Internal Medicine

#TriviaTuesday

Q5. An English surgeon (known as the pioneer of antiseptic surgery) demonstrated in 1865 that the use of carbolic acid on surgical dressings would significantly reduce rates of post-surgical infection. His work inspired the invention of an alcohol-based formula which included eucalyptol, menthol, methyl salicylate and thymol. It was named in his honour as X.

This formula has had several uses over the years as a surgical antiseptic, floor cleaner, cure for gonorrhoea, cigarette additive, dandruff treatment, cure for the common cold etc. before it found its current use in 1920. Today, it is used regularly by people all over the world.

What is X?

Hint: You often start off your day with this. 

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Q4. Sometimes, music can literally save lives.

After several people discovered a special characteristic property of some tracks of music which makes them extremely useful in emergency medicine, the New York Presbyterian Hospital compiled a list of around 40 such ‘life-saving’ songs. How are these songs relevant in medicine?

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Q3. Last week, the Guinness Book of World Records declared the Dallas-born lawyer and author star Paul Alexander as the longest-living Iron Lung patient in history. The Iron Lung is a type of Negative Pressure Ventilator developed in the 1920s as a solution to the respiratory paralysis that occurred in advanced cases of this disease. It became the standard medical equipment in all major hospitals in the mid-20th century with wards full of them.

Which disease was the Iron Lung used for?

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Q2. The surgical sieve is a thought process in medicine we all use regularly when coming up with differential diagnoses for any symptom. Some versions of the sieve include:

-The chapters under General Pathology in Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease.

-It is frequently used by the character Dr. House in the television series by the same name. The mnemonic MIDNIT was used in an episode to run through the components of the sieve

-A commonly used mnemonic - MEDIC HAT PINE.

What is the surgical sieve/ what is its utility in medicine?

#TriviaTuesday Lets start off with an easy one.

Q1. Prior to modern medicine’s adaptation of the metric system in the 1700s, the apothecaries’ system of weights and measures formed the basis of pharmaceutical preparations. A present-day remnant of this system is X which is still manufactured and prescribed in the doses Y and ¼ Y. These doses were originally derived from the weight of one grain of barleycorn, a unit designated as 1 gr (short for 1 grain) which was equivalent to a weight of approximately 64.8 mg.

Name X and Y, which each of us regularly prescribes.

(Ask for a hint).

Hi everyone! Combining my hobby of collecting seemingly irrelevant facts with my boundless curiosity (read: nosiness) for all things medical, I will be posting a medical trivia question every Tuesday on this group, starting tomorrow. Please join in and feel free to expand the discussion!

Only request: Our dear colleague Dr. Google is capped, so please refrain from consulting. Thanks!

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