A letter to my loyal readers

Dear readers,

You may have noticed my blog posts have decreased in number over the last year or two. A couple of factors have brought about this change.

After blogging for more than eight years, I am running out of ideas. When I started, I had accumulated a number of things I wanted to say about medicine, surgery, medical education, research, and other topics.

The second issue is the Blogger platform I use is very clunky and slow. I’m sure it has discouraged people from commenting. It even runs slow for me. I just can’t face the hassle of migrating the blog to another site like WordPress.

I am going to try to blog exclusively for Physician’s Weekly, a website I have written for regularly over the last six or so years.

Yesterday, I posted “Odd medical stories. The third one is jaw-dropping” on the PW site. Here is the link.

Whenever the next post is ready, I will link to it from here so those of you who are on my email list will know a new piece is available. I hope the extra click is not too inconvenient for you.

Of course, I will continue to promote my blog on Twitter. If you have not followed me there, you can by finding my twitter handle, @SkepticScalpel.

I thank you for reading and hope you will continue to do so.

Sincerely yours,

Skeptical Scalpel

Should residency program directors look at applicants’ social media activity?

Please take a look at my new post on Physician's Weekly: My thoughts on whether residency program directors should review applicants' social media activity.

For longevity, is it better to be short or tall?

Being short is associated with worse outcomes for critically ill adults.

A large retrospective study of 233,000 men and 184,000 women consecutively admitted to 210 ICUs in the UK over a six-year period found hospital and ICU mortality decreased with increasing height after adjusting for available potential confounders. The difference was statistically significant.

The definition of short or tall was based on the median height of the subjects—175 cm (5’9”) for men and 162 cm (5’2”) for women. These figures are nearly the same as the averages for non-hospitalized adults.

The study had several limitations. Height was measured in just 44.5% of the group while the rest were based on estimates. However, the authors noted the median estimated height was exactly the same as the measured height for men and only 1 cm different for women, and measuring height in critically ill patients is difficult.