The Buddha Says

I know there are plenty of wikis around. I got interested in contributing to the wikipedia quite recently. I had another project on my mind - inspired by a friend. A website for Indian patients. The aim would be to provide simple, reliable, evidence-based, health/disease related information in english as well as every regional language of the country. The lack of a strong regulatory body for the medical profession combined with the collective ignorance of the common Indian public results in some very sad situations. I have often been a part of this in the past - a hapless spectator watching the system fail again and again. The surest way forward in my opinion is to empower the people with knowledge. With knowledge comes enquiry. With knowledge comes the freedom of choice. Patients can question the decisions taken by their healtcare providers. The informed patient is a formidable entity who can take on the medical practitioners whop often try to squeeze every last paisa out of a sick p

After much persuasion by my boss, I decided to switch from Suse 10 to Ubuntu 6.06 . And, like all proper decisions this was taken at 1 am when I could barely keep my eyes open let alone think straight. I have had Suse for over 6 months now. I spent a month installing it. That is right. Just under a month. For a variety of reasons. First and most importantly, it was my first linux install. Then I had to find all the drivers for my Dell laptop bits. I had quite a job getting and configuring Suse to play mp3 and mpgs. And, I am not even mentioning manually editing the xorg.conf file. Phew! And what a difference Ubuntu is. It is the easiest linux distribution to install. It took me little over 30 minutes to do. And, it is a breeze. It comes with a prepackaged set of software that should set your computer up to do most daily chores. You get OpenOffice , Firefox , photoediting tools, some games and more. There aren't any fancy complex programs as these are all available on the online re

Is this meant to drive you crazy? I have spent over two weeks now desperately trying to configure a new desktop for under £600. I thought this would be relatively easy. I only had two non-modifiable factors: first, it would be a AMD dual core processor based system and second, it will run only linux on it. I decided to build a system to run only linux for a number of reasons. The most important is out of respect for the man I work for who has taught me a lot - in surgery, life and computers. The next reason is that it will force me to learn and become good at linux. And, this has huge implications when I go back home and start running my own hospital. A linux based network would be infinitely simpler to manage and cheaper. I have so far decided on the processor (athlon fx x 2 3800+) and the motherboard (an asus one with the nvidia ultra 4 chipset). I am yet to decide the rest of the stuff and hopefully should have ordered all the components before the end of next week. And, for the nex

Today I made my first entry into the world of wikipedia. I operated on a lady with an irreducible, painful femoral hernia a couple of nights ago. She did not have any clinical evidence of obstruction or strangulation. I chose to use the infra-inguinal approach as this is much simpler and a much lesser procedure. She had a bit of omentum incarcerated in the hernia. I excised this and fixed the hernia using sutures. My consultant had a little chat (the kind you get when you have done something silly) the next day. He thought I should have used the high-approach, so I would have had better access to the abdomen. This would have been useful if she had needed bowel resection. I was planning on opening the lacunar ligament to get bowel out through the femoral canal. This, he said, was not ideal. So, I decided to read up and was looking on the internet and came across a wiki stump. And, I decided to add some stuff to it. I hope to add to more medical articles in the coming days.