences!
Reading the New Yorker (thanks, Katy!) with the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window may be the single best way to spend an hour of a cold winter afternoon.