I really do NOT have a fetish about bugs or bug bites—even though I’ve written about them many times before.
It’s just that people keep asking questions, others are continually writing about them and there’s just so many interesting photos available to accompany articles.
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The last time I wrote about bug bites I told myself: “If I write one more thing about bugs, people will think I’ve got a fetish or something!”
Well I don’t, but here we go again! There’s just so many questions about them in people’s minds, doctor’s tend to forget about them compared to other daily crises, there’s a lot of articles still being written by others and… there’s just so many good photos lately.
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I thought that we might just take a bit of a break from the intensity of pediatric medical writing and “stop to smell the roses” just a bit. Hope you don’t mind.
I just keep thinking, while I’m immersed in this computer neck deep, that “there’s just got to be something more I can do with it than struggle through medical articles all day.” And, as it turns out, there is: Art.
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Much of medicine is uncertainty, but one thing you can be sure of is that: ANYTHING that is discovered is HARD WORK and NOTHING worthwhile just pops into existence! However, that being said, in this series of articles I’ve described more than a few times what I’m calling Brilliant-Serendipity. The amazing things which continually seem to occur and alter the course of human suffering and change its practice forever.
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The road to discoveries in medicine is anything BUT the scenic route. It is convoluted and littered with failure; however, it does contain more than its fair share of brilliant serendipity which continually alter the course of human suffering and change its practice forever.
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Joe Madiath, who calls himself a Social entrepreneur, is bringing Indian villagers together around water, hygiene and sanitation projects with suprising results. In rural India, he describes, “the lack of toilets creates a big, stinking problem.”
It leads to poor quality water, one of the leading causes of disease in India, and has a tremendously, disproportionately negative effect on women and children.
In this TED talk, Madiath introduces a program to help villagers help themselves, by building clean, protected water and sanitation systems and requiring everyone in the village to collaborate — with significant benefits that ripple across health, education and even government.
“For India,” he claims, “armies and armaments, software companies and spaceships may not be as important as taps and toilets.”
NASA seems to do it’s job so well-thought-out and planned down to the second that, for most of us, our mental image of science has taken on an “uncluttered, pristine, direct” feel full of stainless steel and glassware.
But, those of us who’ve peeked behind the curtain of “the Great and Powerful OZ” know that real science is most often anything and everything EXCEPT those adjectives.
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Truly, much (if not most) of what we do in medicine has had its roots in shear GUTS, DETERMINATION, OCD behavior, STUBBORNESS and… absolute SERENDIPITY! Don’t just take my word for it, ask their discoverers or inventors – accidental medical discoveries.
When I think back on it, to me it’s sheer mind-boggling! I wrote about a few of them, but soon realized these posts need to be put in a series so they can be noticed and thought about.
That’s what the posts listed below are: a list of fifteen or more discoveries which: 1- clearly changed the way the entire practice of medicine worked; 2- benefited all of humanity; and 3- nearly all of humanity has already heard about, but probably dismissed as commonplace.
If you don’t believe me, just think of these words: penicillin, diabetes, pacemakers, X-Ray, ulcer and… Viagra. Got’cha, right? And these are just a few. Read on!