This is the 300th post on the EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog. Woot… please drop me a line and let me know how I’m doing!
Medical and dental students have one more exam to complete, and then will have a few well-deserved weeks of vacation. They may even have time to read for pleasure.
A brief article entitled “Textbook Death Watch“posted on Tech & Learning (May 1 2009) caught my eye, and that prompted an search-expedition for open access libraries of digital works available to anyone to use. The list below is not meant to be inclusive… only representative.
A related article on the Wired section (free to all) from the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 13 2009) discusses the migration from ‘real’ books to digital archives at University of Oklahoma: at this link. An article published in the Washington Post (May 19 2009) about the scope, reach and legal considerations of Google Books is worth a read.
A classic and long-lived source for E-Books: the Project Guttenberg website where 28,000 online books are available at no cost.
WOWIO is a site for free texts, comics and graphics novels. Their About page states that it is “…the only source where readers can legally access high-quality copyrighted ebooks from leading publishers for free. Readers have access to a wide range of offerings, including works of classic literature, college textbooks, comic books, and popular fiction and non-fiction titles. “
Planet E-Book provides online access to over 60 classic books.
Bartleby.com is a true E-reference site, stocking many diverse works from writing guides, fiction, non-fiction, encyclopedias, verse and poetry, quotations – even Emily Post’s Etiquette.
University of VirginiaEText Center: Collections provides access to 2,100 works. There is also a Subject Collections page, such as a collection of Early American Fiction or the works of Shakespeare.
Faculty atCarnegie Mellon University have played an integral part in the creation of the Universal Digital Library which provides access to over 1,000,000 open-access books in a dozen languages, with mirror sites in China, Egypt and India.
A list of “Life Changing Books” recommended by readers came from OpenCulture (published Aug 19 2007). Note: The titles are linked to Amazon but some of these titles on the list are in the public domain and available through several of the E-book sites shown above (i.e., open access).
Good Reads is a valuable website – type in a book title or author, and the site will “suggest” similar works. For example, here is a list of novels about “Magical Realism” novels suggested by readers.
Dreaming Methods describes itself as “a fusion of writing and atmospheric new media that explores digital storytelling, imaginary memories and dream-inspired states“. And their List of Links to other literary sites is worth visiting.
We Tell Stories(digital fiction from Penguin Books UK) is part novel, part Google Maps.
Yearning to write your own novel? Visit National Novel Writing Month if you think you can write 50,000 words in 30 days.
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Finally, two sites not for enjoying literature as much as for savoring historical images.
Image Credit: http://www.lifeinwesternpa.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Calisphere (a digital library project for the State of California, hosted by the University of California-Berkeley), which is where I found this beautiful image (circa 1945):
Sorry for the considerable absence of blogging lately – it’s the end of the academic year and things have been piling up.
Here’s the Friday Post #33 for May 29, 2009. And if it doesn’t stop raining every day here in Connecticut (and soon), more than a few of us are going to start to yell and scream!
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Part literary magazine/part interesting blog written by students from Northwestern University, here is an excerpt from a recent article on NorthbyNorthwestern, commenting on the precarious state of the current economy:
“ It comes as a huge surprise, then, that in the single most severe financial plunge since the Great Depression we, myself included, are more familiar with Facebook’s layout changes than with the principal events that truly affect our lives. It might not seem to matter to us just yet, but there will come a time when our own ignorance is going to bite us in the ass…. “
” The life of a sick person can be shortened not only by the acts, but
also by the words or the manner, of a physician. It is therefore a
sacred duty to guard himself carefully in this respect. ”
—American Medical Association, Code of Medical Ethics, 1847
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Physicians are trained to seek a cure for their patients, to deliver treatments, to act promptly yet with deliberation; much less time is spent during graduate medical education on how to deliver bad news to a patient or their family.
Unfortunately, communications about treatment failure, impending death or options for end-of-life care – including emotional or psychosocial issues – can be delivered by the physician in an incomplete, ambiguous or unintentionally insensitive manner.
Poorly chosen words complicate an already emotional and anxiety-charged scenario for the patient or their loved ones. Counseling family members after an unexpected or traumatic death is even more difficult for the care provider.
UCSF physician Stephen Z. Pantilat wrote a practical, thoughtful essay about doctor-patient communications at end of life, entitled “Communicating with Seriously Ill Patients: Better Words to Say“. It was published in JAMA on Mar 25 2009 (Vol. 301, Issue 12, page 1279-1281). (Note: Subscription necessary to view the text.)
Following is an excerpt from Dr. Pantilat’s article:
” Words matter. What clinicians say and how they say it hugely affects patients. Communicating about emotionally and medically complex topics such as advance care planning, preferences for care, prognosis or death and dying is challenging. Doing so requires clinicians to attend to their own and the patient’s cognitive reactions, tone, affect and nonverbal cues… Although poor communication may harm patients by leading to unwanted invasive procedures, generating unnecessary anxiety, or creating feelings of abandonment, good communication can improve outcomes for patients and their families by promoting shared decision making and addressing patient concerns”.
Excerpt from: “Communicating with Seriously Ill Patients: Better Words to Say” – JAMA, Vol. 301, Issue 12 (Mar 25 2009) – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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This 3-page article should be required reading for every third-year medical student before the beginning of their clinical clerkship year.
Over the next few weeks, I will post a brief series on learning to care for dying patients’ physical and emotional needs.
Sunday, May 3rd marked the birthday of an American original: musician, songwriter and dancer James Brown (1933-2006).
WoW… that man could dance. Here is the proof:
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Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita eleonora) who lives in Indiana with his bird rescuer Irena Schulz. The bird’s unique dancing and bopping-ability was featured on the ScienceNews blog (April 30 2009) which is where I first heard about him. A quick search on PubMed turned up the research report written by scientists Aniruddh Patel, John Iversen, Micah Bregman and Irena Schulz entitled “Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal” which published last week in the journal Current Biology 19 (May 14 2009).
Embedded in the article is a video of Snowball dancing to three segments of music with varying beats per minute (BPM): 106, 125 and 130 BPM, which you can watch at this link (media player popup).
YouTube.com offers two somewhat less officially scientific videos of Snowball grooving, the first to the music of Queen. Notice that he has to stop in the middle of the song and rest up a bit. But he really is sort of a cheerful Bird-Athlete, don’t you think?
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See another video of Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys here
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Finally, anyone who reads this blog knows that I love cephalopods. Do cephalopods dance? Dunno, but here’s a video of one clever Octopus filmed as she’s trying to get at a tasty treat which her human left for her in a sealed jar:
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And that’s the Friday Post for May 8 2009! Have a great weekend, folks.
” The alarm around this particular strain [A-H1N1] has a couple of roots. First is, it’s new… it’s novel. And new is always cause for some amount of concern. Second, it does appear to have just recently jumped from one species, pigs, to another, humans. And very commonly, in the whole world of viruses – not just influenzas – when they first make the jump from one species to another is when they’re really hot viruses, dangerous viruses. That certainly was the case with SARS, which had just made the jump from bats to civets, civets to humans. So we always worry when we see a recent jump. ”
Ms. Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994), and The Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (2000), is currently a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
How A/H1N1 influenza – identified in Mexico in March 2009 – continues to develop in human populations is still uncertain, as the virus spreads to every continent. The good news is that clinicians seem to think it is not as virulent as first feared; the bad news is that over time, the possibility still exists that we are witnessing a phenomena that every epidemiologist dreads in his or her lifetime: the emergence of an uncontainable virus in a human population who have little or no immunity against it.
While many people thought the media hype over this emerging virus was of hysterical proportions, and discounted the severity of the strain, a different way to view these events is as a sort of dress rehearsal which demonstrated that world-wide networks of disease surveillance, data-collection and cooperative intelligence sharing are functioning reasonably well. (But I’m not a virologist so maybe I know no more than the next guy on the street.)
If nothing else, it shows that swarm-intelligence and citizen-journalism is alive and well!
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You could say that some of my reactions to public health crises have been shaped in part by having lived in city of San Francisco in the early 1980’s, when a different public health crisis unfolded with the identification of a novel viral infection which came to be known as human immunodeficiency virus. If you haven’t already read And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts, who was a reporter at the time for the San Francisco Chronicle, it is truly worth the time. *
Let’s hear it for more dress rehearsals, and fewer real-life epidemics.
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Following are a few books or online resources for background information on epidemiological investigations, medical detective work and emerging infectious diseases, for your consideration:
“The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready?” A Workshop Summary, 2005 (free online full-text from National Academies Press site – link to PDF here).
Book: The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John Barry (Viking, 2004).
Book: When Germs Travel: Six major epidemics that have invaded America since 1900 and the fears they have unleashed by Howard Markel (Pantheon Books, 2004).
Book: Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection and Response by Mark Smolinski, Margaret Hamburg, Joshua Lederberg (National Academies Press, 2003).
Book: The Molecular Epidemiology of Human Viruses, by Thomas Leitner (Kluwer, 2002).
Book: The Invisible Enemy: A Nature History of Viruses, by Dorothy Crawford (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Online Book: Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching by Dr. Michael Greger (Human Society Press, 2006). Free fulltext book at this link.
United States Geological Service (USGS): Disease Maps
Book: Man and Microbes: Diseases & Plagues in History and Modern Times, by Arlo Karlen (Putnam Books, 1994).
Robert Preston is the author of two popular works, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story (Random House, 2o02) and The Hot Zone: A terrifying true story (Random House, 1995).
Book: Emerging Viruses in Human Populations by Edward Tabor (Volume 17 of Perspectives in Medical Virology, Elsevier, 2007).
Book: Seasonal Patterns of Stress, Immune Function, and Disease by Randy Nelson (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Book: Human Virology: A Text for Students of Medicine, Dentistry and Microbiology by Leslie Collier (Oxford University Press, 2006).
It’s been a big news week. Global health developments have occurred with such rapidity that reporting the news of this week gives additional meaning to the use of the term “viral” as in… tracking the global spread of a novel virus: A/H1N1 – swine influenza.
After writing this post, I then noticed that only one of items on the list below refers to materials which are in print (that of the journal Public Health Reports). It is online that we are.
DynaMed, an evidence based medicine resource which UCHC Library subscribes to, announced this week that an online section for current clinical information on Swine Influenza A/H1N1 will be available to anyone in the world at no cost – at this link. The database, produced by Ebsco, is updated daily.
Finally, the cartoonist-blogger XKCD drew a great comic this week, arguing against getting one’s news of the day from Twitter and re-tweets. Many other bloggers worldwide have featured this cartoon this week, but in case you missed it…
Scientists, clinicians and students who need to read continually in their specialty fields to stay current frequently express frustration over the amount of time and efforts needed to keep up each month.
Our collection management librarian at UCHC recently told me about this great site: ticTOCs where one can… “find 12,415 scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs) from 436 publishers “.
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TicTocs
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ticTOCs is a journal-alerting, table of contents service based in the UK. This service is free; registration with the site is required to set up individual alerting preferences.
Following is an excerpt from the ticTOCS “About” page:
” The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. With ticTOCs, it only takes a or two to keep up to date.”
” The ticTOCs Consortium consists of: the University of Liverpool Library (lead), Heriot-Watt University, CrossRef, ProQuest, Emerald, RefWorks, MIMAS, Cranfield University, Institute of Physics, SAGE Publishers, Inderscience Publishers, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Open J-Gate, and Intute.”
Next, a screenshot of the link where one can register for the service, and then set preferences for receiving table of contents from individual journals:
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Today, I did a search for “hepatology” on ticTOCs; here is a photo of the results:
Public health concerns dominate the news headlines this week, as evidence continues to unfold of a global outbreak of a novel strain ofswine influenza A/H1N1.
Thanks to an active international group of Medical Bloggers and Librarians connected through social networking sites such as FriendFeed or Twitter, as I arrive at work on Monday morning, this connectedness becomes a great advantage for those of us in the United States, as our European colleagues have already scanned and posted many news or website links on items of vital concern, as emerging news continues to pour in from many places around the world.
Following are a brief set of links to global health information, disease-tracking and interactive-maps for the spread of Swine Influenza A/H1N1 (reported as of Monday, Apr 27 2009):
The International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) produces ProMed-Mail, described as“the global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases & toxins, open to all sources“. Subscription to ProMed-Mail is available to anyone, free of charge; updates can be set up for daily or weekly email alerts.
UCHC Library subscribes to GIDEON(Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Online Network), which is a specialized database for epidemiologists used for “… diagnosis and reference in the fields of tropical and infectious diseases, epidemiology, microbiology and antimicrobial chemotherapy. GIDEON currently tracks 337 diseases, 224 countries, 1,147 microbial taxa and 306 antibacterial (-fungal, -parasitic, -viral) agents and vaccines, including over 10,000 notes outlining the status of specific infections within each country and over 20,000 images, graphs, interactive maps and references“. GIDEON is updated daily.
I’d like to acknowledge the cooperative work of many European scientists and medical librarians – and in particular, bloggers Laikas, Berci and DigiCMB – who are always 6-8 hours ahead of me, both literally speaking in the real world and in many Web 2.0 innovations, who have posted scientific links and news about swine flu and steered me to several links for this post today. Thank you to these talented, and generous, colleagues.
First: A funny collection of One Hundred 404 Error Screens from the blog of Francesco Mugnai. I especially liked the guy with the long ponytail in the red cowboy bikini and the thigh-high leather boots (you know, the one holding the .357 magnum). In fact I think it may be Sean Connery.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of BoingBoing.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
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Do Not Sulk or Cry
” Students who answer incorrectly shouldnot become overly discouraged. Attendings rarely remember studentswho give wrong answers (especially to difficult questions);they often remember those who lose their composure. “
Excerpt from “The Art of Pimping” by Alan Detsky, MD – published in JAMA, Vol. 301 – issue 13, p. 1379-1381 (April 1 2009)
DB’s MedRants - and many other physician-bloggers – have already blogged about this article. Life in the Fast Lane wrote a multi-part post about pimping. Funny and cruel.
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Exams are finally wrapped up for awhile (after ten difficult days for the students), so get jiggy with Will Smith for a minute because 3.7 million views on YouTube can’t be wrong, and besides, those Egyptians are very handsome :
A blog for medical students, faculty, researchers and librarians about their use of clinical literature, Web 2.0, evidence-based medicine sources, search strategies.
Image Credit: http://www.lifeinwesternpa.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
or two to keep up to date
