What have we done?! The purpose of Project Wormwood was to develop antidotes and treatments in case of advanced biological attack. They told us that they would never use our research as a weapon. If we had known what they were planning on doing, if we had had any idea… No, we should have known. When faced with invasion and near-certain defeat, any nation would have done everything possible to defend itself. But at such a cost. Millions dead. Millions more dying. The survivors are the unlucky ones, cursed to be plague bearers forever. God almighty, what have we done?!
Have you faced your Demons yet today? - Comic updates bi-weekly Monday and Thursday.
All posts tagged medicine
28
Nov
I had two tests today in medical school, and have one more on Monday, wrapping up the Anatomy block. It has been very interesting material, but at the same time I am ready to move on to something else. Part of that may be that I don’t think the level of detail we are learning is necessary, at least not for my chosen career path.
Not really, but it seemed like a catchy title. As an update, I still don’t have power (curse you hurricane Sandy!) but kind friends do. They also have a warm basement. Friends are awesome. 
Anyways, the post. I read during my intermittent internet usage this week an interesting article about IBMs Watson learning medicine.
I.B.M.’s Watson Goes to Medical School - NYTimes.com.
From the article, quoting Dr. Ferucci, the man behind Watson:
In medicine, he said, you have a problem with many variables. For example, a 69-year-old female with certain symptoms, vital signs, family history, medications taken, genetic makeup, diet and exercise regimens.
Someday, Dr. Ferrucci said, Watson should be able to collect and assess all that patient data, and then construct “inference paths” toward a probable diagnosis – digesting information, missing nothing and winnowing choices for a human doctor.
I have to admit, that sounds pretty good. I’m in medical school now, and there are a bajillion facts and figures to learn and try to memorize. In our day and age of multimedia devices, internet, Google and Siri, I’m never a few clicks away from the answer to most any question, making it kind of annoying to have to memorize random facts and details.
An important question, especially along the title theme of singularity, is what does the human bring to the equation? If computers are so awesome that they can learn, analyze and utilize data better then us, what are we good for at all? What do we add when you have a super-smart computer?
I honestly don’t have a right answer. Maybe we are just selfish meat bags who want to be in control, and we want to know that other human’s are in control of things, like our health, and not some computer or robot. It is hard (if not impossible) to program real empathy and sympathy.
That’s one of the things that I love the most about our story, is that we talk about how an AI becomes more human, about what the perfect blending of man and computer may be.
Don’t forget, we’re launching our comic this Monday, so come and read. Also, answer this question for me in the comments below: Would you be comfortable with Watson as your doctor? Why or why not?
21
OctSo I’m in my first year of medical school. That obviously involves learning a lot about the human body and such. It also requires a lot of studying to understand why things happen. I figured I’d post an example of the type of detail I need to know for my anatomy tests this week.
Ulnar Claw vs Hand of Benediction | teachmeanatomy.
I’ll assume you actually clicked the link and at least looked at the site. Very similar symptoms caused by very different mechanisms. There are a lot of things like this sadly.
It is pretty awesome though. It has also been surprisingly useful at times when trying to write the story or review the art for our webcomic. In an upcoming chapter we deal with some seriously injured soldiers. Before medical school, my thoughts on their injuries were more vague, like “his shoulders is all hurt-y.” Now, I’m all like “lesions of nerves of the brachial plexus leads to a loss of innervation of the deltoid muscles preventing elevation of the arm at the shoulder.”
One of our artists drew an injured soldier and I was correcting his drawing to make it more clinically relevant. Like any of our (future) readers will know or care that much about the physiology of any given soldier’s injury. I care though, and we want to give you as realistic a story as possible, so when you see anything related to medicine in the comic, know that I at least put a lot of thought into making it as legit as I knew how.