Skewed data - Stats again

For those who didn't understand the photo :

Background Statistics -
A normal distribution curve is symmetrical bell shaped curve bla bla bla, which I'm sure you know

Skewed curves are seen when the distribution is not symmetrical. It can either be Skewed to the left or the right (see picture)

Now imagine a Skewed curve, depicting the average income of a person and the number of people.
When it's a Gaussian curve, you'll see that - the majority of the people will be in "middle class", some will be super rich and some will be poor.

Now what if that is actually not true? Our graph will get Skewed. This can be of two types.
1) most of the people have an income higher than the average. Mode is greater than the mean.
This is called Skewed to Left, because the graph dips on the left side. And as per the convention, left is also the negative axis. Thus we also call it negative skew.

2) similarly, when most of the people have their income that is less than the average, and very few people own a major chunk of wealth, we call it right skew or positive skew.

And here comes the Eureka moment where you compare them with ideals and philosophies.
Left wing socialists / communists to right wing capitalists.
I'll leave it here for you to ponder over it, gulp it and ruminate it 😉

To diversify : Learn from the guru itself

It's another morning when my hands involuntarily grab the daily newspaper, trying to skip a few pages of same news about worldwide protests against newly elected POTUS Trump, the page about personal finance has incited interest in me of late.

After the monotony of news regarding scams and the updates of upcoming polls, this page refreshes me with the Serotonins of happiness after learning something new - Personal Finance.

Woah bro. Calm down. Now we are going into the territory where every biology student treads with fear. Finance, Economics and Statistics.

Today's article talks about diversification of portfolios. But everyone knows the nature's secret of being able to keep the species alive.

The nature is working all the time to make infinite minute adjustments in the genotype, to adjust with the environment. The nature is perfecting her art since 5 billion years now. 

She has a mechanism of cell division called "Meiosis" that allows genetic transfer of information, allowing the offsprings to be genetically superior, evolving continuously. 

Even our HLA haplotypes, the MHC antigens present on our WBCs are so varied and diversifed already, that should a catastrophic microbiological attack happens, atleast some human being will be immune to it to propagate our species further. 

Now that's a Micro-"surgical strike" indeed 

Doctors as Travellers

Like the most other thoughts, even this one originated from the bathroom!

All of us were inspired by Ranbir Kapoor in YJHD, and must have had a thought of roaming around the world, traveling to the must - see places around the globe. Who wouldn't want such a kind of life.

Given a chance, even I would have chosen that. The travel show hosts, air hostesses, pilots, Navy ship merchants, globe trekkers, adventurers, even monks did that matter! are the people who get to visit the maximum number of new places. An addition that I'll make to this list is a doctor.

The essence of traveling isn't just taking photos of those places and uploading to social media. You may very well use Google Earth and Google 360 for that.

The true essence of travel lies in connecting with the place and the people,  knowing their culture and traditions, understanding their way of life. And who else can achieve all of this, better than a doctor?

Few weeks ago I was walking through the corridor of the old building when this young chap with huge spectacles, unkept Hair, checked shirt and a loose formal pant approached me asking where is the radiology department. I just decided to take him there rather than just give the directions. On the way I happened to ask him what does he do and where is he from. "I'm doing MA in Hindi from Ruia" was his reply. And then we ended up talking animatedly about Mr Premchand and I told him whatever little I had learnt about him in school.

Such instances, I m surprised, are engraved in my mind...given the fact that I don't even remember birthdays of my friends.

Looking forward to meeting more interesting people in my life. Looking forward to being a good doctor and Traveller.

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.

What is blogging to me?

Today, a friend asked me, "Why don't you share the link to your blogs?"

THAT made me think why did it never occur to me to do so...
I had already put a link to the home page of my blog site on Facebook and Twitter accounts. And even after writing blogs over 3 years now, I have never shared any particular blog with "people" 

I got my answer in my next breath itself. I never wanted anyone to read my blogs. All I wanted was to vent out my thoughts, in a way that they are accessible to me as it is, even my hair will turn salt and pepper.

Google Blog, for me, is a chest of ideas, random yet structured, abbreviated yet connected and with layman English yet deep meaning.

What the Pensieve is for Dumbledore, that's what is Google blog to me!

So, the plan is to just keep uploading random ideas and to hope that it will make sense, sooner or later in life.

To the Depths of Darkness

27th February, 2016. Saturday

Third minor is that year of MBBS course when you just have to study 3 subjects : ophthal, ENT aaaaaaaaand PSM!
The journey from 'help-me-figure-out-whats-going-on' in the first year, to 'putting-your-fingers-in-every-damn-event' in the second year, I had thought that third minor should be comparatively chilled out.

From holding the necrosed ear ossicles to examining the nucleus of cataract lens, from observing into the friends' ears, to unsuccessfully trying to evert my eye lids, ENT and ophthalmology postings have already taught me a lot.

But there is this one case I saw in the ophthal OPD that I cannot easily forget. A 13 year old girl from a low socioeconomic background, a known case of B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, had come with endophthalmitis ie infection of inner coats of eye.

She screamed in pain as the attending doctor tried to examine it. She got herself admitted to the neighboring Tata memorial Hospital for the leukemia and had already been through 3-4 days of course of few of the strongest systemic antibiotics I knew of.

The doctor called her father and explained the need of continuing the treatment and also putting more topical antibiotics, otherwise the infection could spread to her brain. She said, "hamein jaan bachaane ki koshish karni hai pehle".
To which he asked, "aankh toh theek ho jayegi na baad mein?"

And the girl broke down when the doctor shook her head and said, "iss aankh ki roshni ke wapas aane ke chances bohot kam hai" 

I can never forget that moment. The moment of horror for that poor girl, when all her dreams must have got shattered at once.

That's when reality dawns upon me.

What Khurana or Parson never taught us was that 'the Eye' is not just an organ but the most prized possession of the body!

During the OPD in the next week, I saw that girl and run after the doctor who had seen her. My joy knew no bounds when I learnt that she was responding to the treatment!