A deep divide

As you may have read, the members of the OMA have turned down the present form of the agreement that was negotiated with the Ontario government because 59% of votes cast by OMA members were against the agreement. The Ontario government has countered by saying that they will implement the agreement anyways (isn't that no longer called an agreement?!).

Anyways, the present politicking isn't the main issue that I want to write about. I am more interested in the way the vote was split. The overall numbers indicate that 51% of eligible OMA members voted and that 59% of the votes were "No"; however, contained within this overall figure is the fact that 50% of medical students voted, and 95% of their votes were "Yes".

This apparently caused a bit of an uproar with the OMA coucil, and a motion was put forward to exclude medical students from voting in any future referenda. Although this motion was shut down through support of the medical student vote from many representatives (including the OMA president John Rapin), it still concerns me that the council would even motion this to begin with.

I am simply one member of a very heterogeneous group that makes up the OMA; from medical students to family doctors to surgeons, each sub-group experiences the health care system in unique ways. Although we are members under the same OMA umbrella, the fact that our experiences are different would be expected to influence what we are looking for in an agreement and hence how we vote.

I voted in favour of the agreement because it is a good deal for medical students. I didn't feel the need to consider how this would affect all of the other types of doctors because I don't know anything about their present situation (i.e. I am not a doctor, I am a medical student). I would expect that each of the different sub-groups would vote for what's best for them, and in the end the OMA would have an overall vote that told them if the majority of their members think that they would be better or worse off with the agreement.

This is the pretty simple concept of voting, and I think that most doctors- including those on council- probably understand this. If it had turned out that surgeons voted much different than the majority of the OMA, I imagine council would simply have come to the correct conclusion that the deal had different appeal to surgeons than the rest of the OMA. This might provoke them to look at why, but I doubt that council would think to ban surgeons from voting.

The funny thing about coincidence

It's remarkable how often coincidences will seem so mystical. When we hear astonishingly true stories of people dreaming of their Auntie Jane for the first time in years and then finding out in the morning that the Auntie had died the previous night in her sleep, we get a chill up and down our spine. It is really hard not to.

I recall reading a great book by Richard Dawkins entitled "Unweaving the Rainbow". In one chapter he actually did the statistics on a seemingly improbable event: buying an antique engraved watch and finding your mother's initials on it. Using reasonable assumptions based on the frequencies of names in phone directories, he came to the conclusion that if everyone in Britain bought such a watch, roughly 3000 people would get a watch with their mother's initials. He uses this and other examples to describe the PETWHAC- Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental.

Since Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist, the really interesting part of the chapter was his analysis of the Darwinian roots of our awe of coincidence. He argues that our innate statistics were not built for today's society. Our brains evolved to navigate the best road between false negative and false positive errors in an environment that had much smaller population sizes and much more homogenous day-to-day experiences. The result is that we intuitively expect a very modest level of coincidence. However, in today's world, with an exponentially increased population size and a mass-media that connects a significant proportion of society, the chances of coincidence occurring are multiplied considerably. Our brain is unfortunately still essentially the same brain as our early ancestors, and we are stuck with outdated equipment for innately assessing coincidence. The only thing we can do is try to learn to be skeptical until we have taken time to actually think about the probabilities involved. But as Dawkins points out, this is "revealingly difficult even for sophisticated scientists and mathematicians."

Last week we were learning about Leukemia and I couldn't help but think about a childhood friend who had had Leukemia. She was probably one of my best friends until age 10. After extensive chemo, she went into remission. Shortly after, she and her family moved back to Northern Ireland, and we pretty much haven't heard from them since. When I got a phone call from my Dad on the same day I had thought about her saying that they had just emailed him because she was coming soon to work as a doctor at Sick Kids in Toronto (you can go into Medicine directly from high school in Ireland), I will admit I had a chill come over me.

Hopefully this doesn't tarnish my image as a "sophisticated scientist".

Time to add some thyme to my time here in Ottawa

(Note: I'm not sure if thyme is considered a spice, but there seemed to be enough chefs on the internet who thought it was, so I'll take the liberty of defining it as such so that my title makes any sense at all)

I took Tuesday off. After a devastating penalty shoot-out loss in the intramural soccer finals in near-freezing conditions, followed by a night spent coughing up my lungs due to my current moonlighting occupation as cordial host of a weak form of Ebola, I felt like terrible when daylight eventually came to kick me out of bed. Although the lecture descriptions for the morning were tantalizing, I decided that a day of rest was in order.

After sleeping in and overdosing on Benylin DM-D cough syrup, I felt (un?) surprisingly well. Although my symptoms were temporarily masked, I decided it would be prudent to seek the appropriate pharmaceuticals to actually mend myself. As well, it seemed like a nice day to go to main campus (the health sciences faculty here is on its own separate campus, grouped together with a number of the major area hospitals, and is about 3 kilometers from downtown Ottawa, where the main campus is located).

After getting rejected for drugs by the family doctor at the university health clinic (since when do they not give out antibiotics like candy?), I decided that I should see what else main campus had to offer. Also-coupling business with pleasure because I am that kind of efficient- I decided that it would be a good idea to check in on my OSAP status with the financial aid people.

Walking around main campus brought me back to the days of undergrad: lounging students occasionally reading something other than 600 page, 10"x12", hard-cover, glossy text books; student newspapers writing about future leaders, stress management, and talking ferrets; display booths all over the student centre pushing various charities in your face; and...this is the big one...Tim Hortons coffee!

I realized how much I miss some of these things. As much as I love my new area of study and find most everything about it interesting, I am having a hard time with the level of medical saturation. The unfortunate reality of having the Health Sciences faculty on its own campus is that the environment becomes all medicine, all the time. This may enthuse some students, and may actually be a goal of the Faculty, but I personally don't subscribe to the theory that removing oneself from all things non-medicine is ultimately beneficial to one's education.

So it's time to take my education into my own hands. Time to spice up my life. Add a little variety. With the amazing amount of Arts and Culture in this city, it shouldn't be too hard. Time for some art house films, galleries, symphonies, museums.....okay, maybe I am getting a little carried away; as much as I would love for these things to be part of my regular lifestyle, that may not be feasible. It is probably best that I simply force myself to at least read about something non-medical in some of my time out of class, and make a major outing to something cultural on a less regular basis- maybe once a month.

With my new-found enthusiasm maybe I can start a new club: the non-medical, medical club. We can go to regular cultural events as a group, or, even better, we can take over a room in the actual medical school building, call it the non-medical room, and fill it with Arts, History, Economics, and Politics material. I wonder if anyone would join such a club?

Some positive spin to the Bush win

After a three-week hiatus for a medical student "conference", homecoming weekend at Queen's , and a move from my downtown apartment to the 'burbs, I am finally back at my computer to do some blogging.

A friend of mine in Australia who forever loves us Canadians for our steadfast Liberal spirit has directed me to a website that reveals a fantastic opportunity that has arose as a result of Bush winning the US election. I feel it could be useful to many of my Canadian friends.

In short, it encourages single Canadians to marry endangered US liberals who are now "desperate to escape". The website requires a pledge from its members:

"Now that George W. Bush has been declared the official winner of the November 2 election and shall become the President of the United States for four more years of idiocy, I the undersigned, a Canadian citizen, pledge to liberate, through the legal and binding act of marriage, a willing citizen of the United States of America, of a gender of my choosing, and with one or all of the following political leanings: discouraged Democrat, reformed Republican, apolitical with limited world-domination tendencies.

In addition, I promise to help my new Yankee spouse to adapt to life in the great white north, keeping them safe from (gratuitous) invasion of privacy, and to provide him/her with a reasonable supply of Timbits."

I say to my single friends: go forth , do your duty for the world-wide Liberal spirit and pick yourself up an American sugar-momma/daddy in the process.