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..................................................... Problem: Over the years, many medical students have talked to me about their stress. But so have undergraduate students, interns, residents, fellows, and practicing physicians—leading me to wonder if medical students' stress was actually extraordinary. I remember my medical school days as moderately stressful, but, as my wife points out, I was somewhat insulated during medical school because I already had a family, had left behind another career, and was older. Her perspective is wise, as I have learned from a recent paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine that looked at stress and its consequences in U.S. medical students.read more
Buddhist Stalkers, Orphan Con Men
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| today's papers: A summary of what's in the major U.S. newspapers. Get Out of Town
With Labor Day weekend upon us, it's time for Americans to sit back and reflect on important questions like, "Is it really worth five hours in the car to spend two nights at the beach?" At the Atlantic's Daily Dish blog, Jonah Lehrer writes that no matter how hellish the traffic is, the answer is yes. Research shows that even the idea of far-off places can have a measurable impact on creativity, imagination, and our ability to solve problems. Indiana students who were asked to do a task devised by other students in Indiana came up with fewer and less imaginative responses than those told their task was devised by Indiana students studying abroad in Greece. It appears that proximity to a problem narrows our response to it, meaning that thinking outside the box sometimes requires getting outside our comfort zones. Read original story in The Atlantic | Saturday, 5 Sep 2009 Will Obama's Speech Revive the Public Option?
President Obama will address a joint session of Congress in hopes of rescuing health care reform, the debate over which devolved during the August legislative recess into partisan bickering. Few details of the speech, which Politco has called Obama's "riskiest effort to date," have emerged since the plans for the address were announced Wednesday, but pundits and reporters are taking their best guesses. White House senior adviser David Axelrod told reporters that the speech will be "the best way to kick off the final discussions, the final debate," and that listeners "will have a clear sense of what he proposes and what health care reform is not." Such comments lead the Associated Press to conclude that Obama is giving up hope for a bipartisan bill and that he'll begin to take a more hands-on approach to shaping the bill. The White House's meetings with Maine's moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe has others guessing that the government-run "public option" is under consideration again. Snowe has considered the public option as a backup proposal to force insurers to lower their rates, and, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein notes, "Snowe could pretty much write the bill at this point" since she's one of the few pro-reform Republicans with little to lose. Yet the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus says that the White House is warning reformers that it will no longer support the public option. In his comments about Obama's speech to Congress, Axelrod stayed on the fence, saying the public option important but not whether would be necessary for a final bill, according to the Associated Press.
Read original story in Associated Press | Thursday, 3 Sep 2009 More Combat Troops for AfghanistanAs many as 14,000 combat troops could replace support units in Afghanistan in an effort to increase the number of "trigger-pullers" while not actually increasing the total number of American troops in an unpopular war. Although no one thinks this will replace what is a virtually certain request for additional troops from the top American commander, it could end up making it smaller. Officials say that before more troops are requested, the military wants to make sure that every servicemember in Afghanistan is essential and can't be replaced by private contractors. It's hardly surprising that defense officials would want to increase the number of combat troops to fight an enemy that has improved its tactics by exploiting weaknesses in the Western forces, as the Washington Post notes. Still, it's a tricky proposition to increase the number of private workers at a time when the number of civilian contractors in Afghanistan makes up the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel of any war in the country's history. Yesterday, a government watchdog group said the private contractors who guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul have engaged in "lewd and deviant" behavior. According to the Project on Government Oversight, the guards worked in a "Lord of the Flies environment" where supervisors held weekly parties that included lots of homoerotic hazing sessions—including urinating on each other and drinking vodka poured off exposed butts—and those who didn't participate feared they would lose their jobs. Gawker has some disturbing photographic evidence. In other Afghanistan news, the country's deputy chief of intelligence was killed in a suicide blast today and a U.N. report says opium cultivation has declined for the second year in a row. The amount of poppy cultivation decreased by 22 percent, and one-third of Afghanistan's territory is considered to be virtually opium-free.
Read original story in Los Angeles Times | Wednesday, 2 Sep 2009 |
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Old and Fat
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