Why I may never eat crab

My wife is from Maryland and loves eating crabs. She promises me an almost transcendental experience next time we go back to visit her parents - we'll eat crabs fresh from the Chesapeake Bay, sprinkled liberally with Old Bay. I've never eaten crab before and thought it sounded wonderful. Notice the past tense there.

I was down with that until this week's NEJM showed me how eating crab can go wrong. The kind of wrong that comes with haemoptysis.

Paragonimiasis

Christmas: The other silly season

I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas/ Holiday period and I'd just thought I'd share a couple of corking papers in this month's British Journal of Medicine. Traditionally, the BMJ treats Christmas as a bit of a silly season when it comes to content and publishes papers which might be considered a bit frivolous at other times of the year. Anyway, these are my favourites from this year:

"Relevance of the expression “obs stable” in nursing observations: retrospective study"

"Orthopaedic surgeons: as strong as an ox and almost twice as clever? Multicentre prospective comparative study"

Both papers are freely available as PDFs for your consideration.

See you all in the new year!

Entertainment, journal style.

I have a proper post for this week, but I've just stumbled across A Good Poop and it reminded me that people write medical papers because sometimes life is just too bizarre.

It doesn't look like it's still being updated, but it does have a some intriguing papers and now I've got my BMA membership, I might well celebrate by hunting through the BMJ archives for more oddities...