Confidence and ability stem from Faith in God

What is Faith?

Faith is a force that is greater

than knowledge or power or skill,
And the darkest defeat turns to triumph
if you trust in God’s wisdom and will,
For faith is a mover of mountains —
there’s nothing man cannot achieve
If he has the courage to try it
and then has the faith to believe.

So, if you have faith and work hard, then I'm sure all roads will lead to only one destination - success!

The death of NEWS

The first rays of warmth wake me up at sunrise. Feeling fresh after a good night's sleep, looking forward to another day of challenges and surprises, I walk towards the sofa and follow my routine. A crisp new copy of TOI is kept on the table, which I fetch to read. 

I am greeted by a picture with a breath taking view from a high rise in Mumbai, inviting readers to see their sample flats, inviting the "Mumbai cha manoos" to live his dream, the dream of buying his own house.

That takes me into my world of dreams. The cacophonic sound at home quickly brings me back to reality as I flip over to the next page. 

This time, it's an advertisement of a coaching class. Showcasing it's achievements over the past two decades and forcing you to believe that- enrolling your child with them will guarantee an improvement or a seat in preferred college. Well, atleast it's better than seeing the ugly photos of politicians on posters and Banners along the arterial roads, put up of their "chamchas". 

Finally after flipping another page comes the headline and cover page news. The things that I am actually interested in. 

The print media offers this prime space for a handsome fee, either to sustain the print circulation or to increase the weight of the pockets of its owners. 

Columns for advertising is alright, as it's at least ethical. But, what's saddening is "paid news" or news and publicity of an event, in return of publicity/subscriptions of the newspaper. 

This trend is actually killing the essence of newspapers - bring out the truth!! 

I feel, the advertisements should not be printed on the main page of the newspaper and most relevant news should be published here. It will be of benefit to the masses. 

The media is regarded as the fourth pillar of the democracy; it's time there is a change in this and we open our eyes everyday to more relevant details. Otherwise, it won't be long before the NEWS apps and e-papers will one day kill the print circulation!

My sabbatical from writing blogs

   I can't think of any topic to write on...writing after a long time....

   Being an iPhone user, I felt the memory crunch within few months and I had to delete the "Blogger" app through which I used to post blogs. 

   Yesterday suddenly a friend asked, do you write blogs. My promt response was, "Yes, I used to". And I felt, I should again start writing blogs, now that I have recently deleted 3GBs of photos from my phone. 

   After downloading the app again, I checked my last post. It was in September 2014. And today is 14/4/15. A sabbatical of 8 months.

   That reminds me of Rahul Gandhi' sabbatical of 55 days from his political life that I read in TOI today morning. His sabbatical was probably for introspection as to what went wrong during the  2014 Lok Sabha polls or to decide the future course of action for his party.

   And I pondered, did my sabbatical help me with new ideas for the blogs? Have I improved in blog writing after such a long gap? After being "disconnected"??

   I got the answer in the first line of this blog.

  So, I concluded that-

(1)

 to think about the future of political party, one has to stay with the grass roots of that party

(2)

to change the system you have to be a part of that system and understand it.

(3)

to study medicine, you have to attend postings, not just sit in library and read. 

You might feel the 3 different points are not at all related. Think again. 

Patients, still dumb?

   Gone are the times when patients were unaware of their clinical condition and used to reply solely on doctors' advice. On the other hand, they have become proactive in clinical decision making and it's implementation.

  The good thing about it is- there is more awareness. Involving patients and relatives will improve Health care in the country. This provides a thrust to the new form of therapy- "the information therapy" where along with the conventional "therapy", the health care provider will take informed decisions from the patient concerned and it's relatives. 

   However, we still continue to treat them as dumb people. I would give you an example-

   "We were having clinics in the side room of ward 12 on 10/9/14. The case which was being presented was of GI system. The presenter began- "my patient....present with chief complaints of jaundice, abdominal distenss " and the teacher snapped in between- "you shouldn't say jaundice. Because the patient will never himself say he has jaundice. What he will notice is yellowish discolouration of the sclera(first) and skin(later). So instead of saying "jaundice" we should say "yellowish discolouration of the sclera and skin"....even though the patient clearly mentioned he had jaundice. The Essense of Histroy Taking, I believe is a record of the conversation between the doctor and patient. So the same words should be used

     There comes an argument to this proposition-

•the patient may be wrong in his diagnosis as there will be differential diagnosis to yellowish discolouration

    In that case, none of the two know what really he has. So it doesn't make a difference, does it?

Why does brain control opposite halves of the body?

This picture shows three diagrams.

The circles show the retina, the lines are optic tracts and curved lines resemble the cortex

The third diagram in the picture shows what may have been the arrangement- the right cortex receives visual signals from right eye. But the images on the nasal side will be seen on the temporal retinas of both eyes, which will be seen as double. So the arrangement is not feasible.

Now we come to the first diagram, this is what actually is-

The nasal fibres (carrying impulses of temporal field of vision) cross over. 

And since right cortex receives impulses from left side, it sends motor impulses also to the left side

Now here is my question-

Why don't the temporal fibres cross?

If that would happen, the same half of brain will control same side of the body! Human anatomy could have been so much simple 

If you get answer to this question-

Plz post it as comments 

Thanking you

Trip to Pune

    I'm forced to recollect those days of exams, as I write this blog. Those were the days when each student would stop wasting even a single minute and keep studying (or "begin" studying for that matter).  While studying, my mind would drift start thinking of vacations that would soon ensue. So I noted the things that I would do in vacations. 

   So here was my first big plan of my vacation. The trip to Pune. All the memories are still flashing vividly in my mind as I contemplate the beauty of the mountains which I see passing by, during my journey back to mumbaaaaaai!

   The fun began from the CST station itself! Being an impromtu plan I had to travel by general compartment, without reservation. I met Ronak at CST in the morning at 6.30 am, three days after the summer solstice of 2014. As we reached the platform the train came. And with it began the mad tussle for the seats. The doors were locked from inside as the train approached. Ronak spotted an emergency window, pulled it up and we threw ourselves inside the compartment, with a feeling of victory we opened the door for others and secured our seats. There was no getting up from that moment on if we wanted our seats. So the journey was spent mainly by chatting, watching an episode of GoT and consuming the scenery of lonawala.

   Ajinkya came to pick us at the Pune Station. Had brunch at vaishali. Ate at ajinkya's place again! That was my first experience of a perfect marathi lunch. It was too good.  "What have you travelled, if you haven't even tasted that region's speciality".

   In the evening we played poker and pictionary at spruha's place. That board game was super fun. Aim of the game is to try to tell your partner the name that you get by picking a card. That brings out the insane creature in you. The dinner was outside. I saw the football match with them, though I am no fan of football! 

   Next day we went to a water park. Water park by itself was no fun, but our crazy and stupid things made it memorable. Dinner at Hard Rock Cafe of Pune. These were a few things where Pune is better than aamchi mumbai. :( . Time just flew by while playing it again. 

   Next morning was the last day. I'm happy we did something productive as well as fun on the last day.We visited Dinanath Mangeshkar Hospital. Saw CT-MRI, saw a live surgery, PCR machine, ICU and so many more things. 

   Here I'm, going home with a handful of enjoyment and a pinch of new knowledge. 

The Pune railway station 

CST station while leaving from mumbai 

PUNE, BRTS

During journey

Future of surgery

      It's 12.39 am and I'm trying to sleep. That's when all weird thoughts start coming to our minds. And I couldn't stop my brain from thinking about the surgery of the future. I don't know how did this thought come to my "Cosmo-cortical" pathway, but that was enough to fire some corticospinal neurons to direct my hand to pick up my phone and begin writing. 

       If we can manage to miniaturise the robots and teach them how to...

      Hey wait, it just occurred to me how did I begin thinking of this-

I had this doubt about- why the peritoneal cavity in females is open. I finally got the answer in embryology. That reminded me of what a sir in my college had commented about embryology, "embryology is not real. There's nothing like embryology. All what we are studying is abstract". That lead me to pondering over the fact that our embryology is limited to- explaining why the defects occur and the underlying basis of that anomaly. (How fascinating it is that we don't need to think of the whole sentence to think of that whole sentence that my sir had told. In a jiffy, I am reminded of all the words that my sir had told. I mean, to recall an entire day of your life, you don't need to spend that much time recalling it, it will take the same amount of time as you take to recall one word! That's just by the way). Then I started thinking of-if we would use knowledge of embryology to help people. Then it came to surgery while an embryo is still growing. But how can a human approach it? So I thought of robots. Microbots, the size of bacteria may be handy at that time. 

   After making giant leaps in the sphere of technology, we may one day be able to produce robots that have the capability of normal robots. Storing power, computing, operating, commanding, seeing, hearing, connecting and doing its job. 

     So imagine, a women is on the operation table half a globe away from me and a friend of mine just invents a new way to fight a disease. He codes it and instantaneously sends it which I forward to the master computer over there. It is then shared to the million Microbots all piled up in an injection. They are made to connect to the computer via wifi and download the lastest technique to fight the disease. They all also can talk to each other. When first one goes in the body, he may send a message to all others like- "oh it's dark in here. Oops I just got pushed into the right coronary artery. I ll do my work over there. Take care and good luck". The other Microbot may reply, I m having some difficulty in the 8th zone of the right lung. I need backup immediately". Robots will be carrying packets of drugs that can be injected selectively into each cytoplasm. They may be able to enter the nucleus, obtain copy of the main DNA via PCR and replace the mutated DNA with the new one. 

They all will work as a team. 

   That I think will be the future of surgery. :)