JOKE: Your Duck is Dead #overdiagnosis

An friend of mine (LL) sent this story to me and I think you'll find it illumniating. No, it's not about quacks!

Your Duck is Dead

A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest.

After a moment or two, the vet shook his head and sadly said, "I'm sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away."

The distressed woman wailed, "Are you sure?" "Yes, I am sure. Your duck is dead," replied the vet.

"How can you be so sure?" she protested. "I mean you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something."

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room. A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck."

The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman. The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$150!" she cried, "$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!"

The vet shrugged, "I'm sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it's now $150."

VIDEO: What causes antibiotic resistance? Kevin Wu | TED-Ed

It is goofy (there are butt-faces, silly monsters, Salmonella shooting lasers, and even a fart scene at 2:22) and informative. It is bound to be a classic!!!

Watch this fun video explaining What Causes Antibiotic Resistance thanks the Kevin Wu and Ted Ed.

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-antibiotics-become-resistant-over-time-kevin-wu Right now, you are inhabited by trillions of microorganisms. Many of these bacteria are harmless (or even helpful!), but there are a few strains of 'super bacteria' that are pretty nasty -- and they're growing resistant to our antibiotics. Why is this happening?

Source: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-antibiotics-...

VIDEO: How To Become Gluten Intolerant: The lighter side of medicalization

You are going to have to watch this genius video to understand. When the human condition becomes a medical condition, it can be very very funny.

JP Sears (@AwakenWithJP) explains that "being gluten intolerant is a fantastic opportunity for you to assert your dominance in the life everyone around you, which helps improve your life."

His video contains amazing tips on how to achieve the gluten intolerant lifestyle, among them:

Give expert medical advice. Once you take your gluten free vows, you'll need to have an automatic understanding that every medical condition in caused by gluten. Depression: it's always caused by gluten. Obesity: that's 100% gluten. Every single case of cancer is caused by gluten. I swear, gluten's what killed Gandhi. . . 

Seclusion makes gluten healthier. Understand that when no one's around, you somehow become less gluten intolerant. How does this happen? Well, based on medical evidence that's yet to be discovered, there's a direct correlation between how many people are around and how gluten intolerant you are."

See for yourself, and become enlightened in the ways of the gluten free: 

Being gluten free used to be a luxury only reserved for those who are intolerant to gluten. With this cutting edge gluten educational video, you can become gluten intolerant too, whether or not you're actually intolerant to gluten.

Source: http://devour.com/video/how-to-become-glut...

Must Watch VIDEO: (TEDMED) Are zombie doctors taking over America?

I don't know how I hadn't already seen this. It is perfect.

I've been feeling lately that it is impossible in this system to deliver good quality care and to be 'happy and well and fulfilled' myself, I can related to almost everything Dr Zubin Damania (aka ZDoggMD) says in his TedMed talk.

For years I've enjoyed ZDoggs hilarious videos but for some reason I did not see his TED talk until today.

Physician Zubin Damania, Director of Healthcare Development for Downtown Project Las Vegas, has a plan to fight back against a system that can dehumanize doctors and patients alike.

So much of what he says about his journey into medicine resonates with me, but this one section captures it all perfectly:

"A typical day in my life went something like this:

It begins with a mad scramble from room to room seeing complicated, sick and scared patients and their families, followed by three hours of paperwork using an electronic medical record that's two keystrokes away from becoming sentient and destroying humanity, all the while answering phone-calls from insurance companies, colleagues, and administrators each asking that I do more and more with less and less while improving quality and patient satisfaction. And speaking of which, that patient for whom I refused Vicadin because I was convinced it was destroying his life just ripped me a new one on Yelp! And I get through my 31st voice mail and I'm trying to delete it and it won't delete and I'm thinking I have to call I.T. now and I realized the reason it won't delete is that it's a live person I'm talking to. And it's my wife. And she's asking me to come home.

When I finally do get home, I can't be present with my two little girls because all I can think about is 'could I have missed something in this insane shuffle that could hurt or kill somebody?' Later, rinse, repeat for an entire career."


"Enough was enough. I realized I had a choice to make. I could either submit to this insane system and retire and then do my thing, but have my soul crushed and join the ranks of the swelling physician-zombie apocalypse. Or, I could surrender.

Just give up the external validation, drop the mask, and really surrender to who I actually was and have some hope of reconnecting to my purpose."


I need to do that. Dr Damania and Iora Health understand the fundamentals of providing the right kind of care. If we weren't wasting so much time and energy on all kinds of things that don't really matter, we could start to care for people again.

How can we do it?

- remember "medicine is about human relationships"
- "fix the reimbursement system . . make it an affordable, flat fee that incentivizes everyone to keep everybody well."
- "revolutionize the care model and the culture of the team; health coaches, nurse practitioners, doctors, and patients working together collaboratively non-hierarchically to change the health of the whole community"
- "glue it together with technology that helps rather than obstructs
- "do things FOR people instead of TO people"

I want to be a part of a clinic like that!

Source: http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=34752