New objective: stop getting my medical education from documentaries about show-dogs. Wikipedia is much more reliable.
In a tute today the registrar who was tutoring us asked if we knew was syringomyelia was. I said I did, saying that it was caused by swelling of the brain. She shot me down, saying that what I was describing was actually syringobulbia. Bummer. Not much of a surprise though, since the source of my information was a BBC documentary I watched about a week ago about purebred show-dogs and the scarily high incidence of genetic disease in them because they are so inbred. Apparently Cavalier King Charles Spaniels have a very high incidence of syringomyelia which leaves the animals in crippling pain.
The program said that syringomyelia was due to the animals' brains being too big for their skulls so they were squashed. And they showed pictures of operations to relieve it, where they removed part of the back of the skull. It was really awful.
Anyway, when I came home today and looked up syringomyelia on wikipedia I saw that it mentions that there is a form caused by swelling of the cerebellum. Aha! That sounds like what the dog-show show was showing. Too bad I didn't look it up last week.
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