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by bookofjoe 661 days ago
"I have always thought of the job as a sort of human engineering, or a big physiology lab."

I like this. I used to tell med students doing a month-long rotation that the specialty could be described as a combination of applied physiology/applied chemistry/applied anatomy with the great thing being you get to find out if you were right in the moment/that day, rather than having to wait days/weeks/months/forever to learn if you had done the right things.

P.S. I majored in political science

P.P.S. ChatGPT-4o just told me that "The use of nerve stimulators for brachial plexus blocks became more widespread in the late 1970s and 1980s."

I never used a nerve stimulator — or US — for brachial plexus blocks during my career (I retired in 2015). I guess I was just so used to doing it the way I learned back in the Dark Ages that as long as I got good results, I kept on keeping on.

Also, if you're doing a locum in some backwoods hospital in a small town in Virginia, you're unlikely to find a working nerve stimulator, much less a portable ultrasound.

I suppose this is why they have a mandatory retirement age for airline pilots.

1 comments

Cool! Thanks for the perspective. They found a Vernitrol (basically copper kettle) at an older hospital I do a side gig at that was set up for cyclopropane and some other agent a few years ago; I pointed out that you could still do anesthesia with it today if you fixed a couple of broken pieces. Neat to look at even if it didn’t have the circular slide rule to determine through-kettle and bypass flows at each temperature.
I think you and I do/did side gigs at the same hospital aka Little Sisters of the Poor
Haha! No, but let’s just say that that would be a very appropriate name for its current condition.

I might reach out to you with a few tidbits you might enjoy out of HN - while this nickname isn’t sterile, I don’t want to doxx myself too easily.