Humor aplasia

On the old blog, I outlined an encounter with Dr. Attending during my psych rotation which posited that Dr. Attending did not have a sense of humor. Well I recently learned that this phenomenon is not limited to the world of psychiatry.

Dr. Attending ended IM morning report with a discussion of "evidence based medicine," which in layman's terms means "don't do anything unless other people have done it first." Through a series of tangents and several lorzepam, Dr. Attending landed on the subject of The Placebo Effect. At that point the following exchange occurred:

Dr. Attending: The placebo effect is very powerful, and evidence to support it has indirectly shown up in eastern medicine for thousands of years. The problem is, nobody will do any studies to prove it because there is nothing you can patent so nobody stands to gain.
Montgomery: Yeah, and if you're testing the placebo effect, what would you use as a control group?

Well the other student laughed and the FP intern laughed (I like FP docs, they're usually happy), but the resident and the attending...not so much. In fact, Dr. Attending literally fired icy daggers at me with his eyes. Tough crowd.

I like to think I'm learning a lot about the practice of medicine during my third year, but at the very least I'm spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to polish my stand-up routine.

And one for the road
My patient had neutropenia, which means he didn't have some of the cells necessary to fight infection. When you get a blood count, it'll show the number of segs (more mature) and bands (less mature) neutrophils. Well, Mr. Patient has almost no segs. Which prompted me to say, "sounds like he has seg agenesis." That's bad even for me, good thing I just mumbled it.