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Ben Franklin is one of my all-time favorite historical figures; there are few people who have been universally successful in all they've done: business, politics, science, and humanitarianism. Franklin was one of these, and he's left a guidebook for those who wish to follow in his footsteps. (And really, how can you beat $2.50 for a brand-new book?)

I've been reading through it lately, and while it's easy reading, it's so chock-full of wisdom that I find it slow going. Lunchtimes and evenings find me with pencil in hand, underlining and annotating the bits that especially speak to me, and there are many.

I came across this paragraph, and I was astonished. With the anti-vaccination crazies gaining influence and mindshare, this earthy bit of common sense was a breath of fresh air, written in the 1700s by someone who knew a world without vaccines, and saw the devastation caused by these diseases — smallpox, polio, and many others — first-hand.

In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted him bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it, my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and therefore that the safer should be chosen.

Simple and profound. Alas, I don't think the anti-vaccination types will take his advice to heart, and we are all the poorer for it.

Last night while waiting to board my flight in Charlotte, NC, I signed up for Harvard's intensive 8-week Organic Chemistry I and II classes (+ labs). Ironically it's cheaper than taking them at MCP (and nearly as inexpensive as taking them at UMass), and they'll be over more quickly. I tend to do much better in classes when I completely immerse myself in the material. E.g. Calc II, biology 1, college writing II.

$4600 including student health insurance, and it includes the labs — which are usually more expensive than the actual class. I have free parking a 10-minute walk from campus at Paul's place, which is completely awesome. I intend to get A's, which won't be a problem if I actually study.

However I am getting ahead of myself, so I'll back up a bit.

After turning in an undergrad performance that more closely resembles this cat than a decent education, I have decided to forgo pharmacy school entirely. Instead, I've made up my mind to attend med school. Where, I don't know. Nor do I particularly care, to be honest. Any med school I attend will give me the tools I need to pass all three steps of the USMLE, and then it'll be up to me to learn during residency.

I feel like I've been fighting this decision for a long time. Probably two or three years. I've been resisting it because of the way healthcare policy in the country is set up. I have issues with things like EMTALA being an unfunded mandate, inclinations toward socialized medicine, medical malpractice insurance premiums, residency, and personal shortcomings. In a bizarre way, I feel like I'm better equipped than most who desire to go to med school who have their idealism ripped right out from under them when they hit the Real World because I don't have any in the first place.

I'm not worried about the MCAT. I rock at standardized testing, and I actually plan to prepare for this one. I never prepared for the SAT, and I did extremely well, and MCATs apparently correlate fairly well with SAT scores. How much better could I do on the MCAT if I prepared rather than going in blind, tired, and unprepared like I did with the SAT? I'm hoping to score at least a 33, which is easily within the realm of possibility.

My personal statement will be excellent because I'm a good writer, and I've thought about med school from a real world perspective more than I've thought about anything in a long time. I'll have recommendations in spades; I have a list of 16(!) different people, all of them in the medical field, who have agreed to write me a recommendation if I ask them. Many of them in unique positions of influence. This is a comfort to me because of:

My main trouble will by my GPA. I've got to rip up and repave my undergrad career in a few key places: organic chemistry, microbiology, and (perhaps) general biology. This will take some money, and probably six months to a year. If I decide to apply to a foreign medical school — which holds a great deal of appeal to me — I could probably forget retaking basic biology. Oh, and I'll probably have to take Physics II (+ lab). Not a huge deal there.

Looking back at my old transcripts and thinking about how I used to (not) study makes me cringe. It's like looking someone else's life and saying "And did you want to set yourself up for failure later?"

Anyway, regarding personal shortcomings. Two main things stand out to me: I tend to follow the path of least resistance. It is, for example, easier to watch TV than it is to study. I'll have to watch myself carefully. The other is sleep. I worry that residency will be a disaster because I'm one of those unlucky fools who needs 7-8 hours per night, otherwise I'm useless.

But I'll have to get there first.

I haven't written anything in a while, mostly because I don't have much to say that others would find interesting. However, I would just like to say that printing to PDF absolutely kicks ass. I discovered this nifty little thing a couple of months ago, and I've been using it religiously ever since.

For those of you non-Mac users, and those who are but haven't noticed, OS X has a built-in print to PDF feature — made much more useful if you click the print page link, or printer-friendly link that most sites have before printing to PDF. (Click for full-size.)

For the last couple of months or so, I've been creating my own little library of research papers of things I'm interested in, or have had occasion to use:

I've actually been accumulating material faster than I can read it thanks to school and work, but I'll have time to catch up in the coming weeks. When I want to find something that I know I read, just Command-Space and I can search the contents of all of the PDFs instantly using Spotlight.

Lots of people complain about Spotlight, but it's better than anything Windows has out-of-the-box.

All of this can be accomplished on Windows, as well, but it's just easier on a Mac. I save CEs, journal articles, whatever I find interesting. It's also interesting that a lot of what you read in medical news and journal articles is 1) uninteresting 2) unremarkable and 3) useless. It seems it's always fun to compare things to placebo when it would be much more interesting (and useful) to conduct head-to-head tests of drugs.

There is no "best-of-breed" drug for a given condition most of the time, thanks to the near-infinitely variable nature of complex higher organisms. There are very few absolutes in medicine, but there are trends that usually emerge. It'd be nice if researchers started going out of their way to look for them. That's somewhat difficult, though, when most of the big studies are funded by large pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in seeing their drug perform well. You'd be a fool to hundreds of millions of dollars for a big study only to have your drug not perform as well as a competitor's… Sometimes the NIH funds head-to-head studies — the only entity besides Big Pharma with pockets deep enough to do so — but only when there is a significant amount of money to be saved by establishing a "winner".

If I get bored someday soon, I'll post some of the names of the huge studies to which I refer in this mini tangent…

Apple, OS X, Spotlight, Tiger, Mac, PDF, library, digital library

So I'm not in pharmacy school at the moment — though I hope to return in Fall 2007 — so I'm taking courses at UMass Lowell. I've changed majors to psych just to make it easy in the meantime. Anyway, I wasn't expecting it to be quite this easy. I haven't taken courses that required so little effort since I was in early high school. While I am getting mostly As, I find myself dissatisfied because the work is so utterly unchallenging.

Fast forward to yesterday morning around 7.30am: I discovered yesterday that I had a research paper due today by 11.59pm. Between then and midnight tonight I'm scheduled for 15 hours on the Pharm. Oops. Anyway, of the 5 topics on the list, the one that seemed the least interesting at first glance ended up being the most interesting upon closer inspection, and now I find myself biting into a fairly information-dense biochemistry paper discussing the viability of using ADAM 12 — a disintegrin-containing metalloprotease — as a breast cancer screening test. Since it can be isolated in urine, it's far less invasive than other tests.

It's actually been pretty fun so far. I'm feeling the crunch (been up since 4am), which is not something I've felt in quite a little while, and it's invigorating. The material is pretty cool, and it's relevant to medicine and pharmacy, and since that's what I'm truly interested in, it's been a nice breath of fresh air.

It's also nice to have something challenging to sink my teeth into for a change.

This is one of those stories I really don't feel like telling, but ultimately it will be easier for me to simply write once and point people here rather than re-tell the story 100 times. I haven't edited it for grammar or smoothness. As such it probably won't read that well. But I don't care.

Anyway, some of you know I'm on vacation in California visiting my friend David. Got here Wednesday night, and I'm here until Tuesday (tomorrow). On Friday, we were supposed to go up to Big Bear Lake, and we did. We were planning on going fishing and maybe playing some tennis and relaxing. Unfortunately, I started getting sick on Thursday night. Bloating and waves of pain about once every 3-4 minutes. It felt a bit like lactose intolerance, but taking lactase enzyme didn't help, so it obviously wasn't that.

I didn't want to go to the hospital because I knew what they'd do to figure out what was wrong: more barium and a CT scan. I HATE barium. I'd almost rather die than drink barium. More on that later.

Continue Reading »

I just posted this over at OnThePharm, but I thought you guys might like to read the story, too.

I got call before work this morning to swing by and pick up a mis-delivered crate on my way in. Its contents was worth over $15,000. Underneath all the packaging, how much did the goods weigh? About 2 ounces.

If you enjoy reading it, please digg it.

Time for another OTP zeitgeist. (June's can be found here.) It's been 2 full months of writing for fun and profit. This month went by particularly quickly — I've got more on my plate in terms of responsibilities, and the "newness" wore off. I don't check my AdSense earnings as religiously as I did in June. (Incidentally, if you are a Mac OS X Tiger user, this widget is quite nice if you just want an overall look at how you're doing.) I think think that was a particular factor in making the month seem to go by quicker.

Google also rolled out a toolbar PageRank update. I went from 0 to 4. Not as impressive as the 0 to 5 jump that polyscience.org did, but I don't mind. i get much more search engine traffic than polyscience ever did.

June-July comparisons:

Impressions:
June: 13,606
July: 12,042

Clicks:
June: 111
July: 90

Earnings:
June: $28
July: $25

RSS subscribers:
June: 28
July: 55

Goals exceeded:

• I said I wanted 3,000 page impressions for OnThePharm in the month of July. I got 3,629.
• I said I'd like 28 RSS subscribers. For the last 7 days, I've averaged 55.

Goal not met:

• I wanted to hit $35 in AdSense earnings. I didn't meet that for a variety of possible reasons. See below.

Contributing factors

Webhosting

Against my better judgement several months ago, I chose a crappy webhost. It was a tough month for them, and while they're a company that believes in full disclosure, their service has been spectacularly unreliable. If there's one more monumental screwup in the next six months, I'll be moving to MediaTemple who seem to have people that 1) know how to create a reliable network and 2) have servers that are fast. Even for WordPress sites. (OMG!) MediaTemple is in the same building as DreamHost — as is MySpace — but they didn't seem to have the issues that DreamHost has had thanks to their apparent lack of networking and failover expertise.

Mostly I just want a non-suck webhost that doesn't make me bleed money through my eyes. I sort of miss my dedicated server, but as I've posted above, I'm not making bank from my writing. Something tells me I'd be better off picking a datacenter that's NOT located in California. Even without Enron playing games with the power grid, it's still incredibly unreliable. I'd like to find someplace like DirectNIC which stayed up even during Hurricane Katrina with their entire first floor under water.

Misc. other factors

I wonder if my increased RSS readership has anything to do with lower revenues as well. My feeds are fulltext, which means you don't need to visit the site to get all the content. When I hit 100 readers, I'll switch to excerpt-only feeds as a one-month experiment. As I don't get paid for page impressions, I don't know if fulltext is a problem. Regular readers aren't likely to click ads, and since page impressions are up and revenues are down, I suspect some other phenomenon I've yet to discover is going on.

Looking ahead to August

I don't have a clear direction for the month of August. I'm going away for one week towards the end of the month. I'd like to hit $30 this month, which means I'll have to do a little more large-scale promotion than I did this month.

Mostly I'm going to focus on providing good content and seeing what happens with search engine traffic, RSS subscriptions, etc. I'd like to double the number of regular RSS subscribers by the end of the month. I wonder what the limits of my niche (healthcare) are? Is there huge demand for policy and finance (which I tend to focus on)? People seem to love good stories, but I honestly don't have many good stories.

I've got an idea for a controversial post that I'm going to write, but we'll see how long it takes for me to get around writing it. It's about a very real problem that faces patients — particularly terminal patients or those dealing with chronic pain.

Blogging, zeitgeist, RSS, adsense

Big Pharma catches a lot of flak for advertising directly to consumers. As marketing budgets approach and sometimes even exceed R&D spending, it has some wondering what's going to happen as pipelines run dry, and what consumers and the industry as a whole can do about it. Now with 10% more balogna!

Link!

A feature article that I wrote. Weighing in at some 2000 words or so.

If you have a digg account, please digg it.

This is largely copied from post over at polyscience.org:

There I was, re-opening shop, only to disappear after a week or so. Now I'm moving on, permanently. As in, leaving the business of science writing. Over the last six months, my interests have been slowly shifting, and I find myself interested in "science" as a general concept less and less. I'm more focused on business, medicine, and the business of medicine.

I never thought I was particularly good at writing about science and science-related things. I always felt as though there was someone who knew more, someone who could convey my ideas better than I could. I also felt as though it was a relatively new niche. I discovered quickly that I had been mistaken. It is for these reasons that I am no longer going to be writing about science and related interests.

While writing for polyscience.org, I always got the most enjoyment from writing about medicine. Specifically adding commentary to news articles written by journalists whose first area of study was certainly not medicine. In the meantime, I've also picked up quite an interest in business, and so it only seemed natural to marry the two ideas.

Thus, On The Pharm was born. I've been writing there for a few days, I can honestly say that writing for it does not feel like work. Indeed, it's more fun than anything else, probably because 1) it's easier and 2) I don't have to learn so many ideas from scratch like I did when writing about science as a whole. I can focus on my niche, and that's what I want to do. I also like the look of the site much better. So without further ado, here is my latest work-in-progress:

URL: http://onthepharm.net
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnThePharm

Some stuff will be technical, some will be fluffy, some will be business-oriented, and some of it will be tongue-in-cheek. And all of it will likely be informal. I prefer to talk in my posts as though I'm talking to a person, and I hope that comes across, unlike here where I pretended to be an omniscient narrator. I'm writing for it every day (so far), and I have a small backlog of material from the last two weeks, but I'm slowly clearing it out.

I can only hope that it'll find a niche of readers so I'm not listening to myself echo in cyberspace. I've decided that I'm not going to be half-assed this time, either. I'm going to jettison my (utterly ridiculous) dedicated server which costs me $120/month — though it's a great deal for what I get — simply because I don't need it. As soon as my contract with iweb.ca runs out, I'll be moving both this website and polyscience.org over to DreamHost who is currently hosting On The Pharm. Their packages are unbeatable, and I'll likely never outgrow them. (Though it would be awesome if I did!) If the time ever comes that I need my own dedicated server again, I will likely go back to iweb because they were just that fantastic. (Read my review I linked up.)

I spent a lot of time on the layout and colors. I would like to make some money with this venture, which is why I said "doing it right" earlier. I studied ad layouts, and I'd like to see if I can effectively make some money without interfering with layout too much. I think I've done a pretty good job so far — I'd love to get some feedback from you guys. I think the ads blend in well, and it would be nice if they generated a decent CPM once I get more traffic going to the site. Given the nature of what I'm writing about, each click should be worth more than a few pennies — though that's certainly not why I chose my niche.

I still need to come up with some ways to drive traffic. My niche is pretty specific, and doesn't really appeal to places like Slashdot or digg or boingboing, so I need to come up with other ways to drive traffic. I haven't had time to really look into larger websites that I could submit some of my stuff to. We'll see what happens in the next week or so. I'm approaching this like a part-time job, and I'm trying to put in some real solid, uninterrupted time each day to add content. I hope it pays off.

writing, On The Pharm, Pharmacy, medicine, blogging