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I never liked anatomy class. I never really knew why some people liked to spend hours elbow deep in smelly crinkly old dead people.

In fact, my best memory of anatomy is when the anatomy demonstrator, during a particularly vigorous limb sawing exercise, ended up with a small piece of the poor deceased chaps muscle on her lower lip. We were all far to terrified of our demonstrator to let her know about the issue and all watched in horror / anticipation / fascination as repeated lip licks failed to come into contact with the foreign body, until finally she discovered what was causing that tickly feeling and swallowed the thing, still completely oblivious.

So yes. I learned that sawing too hard and simultaneously licking your lips might result in the unfortunate digestion of dead man's muscle. To my surprise, this knowledge has yet to be of use in my career.

Anyway, if you want to avoid my predicament, and actually learn some anatomical features, these beautiful hand made thingy-ma-jigs might help. Probably not. But maybe. And they're very pretty to look at.

Almostadoctor crashes due to high demand!

Firstly, sorry. Sorry we’ve been offline for a few days. It’s been literally driving me crazy. And we’ve been working around the clock to fix it.
 
Secondly, I’ll explain.
 
It’s that time of year: exam time. That means lots of you coming to almostadoctor all at once. And along with that, we’ve also got some new friends in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
 
So many new friends, it turns out, that on Monday night, we brought down the server, and with it, almostadoctor. And not just almostadoctor. According to our hosting provider we brought down hundreds of other websites too!

Vitamin D: hot air or solid fact?

Unless you're  nocturnal, then you won't have been able to escape the glorious sunshine that the country was basking in two weeks ago. Our consultants let us leave a few clinics early for 'revision' which we interpreted as light reading in the sun to "top up our vitamin D levels". I certainly felt a lot better after an ice cream on the hopsital lawn with some friends but is there really any medical benefit to our main source of vitamin D- the sunshine?

 

It doesn't take a genius to see that there is a lot of controversy surrounding the NHS' future and a certain Conservative Prime Minister. It's all a bit negative at the moment isn't it? Last week I did something a little different on Friday night. I didn't neck vodka, instead I went to the Opera House to see Madame Butterfly. I didn't know the story of the opera before I went, (it goes without saying that as it was written by an Italian, there is A LOT of drama). In a nutshell, we're in Japan, it is approx 1940: rich girl loses money, becomes a geisha to fund herself, marries an American Naval Officer, child is born (unbeknown to him), he heads back home to the USA and marries a ‘Lady’.  3 years later, the US officer returns to Japan, the now poverty-stricken geisha is beside herself with her husband's new wife and kills herself. 
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At the point of the Geisha's suicide, I began to think how great the NHS can be sometimes, this was actually quite annoying as the show was excellent, because if we were to re-write the story in the 21st century (and I hope that at this point Puccini isn't turning in his grave), would the story have panned out the same way? No…
 

 

almostadoctor goes wiki! (ish)

Now any registered user can update and edit our articles!

 
Almostadoctor is basically run by one guy (me! – a junior doctor in Manchester) with a good bit of help from medical student Patrick Green, and lots of contributions from junior doctors and medical students around the world.
 
We’ve got so much great content, but there’s still loads of room for improvement, our references are basically dreadful, and, of course, it all needs maintaining and updating as medical science advances.
 
This has become such a huge project, that’s its getting too much for me to handle (and I would quite like to get some of my life back!)
 
So, were opening up our content to you guys – wikipedia style (almost). It’s like Wikipedia. But better. If you edit an article, you’ll be credited as an author. And before your changes are published, they’ll be reviewed by a doctor to ensure they are relevant and correct. This should mean we keep our content to a very high standard, we show our appreciation to authors by crediting them, and (hopefully) we avoid spam and vandalism.
 
 

Do I do anything differently now

 Last sunday I met some family friends for lunch. By fourth year, the medic chat starts to become a little more serious. I was asked if, having studied medicine for 5 years, did I do anything different now compared to a few years ago. This was a hard question and I paused for thought (mid-burger)

Spare Part Syndrome

almostadoctor iphone app out now!

It’s finally here. And it’s free.  All the articles from almostadoctor.com,  saved to your device. No Loading.  No connection required.  Synchronises automatically with almostadoctor.com  For iPhone and iPod touch  Out Now

 
It really is finally here. It’s been a while in the making… I hope it’s worth the wait.

Android version coming soon...

In the meantime, android, blackberry and smartphone users can still get a great mobile experience by visiting m.almostadoctor.co.uk from your mobile device!

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