The Brooke, an equestrian welfare charity in the UK, surveyed 3,000 people to identify the most annoying office clichés of 2009. Some of my pet peeves are on this list. Let’s banish them forever! See below for the top 20 annoying clichés.  I would add “Taking it to the next level” and “Pushing the envelope”.

1. At the end of the day
2. What goes around, comes around
3. It’s not rocket science
4. Thinking outside the box
5. Flogging a dead horse
6. Don’t shoot the messenger
7. Going forward
8. By the close of play
9. Give you the heads up
10. Live and learn
11. C’est la vie
12. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
13. Hit the ground running
14. Always look on the bright side of life
15. Suck it and see
16. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth
17. Don’t worry, be happy
18. I know it’s a big ask
19. I’m out
20. There are no flies on me

Read more about the survey here; and, if you work in a cubicle, this rendition of  The Cubicle Song is worth another listen.

 The January 2010 issue of Medical Education is now online, and for now, it is free online! Here are the contents of this issue:

• The state of the science in health professional education
• On complexity and craftsmanship
• The value of paradoxical tensions in medical education research
• Identities as performances: encouraging visual methodologies in medical education research
• The gross anatomy laboratory: a prototype for simulation-based medical education
• Patients in health professional education: so much known, so much yet to understand
• How does research on motor skills translate into clinical skills learning?
• Medical education and other disciplines
• To err is human
• The power of feedback
• Improving the flexibility and efficiency of testing
• Self-organisation, integration and curriculum in the complex world of medical education
• It’s NOT rocket science: rethinking our metaphors for research in health professions education
• Identity, identification and medical education: why should we care?
• A critical review of simulation-based medical education research: 2003–2009
• Active patient involvement in the education of health professionals
• Motor skill learning and performance: a review of influential factors
• Cognitive load theory in health professional education: design principles and strategies
• Diagnostic error and clinical reasoning
• State of the science in health professional education: effective feedback
• A primer on classical test theory and item response theory for assessments in medical education

Here is the 2009 list of banished words from Lake Superior State University. From the site:
Lake Superior State University “maverick” word-watchers, fresh from the holiday “staycation” but without an economic “bailout” even after a “desperate search,” have issued their 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. This year’s list may be more “green” than any of the previous lists and includes words and phrases that people from “Wall Street to Main Street” say they love “not so much” and wish to have erased from their “carbon footprint.”

It’s that time of year again, when the major medical journals publish their Christmas (AKA holiday) reading. Below are some of my favourites from the CMAJ Holiday Review, from the December 2009 issue of CMAJ. For past Christmas issues, see Christmas Journal Issues.

 Faux Review: A report on the zombie outbreak of 2009: how mathematics can save us (no, really)
An outbreak of zombification wreaked havoc recently in Canada and the rest of the world. Mathematical models were created to establish the speed of zombie infection and evaluate potential scenarios for intervention, mainly because mathematicians don’t have anything better to do with their time. We review the development of these models and their effect on the undead.

Research: Snappy answers to stupid questions: an evidence-based framework for responding to peer-review feedback
We developed a Scale of Silliness (SOS) and a Scale of Belligerence (SOB) to facilitate the assessment of inadequate peer-review feedback and guide users in preparing suitable responses to it. The SOB score is tempered by users’ current mood, as captured by the Mood Reflective Index (MRI), and dictates the Appropriate Degree of Response (ADR) for the particular situation.

Satire: Compendium of rejected CMAJ manuscripts: 2009

The 2010 Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Continuing Health Education will be held in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador.  

Consider submitting an abstract; read more here:  http://tiny.cc/CACHE_call
The submission deadline is December 14, 2009.

I just came across this delightful poem, published by Gilda Radner in the November 17, 1988 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine:

DOCTORS ARE WHIPPERSNAPPERS

Doctors are whippersnappers in ironed white coats
Who spy up your rectums and look down your throats
And press you and poke you with sterilized tools
And stab at solutions that pacify fools.
I used to revere them and do what they said
Till I learned what they learned on was already dead.

Radner G. Doctors are whippersnappers. New England J Med 1988; 319 (2): 1358.

Here is an interesting interview from the October 30 issue of The Globe and Mail:
Picard A. ‘When we began, we were almost pariahs’ : A research pioneer [Dr. Dave Sackett] tells André Picard about the battle for evidence-based medicine

Excerpts:  Dave Sackett, a professor emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton, has been awarded the prestigious Gairdner Wightman Award, which is given to a Canadian who has demonstrated outstanding leadership in medicine   …  Dr. Sackett is a pioneer in the field of clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine, which aim to teach health professionals how to separate good research from bad and apply it to the individual needs of their patients. He is also a world expert on the design and implementation of clinical trials  …  I see the Gairdner not as an individual award but as an award for clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine. It’s an award for a delightful bunch of talented people and the credit goes to all of them, not to me. So I accept this on their behalf.
More about the recipient

Listen to Dr. David Sackett on “The Agenda” with Steve Paikin

RSS feeds enable us to browse recent issues of journals through our own desktops.  Actually, you can subscribe to RSS feeds for many kinds of materials, including journals, blogs, Twitter accounts and news services. You can even set up RSS feeds to PubMed searches in the new PubMed. Check out this feed to a search on physicians and the pharmaceutical industry.

Definition: Really Simple Syndication (formerly Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), a newsfeed technology  Read more definitions See also Journals: Medical Education

• Academic Medicine
• Advances in Health Sciences Education: Theory & Practice
• BMC Medical Education
• Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions
• Medical Education
• Medical Teacher
• Teaching and Learning in Medicine

On September 30, NCBI mounted the preview site for the redesigned PubMed. When I first looked at it, I thought they had omitted some key resources like the MeSH and Journals Databases. But I think I entered the site just as they were putting it up, and today, on October 1, there are some great features on the site.

Check out this record:  http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17142167

The default display is now Abstract, with links to the MeSH terms/Publication Types and LinkOut directly below each record. I had heard a rumour that they were going to eliminate the Single Citation Matcher, but apparently there was an uproar among librarians (a terrifying thought) and the feature was retained. There is a simple search and an Advanced Search, and links to the PubMed Tools and More Resources are right on the home page. I think this is an improvement on the current site, where the only way to see MeSH terms is to use the Citation Display. This was not intuitive, and now all users will be able to view the MeSH terms easily.

Read more about the redesign in the September-October 2009 NLM Technical Bulletin.

 Every September JAMA publishes a theme issue devoted to medical education (available by subscription only). The 2009 issue appears on September 23: 2009

Here are the tables of contents of these issues for the past few years:

2008;  2007; 2006; 2005; 2004; 2003; 2002; 2001; 2000 

See also Series or Collections: an index

Check out the free JAMA patient pages.