Mind tricks

Sometimes you just happen to know a piece of seemingly arbitrary information, even though you might know not much else in the same field which is useful at all.  When that happens to me, as it did today, there's usually a strange reason that I remembered the fact.

There is a certain sci-fi movie which was popular back in the 70's called Star Wars.  In it there is a scene on the Death Star where Senator Leia Organa is being interrogated by Grand Moff Tarkin to reveal the location of the hidden rebel base.  He threatens to use the Death Star to destroy her home planet of Alderaan unless she complies.  She (falsely) reveals that the base is on the planet Dantooine, at which point Tarkin proceeds to order the destruction of Alderaan anyway in order to make an effective demonstration of the power of the Death Star.

Why is this relevant?  Because today I was able to pipe up in a tute and remind the presenting doctor, who was having a mind blank, that anaesthetic induced malignant hyperthermia should be treated with dantrolene.  Can you see where I'm going with this?  Dantooine = dantrolene.  Destruction of a planet using giant lasers = malignant hyperthermia.  I can still remember standing in the operating theatre when I first heard about dantrolene and that's exactly what I thought of.

Oh yes, my friends, that's how you scale the dizzy heights of success.