These Are A Few of My Favorite Things

Reading back through my old blog posts (because that's a really good use of my time right now...), I realized I have a bit of an obsession with naming.  Besides all the other names of diseases/procedures/etc. which I have proclaimed to be my favorite name, I have two new favorites:

The first is Rickettsia rickettsii, the bug so nice they named it twice! (It causes Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a disease endemic to the East Coast, go figure.)

The second is a finding in syphilis called the Argyll Robertson pupil aka the prostitute's pupil - the pupil constricts with accommodation, but not in response to light.  So it accommodates but does not react, and has syphilis.... just. like. prostitutes.

Whipple Part I

Unlike those lucky people who only need to hear things once to learn them, I need time to digest material before it enters my brain.  In med school, that means listening to a lecture, going home and typing up all my notes I took during the lecture, and then organizing my typed notes into a way that makes sense for me - categorizing, or making charts, or combining info from related lectures, just something that makes the information my own.  That, as you might imagine, takes a fair bit of time.

Because of our schedule, there's not a whole lot of extra time outside of listening to lectures and going to mandatory labs and discussions to study extra.  That's fine, it is what it is - med school's supposed to be busy, right?  But for me that means that I'm not going to have a really good grasp on most of the material until the weekend before the exam when we have full days (or at least half-days) to really study.  And I don't think I'm alone in this.

George Hoyt Whipple is...

But I don't think professors really understand that some of us need actual time to learn the information.  So when we learn about something called Whipple Disease at the beginning of the week, and then later in the week we learn about something called Whipple Procedure, chances are most of us are not going to realize that we just learned about Whipple twice.

...not the same as Allen Oldfather Whipple

During the second lecture, when we learned about the procedure, the professor pointed out that it was actually named for a different Whipple than the disease.  Rather than thinking, "My, what an interesting fact" or "There are two people named Whipple who were good enough doctors to get something named after them?!" all I could think was, "That's cute that he thinks we remember a disease that we learned three whole days ago."







Fun fact: the non-eponymous name for the Whipple procedure is pancreaticoduodenectomy - maybe the only time the eponym is actually easier to remember than the real name?

Extreme Eponyms

Here's your cake, Tissue Factor.  I hope you enjoy it.

There is only one thing in this whole world that is worse than eponyms (seriously only one thing - and it's not genocide or natural disasters, that stuff is mere child's play).  The worst thing in the world is things with more than one name.  You should never have to use "aka" more than once in reference to a single substance.  As if the coagulation cascade (all the many many steps that lead to the formation of a blood clot) isn't complicated enough, all the involved factors have at least two names.  The one that really takes the cake, though, is tissue factor aka thromboplastin aka factor III.  Why oh why must we fill the precious real estate in our brains with so many teeny tiny details?  [You also know it's bad when before a professor introduces a new molecule, such as Gp2b-3a, he prefaces it by saying, "Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't do the naming."]



More curious about where "take the cake" comes from than about the coagulation cascade?  Me too.  Read all about it's origins here.  One clue:

It's a cakewalk...  it's a cakewalk.

Listen to your friend, Billy Zane. He's a cool dude.

Eponyms Part II

I am one of the biggest complainers I know. It generally takes a LOT of effort to avoid making this blog a cry-fest-woe-is-me-pity-part (I put so much effort into making it positiveeeee, feel bad for me for all the work I put innnnn). Just kidding :)

But seriously, I do recognize that I complain a lot - even if they are usually legitimate complaints, no one really wants to hear them, I totally get it.



So when something POSITIVE happens in my study world, I feel like I should share it with you. Remember this post where I told you how much I hate eponyms? I still hate them, don't worry. But I've finally found it - the anti-eponym. The. Best. Disease. Name. Ever.


Before revealing the name of this disease, let me first describe it to you:

It is a syndrome in which ADH (Anti-Diuretic Hormone) is secreted from your body at inappropriate times, leading to various symptoms due to too much ADH released when it shouldn't be.



Ready for the name?


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Are you sure?


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Really ready?


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Drumroll please....

Syndrome of Inappropriate ADH Secretion

Could that be any more descriptive? A syndrome where ADH is secreted inappropriately - it's the name AND the description!


Compare that to a disease like Bartlett Syndrome - without using the internet, I'll give you 500 guesses to figure out what the problem is (med students who just took the renal exam, you don't get to guess). It's impossible, right? Not so with the Syndrome of Inappropriate ADH Secretion - I bet you could guess it on your first try!

And so I repeat: best disease name ever. Other diseases, you could learn a lot.



[note: in no way do I want to make light of the disease itself - it's just that I want to find whoever named it and give them a big hug]