Psoriasis

I was just reading about psoriasis on wikipedia and was startled to learn that the following treatments have fallen out of favour:

• cat faeces
• onions
• sea salt and urine
• goose oil and semen
• wasp droppings in sycamore milk
• soup made from vipers
• arsenic

I guess my doctor must be pretty old-fashioned.

How to choose an alpaca

People often accost me as I go about my daily business, demanding that I help them select an alpaca.  While I'm happy to assist my close friends and family in this way, the sheer volume of requests that I have been receiving is grossly inconvenient.  Hence I present you with this handy guide to choosing the alpaca that is right for you.

First, don't just think about alpacas.  While alpacas are fun-loving delightful companions, so too are all of the llamoid species.  And let's not leave out the mixed breeds!  To help you decide, ask yourself these questions:

How much do you weigh?  If you have a "fuller figure", perhaps you'd be happier with a vicuna or a guanaco.  Or perhaps not!  Sometimes the "fuller figured" gentleman about town is best served by an alpaca after all.  Only you can tell for sure, but not until you've gotten out there and met some of these other friendly camelids.

Next, how experienced are you?  If you're a new alpaca owner, there's no sense spending $10,000 on a prime alpaca which is just going to get all dinged up in the first few months while you're figuring out how to use it right.  Just get an el-cheapo from ebay for $100 that you won't be afraid of hurting, and you'll learn faster and can sell it to the next sucker learner once you're ready to upgrade.  Be warned - postage can be expensive so it's best to buy local!

How long are your arms?  Measure from armpit to the tip of your middle finger on both sides and use the shorter arm as your guide.  DO NOT buy an alpaca with a chest girth larger than your shortest arm length.  It will be extremely fatiguing to carry.

What's your personality type?  Don't choose an aggressive alpaca that likes to spit unless you're prepared to defend it with your fists or a length of cycle chain.  Likewise, don't choose an alpaca which is flippant or sarcastic unless you don't take yourself too seriously.

Are you planning to travel a lot with your alpaca or just keep it at home?  If you're going to take your alpaca onto public transport, to work, or on holidays, you'll want one with a slow metabolism so you don't have to lug around bags of heavy food.  It will also be sluggish and easier to catch when it inevitably tries to flee. 

Finally, consider your own personal appearance.  You should choose an alpaca that complements your best features.  For example, if you have straight even white teeth, choose an alpaca with stinking yellow buck teeth.  If you have stinking yellow buckteeth, grow a long moustache that covers your mouth.  If you have pale skin, choose an alpaca that is a rich green or deep red.  If you have two legs, choose an alpaca with four or more.  It's common sense really, but take a friend along who you can trust to be honest with you.  It can really help to get your friend to photograph you with a few different alpacas so you can for yourself what an idiot you look like.

Good luck choosing your alpaca.  A good alpaca will be your constant companion for many years - a shoulder to cry on, a friend to laugh with, and a source of courage and inspiration.  I find it hard to imagine how my life would have turned out without my many alpaca friends.  It really is true what the Bolivians say: "A house with no alpaca is like a beard with no letterbox."

GLIYE

The part I don't like about sending flowers to someone is having to dictate what will be on the card.  I would much prefer to actually write it myself.  But instead I have to tell the person and they write it down.  It's particularly annoying when you realize that all you can think of to say has clearly been said a thousand times before - so many times, in fact, that they have a standard abbreviation for it.

For example, imagine that I'm sending flowers to my friend to encourage her in some big exams.  I might say to the florist, "Could it say: Dear Betty, Good luck in your exams, I'm sure you'll make us all proud."  And what the florist writes down is, "Dear Betty, GLIYE, ISYMUAP."

I realize that flower cards are usually not a great outlet for creative innovation in messages, but please - let's not emphasis the sheer banality of the card too much.

Hay mucho hay

You may not know that I am the world's leading hay photographer.  Few people even realize the existence of such a field.  (Haha - a small agricultural joke there!)  It's a small but fiercely competitive arena, where the men are real men and the hay bales are rectangular prisms made from dry grass.  Well, that's what hay was like when I was a youngster.  These days it's all rounded, curvy and sensual.  Alluring and inviting while also distant and unobtainable, these cylindrical bales are a perfect foil for the camera.  Here are some images from my latest shoot:

See the hay frolicking in the wild!  Defiant, fresh, free - the spirit of the hay can never be downtrodden!

Hay isn't the social type, but it never gets lonely.  Friends are never too far away but until then it's time for some relaxation and quiet contemplation.  Hmmm.

 Hay can prosper and flourish in such a wide variety of environments, from paddocks to fields to farms.  Amazing! Its go-anywhere, do-anything attitude is why it seems to be everywhere you look!.

Here we can see that the hay is wearing little white jackets - so clever, so cute, so now!

Keep an eye out for hay in your neighbourhood.  Something tells me that you'll be getting to know hay a lot better real soon now...

Medicine is basically pretty gross

Most of the time I consider myself really lucky that my Smaller Half is also studying medicine.  But tonight, when we had a lengthy conversation about ulcers while eating our dinner, was not one of those times.  We also got in a quick chat about various dermatological lesions.

Still, it was better than this afternoon at uni.  I had a three-hour-long block of lectures, most of which was pretty dull.  All I had to break the monotony was a clear view of the screen of an Esteemed Colleague's laptop in the row in front of me.  She spent the whole time downloading pictures of various diseases and conditions of the anus.

I've had enough education for today.

Get rich quick

Who wants to go and live by the scenic river Ebola in Congo-Kinshasa?  How about Marburg in Germany?  Or Hendra in Queensland?  Omsk perhaps?

Of course you don't - all of these places are the unfortunate victims of something that I call Eponymous Virus Dystourismia (EVD).  Whenever a horrible fatal virus outbreak occurs somewhere, the virus tends to get named after that place and it really puts people off going there.  It doesn't always happen this way.  Spain, for example, is famous for much more than just Spanish Influenza.  Ebola, on the other hand...

It occurred to me yesterday, while reading about Hendra virus, that it would be a great idea to buy an investment property in Hendra.  I reckon prices must be plummeting around now.  The cure for EVD is the same as the cure for the underlying disease itself.  Eventually some clever person will develop a vaccine for Hendra virus and it won't get much more media coverage after that.  Prices will rebound once people start seeing Hendra for the delightful, family-centric, garden utopia that it is.  If you take my advice and get in now, you'll make a killing!

But there's a hitch in my plan.  The government has denied ongoing funding to a research centre that is investigating Hendra virus and it will close next year.  Get out there and hassle your local MP - ask them why Australia's only defence against this potentially disastrous disease has been axed.  If they reinstate the funding, you'll be saving lives AND saving my retirement nest-egg!  It's a win-win!

I've always wondered

How can the Tabasco sauce people make any money?  I've been using the same bottle now since 1948.

Dispel all doubt

I'm a little bit older than most medical students.  So when I'm standing around on the wards trying to figure out what the heck is going on, every now and then a nurse mistakes me for an actual doctor.  It's perfectly understandable - the only way she (and yes, most nurses are still women) could tell would be to closely examine my ID tag, so she just goes by the age, the stethoscope, and the ... I don't know what else.  Maybe my watch looks expensive or something. (It's not.)

Anyway, typically we have a little exchange like this:

Nurse

Doctor, may I quickly check something in the notes you're reading?

PTR

Oh, of course, I'm just a medical student.

But perhaps the nurse thinks I'm making some kind of self-deprecating joke, because when she hands the notes back to me she says,

Nurse

Thank you very much Doctor.

I really really hate this.  It is incredibly awkward because then I have to say, "No really, I am a medical student", and perhaps even specifically say, "I'm not a doctor".  But that's okay, I myself am crap at names and frequently call people by the wrong name so I can cope with having to correct people.

What I hate more is the sneaking feeling that if the nurses think I am a doctor, they may well start doing some hare-brained thing right in front of me and expect me to intercede if they shouldn't do it.  Seems ridiculous, I know - when did a nurse ever pay attention to a doctor?  But I just can't get the idea of out my head that something bad might happen to a patient just because someone else thinks I know a lot more than I do.

The way I deal with this situation is twofold. First, as noted, I make sure that anyone who is explicitly confused as to my status is promptly corrected.  Second, I make sure that anyone who may be implicitly confused as to my status is immediately set straight, which I achieve by asking every person I meet a stupid question.  It's working out pretty well so far.  Everyone on my ward thinks I'm an idiot.

In case you too are plagued by these fears, here are some examples of good questions to ask:

• How does this bed work?
• Can you help me? I'm tangled in this curtain!
• Where in the patient does that tube go?
• Where's the handwash?
• Are you a nurse?
• Is it always this busy?