This evening the campus Oncology Interest Group had as a guest speaker our chancellor, an extremely distinguished and well-spoken pediatric radiation oncologist. I personally think he's just collecting titles ...and winning at it. When answering a rather routine question for this area of medicine, "How do you deal with the unavoidably tragic cases in a field with kids and cancer?," the chancellor waxed philosophic about the "problem of evil." This is the very old conundrum relates to the problem of having evil in the world with an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful deity.
In medicine and especially oncology, we often (admittedly unfairly) justify some of the things that happen to our patients.
So how does one deal with this? The non-religious simply say that it's all random, so I might as well help. The fervently religious may claim that there is some grander plan that for some reason required innocent children to die painfully. But the bulk of physicians, like our chancellor, simply stop thinking so hard about it and help as best they can. Even if there is little we can do clinically, we can improve our patients' and their families' lives by being there for them in these difficult times.
Well, the colon cancer patient had a horrible diet; the lung cancer was undoubtedly due to the 2 packs a day for 40 years; and the guy with the throat cancer drank and smoked!But pediatric cancers are never the fault of the kid. What's more, the child hasn't lived a long life of fun and debauchery, and may never because of our diagnosis.
So how does one deal with this? The non-religious simply say that it's all random, so I might as well help. The fervently religious may claim that there is some grander plan that for some reason required innocent children to die painfully. But the bulk of physicians, like our chancellor, simply stop thinking so hard about it and help as best they can. Even if there is little we can do clinically, we can improve our patients' and their families' lives by being there for them in these difficult times.
Now for something completely different: I present to you: SuperMouse PEPCK-Cmus! This genetically engineered mouse line was created by up-regulating one enzyme, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase, which is important in gluconeogenesis.
TIL: Aortic stenosis causes heart sounds to change from "lub-dub" to"lub-shhh-dub".
Excessive fructose ingestion is bad because its metabolism is less regulated in the body compared to glucose. Fructose is quickly used to form fructose 6-phosphate, and it will do this without any negative feedback, consuming all of the body's stores of inorganic phosphate. And that has broad, if vague negative effects on energy metabolism.
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