The First10EM monthly (or I guess seasonal this time) wrap up is a place for me to share updates about the website, about my academic life, and also interesting content, such as books, podcasts, and other FOAMed, that I have encountered in the prior month. Obviously the format means the focus is mostly on content I have found, but I hope the community gets engaged in the comments, sharing books, podcasts, FOAMed, or anything else that you think would benefit or delight the broader emergency medicine community.
Despite mostly taking the summer off, there were a couple YouTube Videos posted:
Massive hemorrhage: A DEEP dive into the transfusion evidence
Andexanet alfa is expensive and harmful (do not prescribe)
I am not great at tracking the podcasts I have recorded, but you can definitely check out the SGEM podcast on gestalt for sepsis, the BroomeDocs podcast, and Emergency Medicine Cases.
What I am reading
I really enjoyed Anathem by Neal Stephenson, although I feel like it might have jumped the shark for me at some point. It is a long science fiction book steeped in philosophy, and it had the opportunity to be truly great, but I just wasn’t sold on the final fifth of the story.
I continued the trend from the last few months of reading lots of John Scalzi, with the much suggested Old Man’s War. I like the basic premise of this book (I won’t ruin it), and it is more easy reading, fun science fiction, although definitely not high end literature. It was good enough that I immediately read the next 2 books in the series – The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony – and I enjoyed both, but have not yet picked up the remaining 3 books of the series, and it is possible this is a series I will leave incomplete.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib is probably not a book I would have picked up on my own, but I am very glad it was gifted to me. It is a beautifully written exploration of life through the lens of basketball. Not for everyone, but basketball fans who like beautiful and challenging prose will definitely enjoy this.
Although there are some problems and omissions in the overall argument of this book, I can understand why Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond won a Pulitzer prize. It is a historical look at why Eurasia ended up with the guns, germs, and steel that allowed them to decimate other cultures in recent history, and the general answer is geographic luck focused on the fauna and flora that generated the most successful agriculture.
You will notice that I read a lot of books that Weingart recommends. We have similar tastes, and so books listed in his emails often find their way onto my reading list. Oddly, despite appearing in his most recent email, I had already started reading the Suneater series, and it is fantastic. The first book is Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio, but the person who recommended the series to me said that the third book is the best, and they aren’t quick reads, so expect this series to dominate this section for the next little bit.
Interesting media
This article, “The staggering death toll of scientific lies. Scientific fraud kills people. Should it be illegal?”, is a must read for followers of First10EM. We talk a lot about p-hacking, bias, and fraud, and the various reasons that you should be cautious in your interpretations of the medical literature. We take it for granted that big pharmaceutical companies are trying to lie to us with data. But when you really consider the tremendous harm to patients that arises from fraudulent data, it is hard not to get angry. This article asks whether we need stronger repercussions for these actions.
I love it when things that seem simple in real life are not actually understood by science. It reminds you to slow down and really question your assumptions. Did you know that until very recently, we had no idea why ice is slippery? At the complete other end of the spectrum are crazy questions about what happens in situations we will never encounter, like what happens to physics when you reach pressures as extreme as those in the centre of Neptune or the Sun?
Apparently the basic mass of a proton doesn’t make any sense? A proton is made up of 3 quarks, and the total weight of the quarks is about 9 MeV. The proton, made of these 3 quarks, has a mass of about 938 MeV. Usually, 9 is not equal to 938, but apparently inside a nucleus it sort of is? This is because the model of the proton involving 3 quarks is a dramatically oversimplified model. In fact, things apparently are constantly coming in and out of existence inside a proton. In one experiment, a charm quark was observed inside a proton, but a charm quark has a mass of 3100 MeV, which is much heavier than the proton itself. Yeah, if you thought evidence based medicine was complicated, don’t bother with quantum mechanics. Anyhow, all of that is a long winded way of saying that I have really been enjoying the Crash Course “The Universe” podcast, which is really not surprising, because I think I have suggested literally everything created by either Hank or John Green at some point.
Any essay that starts with the quote “I love nearly all my specialists, but sometimes I just want to roll up a newspaper, lightly bonk them on the nose, and say, “NO! Baaaaad consultant. No!” is going to be an entertaining read, even if it is purely cathartic.
A evolution song set to rage against the machine? Not sure why this tickled me so much, but probably the fatigue of 7 shifts in a row.
I am not sure how “interesting” this really is, but I have really enjoyed this 7 day a week solar powered livestream from Alaska that just shows a waterfall where there are almost always grizzly bears hunting for salmon. Me and my boy love to sit and watch these bears together. Just feels like a good use of the internet:
Quotes or Thoughts
Easy to spot a yellow car when you are always thinking of a yellow car.
Easy to spot opportunity when you are always thinking of opportunity.
Easy to spot reasons to be mad when you are always thinking of being mad.
You become what you constantly think about. Watch yourself.
“Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.” – Mario Quintana
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” – Viktor Frankl
“Learning is a gift, even when pain is your teacher!” ― Michael Jordan
