Conference Call

I just finished a conference call with the other members of the AMSA Global Scholars Program, where we talked to Saranya Kurapati, the health action organizer for Physicians for Human Rights. It was great to listen, even for a brief amount of time, to someone who is very comfortable talking about issues surrounding human rights on a level that is far more sophisticated than the conversations that we have among medical students. It made me realize how different all of this is from the types of discussions we were having at Columbia. And I don't think it has anything to do with Sinai-- this is the nature of medical school. I was talking with my roommate about this kind of thing, and he was commenting that he feels that everyone has this nature of being so self-absorbed, only worried about how to pad their resumes and what subspecialty they are going to do. There is something about school that can be so all-consuming, so homogenous, that it is impossible to have outside beliefs or interests or plans. This may be a cynical thought, but I am still tired after that first round of midterms that we had, and the prospect of starting to think about the final exams in Histo and Physio is disheartening. Things with Belize are starting to pile up, and I find that summer plans are being pushed to the back burner. All that manages to do is get me more anxious.

The Global Health Scholars are going to have a conference call with Stephen Lewis in a few weeks, which I think is very exciting. He worked at the CGHED while I was there, and I saw his speak a number of times at Columbia, he's a wonderful speaker.

I went to an ID panel this past Tuesday which was really interesting. It felt very comfortable to talk to ID docs about the diseases that they work with on a daily basis, and I think that I could do something along the lines of what they do. Although, as far as doctors go, ID docs kind of get the shaft I think-- they are up there with peds as getting the least respect for what they do. It really bothers me that some surgery subspecialties do nothing more than the same hernia surgery every single day, day in and day out, and receive an enormous amount of compensation and respect, while subspecialties of medicine get none of that. I heard a pulmonologist talk on Thursday, and that was really cool I thought. I'm going to try to shadow him this coming week.

Here is a table from the WHO Global Burden of Disease Project that gives an estimate of diseases or injuries with the highest mortality rates in 2020. There is little I would be able to do about road traffic accidents, war and violence, and I really don't think I want to work with mental health issues (i.e. unipolar depression and self-inflicted injuries) or with obstetrics (i.e. perinatal conditions and congenital anomalies). That leaves CVD (HD and stroke), ID (diarrheal disease, pneumonia, TB and HIV) and lung diseases (COPD and lung cancer). Fully four of the fifteen diseases are related to the lungs (pneumonia, TB, COPD and lung cancer). Of course these are data from all over the world, and different parts of the world will have different rates of diseases. It is quite interesting that the major diseases of the world are still related to ID, heart disease, and lung disease.

Rank of diseases and injuries attributed to the highest mortality rates, 2020

1	Ischemic heart disease
2	Unipolar major depression
3	Road traffic accidents
4	Stroke
5	COPD
6	Pneumonia
7	TB
8	War
9	Diarrheal diseases
10	HIV
11	Perinatal conditions
12	Violence
13	Congenital anomalies
14	Self-inflicted injuries
15	Trachea, bronchus and lung cancer

Alright, renal physio calls, so I'd better be going.