"Things I Learn From My Patients"

From wicked_wish's blog, the Student Doctor Network Forums with some incredible stories about some of the things these students, doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc. see in the emergency room, or Emergency Department, as they frequently call it.

Such as this little gem....

"If you suspect you have an STD, don't go to the ED with your girlfriend and tell the doctor your symptoms in front of her if she's not the one that gave you the STD. Don't act surprised, either, if she storms out of the room crying.

There are 36 (and growing) pages of 25 posts per page. That's a lot of reading! Space aliens, take us now! And expect many, MANY OMG!WTF?! moments! Not to mention quite a few EWWWWs!


And for the bonus round, here's a thread in the same vein for pharmacists.

An infinite number of throw-away email addresses....

A recent post and subsequent replies from donkey_hokey spurred me to look up this site address and post it to her. Then it occurred to me that this is something that lots of people may use, and chances are that a number of people on my flist haven't heard me mention this or may have forgotten about it.

Anyway, there is a web site called Mailinator. They provide a very anonymous email system that is read-only. Email can be sent to it and received, but you cannot send email from said site. So if there is a web site that you have to register for to access any content, but you don't want them spamming you, this is a good way to do it. Just choose a name, add the @mailinator.com, and you're in business. Go to the Mailinator site, enter the name that you chose, and there will be your registration confirmation email. And if the site doesn't permit Mailinator domains for emails, there are several alternative Mailinator domains listed at the site.

The down side of this is that your email is not private. If Fred is the name that you chose, anyone can log on to the Fred mailbox and see all messages for "Fred". The messages are automatically deleted from the Mailinator system every few hours, so get your login email or whatever and move on. The boxes will only hold ten messages, and they have some other criteria for auto-deleting email before it gets to the email box. And best of all, "All images, scripts, and other email nasties are stripped from the above email.
This may affect the email's appearance." So your computer can't get nasties from malicious email.

I use this site quite frequently, between it and Yahoo's spam filtering, I don't get a heck of a lot of junk mail. Highly recommended.