Quack hacks

So I've been surfing the productivity blogosphere while.....procrastinating on my work. Ferric, innit.

HAHA ferric, ironic, geddit? I will go kill myself now. We only children have to amuse ourselves.

Did you know there is a significant proportion of the human (hipster) population addicted to Moleskine notebooks? (googling "Moleskine porn" came up with this) I would be one of them, but I'm too stingy. My friend did give me this bright red silk one for my birthday once, which I used as my Vietnam travel journal. A little red book in one of the last bastions of Communism, oh the wittiness! They are sexy though. Not communists, Moleskines. Well I'm sure there are some sexy communists. Fidel does it for me.

I had a point somewhere...the productivity and the lifehacking blogosphere. Apparently there are shitload of blogs telling people how to improve their lives every day in every way. Came across a post by Scott H. Young about holistic learning, which involves interlinking ideas between subjects and understanding the concepts behind knowledge by visceralisation and metaphor. Food for thought indeed, cos I feel I've lost the knack of studying deeply and internalising concepts. I wondered if his ideas could be applied to the study of medicine, which has a lot of rote memorisation and arbitrary info (looking at you, anatomical pathology).

But the gist I took from it was that medicine shouldn't be as hard as it is. It's just that the teaching, both in books and lectures, is horrible. Just one effing thing after another. Often no overviews of the topic, no attempt to present narrative and links rather than bare facts. People don't think in lists! The only thing I've come across that is remotely sensible is the Made Ridiculously Simple series which has silly cartoons and visual mnemonics (eg. the spider of Willis).

So, an idea for a blog: Quack Hacks, or Medicine for Dummies. Med is the combination of a number of disciplines, each of which can be deconstructed and which have their own tricks. Pharmacology, for example- I wish I'd been told at the beginning that all you really have to know at first/second year level is name, mechanism, uses and side effects (inc contraindications and interactions). And for the blocks we're doing this semester, neuro/endo/psych, drugs can be grouped by neurotransmitter, mechanism or disease. I haven't figured things out in other areas yet, like biochemistry, which is a blur of cycles and loops. Wtf.

Yeah, no good ending here. Go back to drooling over Chairman Mao, that fox.