Exams

Exams!
These are systems in place since ancient times. Conducting an exam is very similar to doing an experiment.
You do an experiment or a trail to separate salt out of water. You need a suitable experience or a test for that. You can choose to distill the water or evaporate the water.
Or suppose you wish to separate iron particles from sand. You hover a piece of magnet above it.

Similarly, you wish to segregate the able from the less able student, for which you need to do some experiment or some examination. But please note, you can't use distillation to segregate iron and you can't use magnet to get salt.

In the same way, you cant use drawing as a test or a criteria for picking out good dancers. And finally, you can't use MCQs to choose the better doctors!!!

Keeping that aside, the pattern of exams for their respective specialities has been more or less constant. Physical tests for being in army, memory based tests for science, calculation based tests for engineering, logic based tests for IQ, grammar based tests for language, etc

Coming back to the corollary, very few new experiments or methods of segregation have been devised recently. So I thought about a new test for finding out the "street smartness" or pragmatic approach of a person.
We can ask the person to define very simple and trivial things. And mind you, things like
- thought
- dream
- soul
- love
- sky
- magic
- death
- to be alive / to live
- good and bad
- sleep vs coma
- aim vs objective
- wind vs air
- friend
And more and more things can be added to the list, forever.
Asking a person to define these things for you, will give you an insight into the thinking of that person. It may help us to "judge someone" better.

Till then, kindly comment if you know of more such words that are difficult to define but everyone knows about it. Thanks!

Oncoradiology and oncopathology

Each of us have our own unique story to tell. Some people can go on for hours even while talking to a complete xeno homo sapiens.
Similarly, each cell, tissue and organ of the body has a story to tell. All we need is some one to listen to. Here are some examples :

The debilitated person - that's similar to agonised women who scream their heart out when given a chance to talk about their sufferings. It's a pain that keeps troubling you forever and won't leave you at all. It's a sign that your cells are dying!

The shy person - These people need to be made friends first before they open out to you. You have to tend to them with care and only expertise and patience is the key here. These are diseases that need a high index of suspicion before you are able to diagnose them.

The drunk person - you give them 'Madeira', the "elixir" of happiness, ie lots of alcohol and they ll speak their heart out. Not remembering later what they said. That's like radiologists putting dyes and enhancing the contrast of the lesion to make the pathology clearly visible.

The confused person - they say yes when asked in public if they have a problem but later it turns out that they did it only for someone's sympathy. These are biological 'false positives' as we like to call them.

The hidden person - these people don't put their fingers up when asked in front of the whole classroom if they have a problem but will try to hide under the desk when the problem arrives. These are biological false negatives.

And finally the happy person - they are the healthy cells and tissues of our body

As you saw, the stories of the pathology is as varied as the stories of different people. What we need are better clinicians to find out the shy people, good radiologists to know more about drunk kind of people, better pathologists to help us weed out the confused and hidden people and better public health doctors to improve the quality of public health.

I would end by appreciating the contact role of all of these, as pathologists and radiologists who learn, study, read, understand, interpret, translate and convey the results from the language our cells speak, to the language we speak.

PS: the last sentence was the thought I had while appreciating the role of pathologists and radiologists during the multi disciplinary meetings in a conference at Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai.