Treasures in MEDLINE

Treasures in MEDLINE

The PubMed server gives access to MEDLINE, a database that contains millions of summaries from articles about medicine and biology. I am working with this stuff and from time to time I cannot resist the temptation of searching for outrageous things. Here you can find some REAL examples.

What about fantastic names of authors?

There is this article by King, Kong, et al. Some Frankenstein writes about assessment and management of pain. Wolfman seems to be quite a common name. And there is even a Batman that works on ophthalmology.

But probably, one day, I will find that my family name (Andrade) means something very funny in Finnish.

In any case, it is no so bad to be named after one of those. They may just had a bad neurologic disorder.

What about fantastic theories?

(From Carolina Perez-Iratxeta)

There is a paper that tell us that VIP patients should be treated differently. No comment.

The nine authors of the paper: Effect of death of Diana, princess of Wales on suicide and deliberate self-harm; deduce that of all sociological effects that could possibly account for a change in the rate of suicide (economic depression, weather changes, unemployement increment, etc.) the most important is the death of a famous person.

The bite of Jesuits' bark explains that intoxication by quinine from tonic water could be the reason of two aviation accidents.

The same author also studies Sarcoidosis in aircrew. He found "pulmonary lesions resembling sarcoid granulomata" in "UK aircraft accident fatalities more often than was expected from the recognised clinical incidence of sarcoidosis in UK". Unfortunately, "it was not possible to prove that these lesions in postmortem tissue were sarcoidosis", but anyway, it does not matter because "the numbers involved are small and so the findings may be due to chance". So, who cares?


Irrelevant Thoughts is not yet proven to be BSE free.