Posts by Hamish McNish 10 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2019
The Merck Manual is pretty good for medics too. With its help I passed the US ECFMG (Examination Certificate for Foreign Medical Graduates) examination in 1973 and the the VQE exam in 1979. I never went to work in the US though. https://www.msdmanuals.com/professional. The Merck Veterinary Manual is also very useful to have to hand if you have dogs or cats.
Hmm. A health care analogy worth sharing is point of care testing - eg blood gas machines. The medic goes straight up to the device, uses it, often with a shared pin code, and then breaks it. The clinical scientist RTFMs first and doesn’t break it. Example of the thought process of the former. “I have some blood in a plastic syringe. It takes more than a few minutes to clot. I don’t need a sample with an anti-coagulant added, The machine will analyse it before it clots”. Then the blood hits wet.warm glass inside the instrument. And the young medic gets a lesson on the effects of disseminated intravascular coagulation... (The clinical scientist has to fix the instrument).
