The Weekly Dose - Episode 33

The Weekly Dose...

... the latest from Dr Karan

  Here is your weekly dose...  

Hi all!Here is your weekly dose of the Sunday Six! A few things I found interesting this week. If you enjoy this please feel free to forward this to friends. families and enemies alike!**You'll find more in depth analysis of some of these subjects on my social platforms in the links just below, including Dr Karan Investigates! for deep dives into interesting topics on my YouTube channel.**

Spurious Correlations...

What if I told you that there was a statistically proven correlation between per capita cheese consumption and the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets?Or a strong association between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool per year and the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in yearly?You can search spurious correlations on google and view a number of bizarre and seemingly random correlations between 2 unrelated events!Often people will use correlation as proof of causation but unfortunately that isn't how statistics work...When someone makes an extraordinary claim and seemingly presents "evidence", be mindful of this one way of "massaging the statistics" to fit the narrative.  

On Call Week...

On Thursday evening last week at 9pm, I finished a busy week on call. A fair amount of emergency operating every day and upwards of 50 patients reviewed daily (ward patients + new emergency referrals) - safe to say they squeezed me for every penny!It wasn't the busiest on call I've done, but for some reason when I woke up on Friday morning I felt like I had been hit by a small baby elephant. My muscles were sore & my head was throbbing like I was recovering from a savage 3-day bender.I'm not "old" by any stretch of the imagination at 32 years but my ability to keep up with working unsociable hours, go hours without food or water and still function at the end of it has waned compared to my 24 year old self.I love medicine (mostly) but I think being on call will ultimately be one of the factors which steers me away from it eventually. It's something that you will have to do for the rest of your career, whether you're a 32 year old surgeon or a 62 year old one!  

What I'm Watching...

YOUIf I didn't do surgery I suspect I would have gone into psychiatry. When I did my psychiatry placement as a 2nd year doctor, I was introduced to the world of acute mental health conditions - everything from schizophrenia to manic depression and people experiencing vivid hallucinations. One of the things I enjoyed was tying in the neuroscience into what drives certain conditions like psychopathy and obsessive traits. Safe to say, what we don't know about this and the brain overall far outweighs what we do know.With the above in mind, TV shows that centre around these topics particularly appeal to me. The hugely popular You is in it's 4th season now and I can't get enough.The show revolves around an obsessive, compulsive individual who stalks various women with fatal consequences but for some reason you connect with this person and in fact cheer them on despite their dastardly acts. Perhaps that reveals more about our human nature than we would care to acknoweldge.Worth watching all 4 seasons! 

  Why Commuting Can Be Good... 

2020 onwards people experienced one of the few silver linings of the pandemic - the ability to work from home as lockdowns shut down office complexes. No commutes, later waking hours - sounds great, right?Remote working offered a huge change of pace for many people and helped avoid the dreary morning commutes that left many of us feeling weary. But what if I told you there was a moment in the commute that provided a strange psychological benefit? The commute is hypothesised to provide a time free of both home and work roles that provides an opportunity for you to mentally disengage from both - a limbo zone where your mind can be blank. You are bored and can detach. It is in this boredom that your mind can wander and creativity spikes.Perhaps by removing this commute it impacts us in some way that also prevents a person from creating a strict distinction between work and home and everything blurs into one leaving you burned out.Perhaps the overall benefit of working from home outweighs any benefit of this "commute break" but you can create your own form of commute if you are a remote worker to provide this space for recovery and transition - simply by partaking in a 15-minute walk to mark the beginning and end of the workday. 

What I'm Reading...

The Call Of CthulhuI don't generally read horror novels even though I love the genre. The last "horror" I probably read in earnest was probably Dracula by Bram Stoker. If you've enjoyed any form of sci-fi horror over the years, chances are it was in some part inspired by H.P Lovecraft, an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Lovecraft created an entire universe centred around the Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a legion of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magic rites and lore. The Call of Cthulhu is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world and its worth reading (plus its very short!) 

What I'm Listening To...

SidedoorI must admit, this is a pretty cool concept for a podcast. It's from the Smithsonian institute and basically they get biologists, anthropologists, historians and basically all sorts of experts to tell you stories about random things from the vaults at the Smithsonian.I'm currently halfway through an episode about Leeches - slimy, wriggly, and sucky but the lowly leech was integral to ancient medical practices and is still used to this day. There are dozens of non-leech episodes too so there's plenty to fill your boots!

As always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which of this weeks Sunday six is your favourite? Is there something you want more, or less of? I'm open to any suggestions so please let me know! Just send a  tweet to @drkaranrajan and use the hashtag #theweeklydose at the end so I can find it!

Have a wonderful week, all.

Much love,

Karan