The Weekly Dose - Episode 55

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!If you've enjoyed any of my content over the years, I know you will enjoy my new book "This Book May Save Your Life", available to pre-order here: My First Ever Book!If you enjoy interesting conversations and podcast, check out my brand new podcast "The Referral With Dr Karan"!**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.**

AI Can Predict Pancreatic Cancer...

I've spoken about pancreatic cancer a few times before - it's a devil. The reason pancreatic cancer kills 88% of patients within 5 years of diagnosis is because people don't typically experience symptoms until it's spread to other organs...BUT..Harvard researchers may have created an AI that could identify which patients are most at risk of pancreatic cancer based *solely* on their medical records and then put them forward for screening.How does it work?!: The researchers trained their AI using the health records of 6.2 million people in Denmark (the records spanned 41 years and included 24,000 people with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis)From this, the AI learned to identify patterns of health problems that people with pancreatic cancer often experience in certain sequences before they eventually get heir cancer diagnosis.The AI seems was able to pick up on patterns in health events that aren’t easily noticeable just by skimming a patient history.What does this mean in real terms?: While the AI can’t just look at one person’s record and say they have an X% chance of pancreatic cancer in the next year, it can give patients a relative risk of the disease.Based on the team’s study, for every 1,000 patients that the AI flagged, 320 will go on to develop pancreatic cancer. Of these 320 patients, 70 of them ordinarily wouldn’t have been routinely considered a high risk of pancreatic cancer and would probably not have had screening.There's still a few years before AI enhanced cancer screening becomes a reality in clinical practice but let's hope the future remains as promising as this early data!

Why You Should Keep Cutting Stones...

A stonecutter's job, naturally, involves chipping away at a large stone..it's monotonous work and possibly quite demoralising as you don't see any breaks or cracks in the stone until the end when the entire rock cracks and reveals it's inner core.To reach that stage perhaps you need a hundred or more cracks.Despite not seeing any progress for the first 99 cracks, it would be foolish to claim that these first 99 hits had no impact - they were doing their job and providing a small amount of damage that was invisible to the naked eye but were an integral part of the outcome.  This exact same thing applies in the way that we work in our lives - you have to do the hard graft and the "99 hits" up front with no immediate gratification or tangible benefits.If what you're doing is worthwhile, you have to keep chipping away at that proverbial stone...steadfast in the knowledge that all of that hard work up front will allow you to get to your end goal. When I first started out in surgery, I convinced myself that there was no way I'd actually be able to operate on a human being and remove diseased organs. Even throughout those early stages of training where I did small components of an operation..I never knew how it would all come together. But it did.Go hit the stones, they will eventually crack for you! 

What You Should Read...

'Fight Club' by Chuck PalahniukThe first rule of book club is...If you've seen the cult movie (or even if you haven't), you definitely need to read this quirky book.It's quite rare to find a book written in the second-person perspective where "you" are the main character.It's a weird experience!In Fight Club, the author turns you into the protagonist giving you a weirdly intense, immersive experience allowing you to live out the storyline. 

The Strange Tale Of The Jim Twins...

Nature versus nurture - the holy grail of developmental psychology...as yet mostly unanswered but this story might fan the flames!Two twin boys were put up for adoption in 1940, at only three weeks old. Their adoptive parents coincidentally named them both James (two separate families).As they grew into men, they both had the nickname Jim but that was just the start of lives that were spookily similar.

Both Jims had childhood dogs named Tony and both had a penchant for maths and woodworking.

As adults, both Jims had married twice and both times they married women named Linda then both married a woman named Betty.Eventually the twins ended up having a son each and...you can probably guess where this is going...they both named their son James Alan.

Both Jims were heavy smokers, drove a Chevrolet and had jobs in security.  In 1977, after one of the Jims decided he wanted to contact his "lost" twin, he got in touch through an Ohio courthouse.This is one of many other similar cases of twins (and even triplets) living scarily similar lives even when raised apart from birth which begs the questions about how much influence hereditary factors have over environmental factors.Jim Springer, one half of the Jim twins did state once that he “always felt an emptiness"...was it his brother he was subconsciously feeling?

The Bicycle Changed Women's Fashion...

Bicycles, surprisingly, seemed to spark a revolution in the early 20th century.Not only did bicycles offer some degree of independence to women who were otherwise long accustomed to relying on men for transportation thus giving them more control over where they went and when, but bicycles caused a change in fashion too!

In the first wave of the American bicycle craze in the 1890s, women soon found that the traditional dress of corsets and long voluminous skirts impeded convenient bicycle travel. This brought about a change in women’s fashion including lighter skirts and even trousers to allow for a less cumbersome ride.Bicycle riding came to embody the individuality women were aiming towards and provided a mode of transportation and clothing that allowed for freedom of movement and of travel.Better late than never, the bicycles are still having a positive impact on women in the developing world where other forms of transportation such as cars are financially out of reach and public transport systems carry risks of sexual harassment for women travelling alone. All hail the humble bicycle!

What I've Learned From Podcasting...

It is not easy!So far I've released 7 episodes of my podcast (The Referral With Dr Karan) and I've got 3 more recoded and read to go and whilst it's an incredibly opportunity to be able to have unfiltered conversations with people who are experts, figures of authority or larger than life social media stars...it is an underrated work load.In every episode I want to bring you 30 minutes of valuable information that you can take away and apply to your daily life to hopefully improve it in some way. I want you to watch or listen to my podcast without having to sit through waffle and empty podcast bluster which is all too common these days.This means I need to do my preparation work before each guest conversation and podcast to nail down what would be useful to learn. For example tomorrow (I'm assuming you're reading this on Sunday!), I am having a chat with a world leading fertility expert.I'm no fertility expert myself but I've been immersing myself in all things male ad female fertility and reproductive health so the conversation and actionables tomorrow can be worthwhile!That said I love learning random new things and each time I sit down with a guest, I feel like I'm absorbing an audio book of someone's life and their knowledge and experiences. Hopefully that same sentiment will filter out to you too!If you haven't caught any episodes already - check it out on the usual podcast apps or watch on YouTube and shoot me an email with your thoughts and feedback! 

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