Just ruminating

 Margan and I gave a presentation on the Covid-19 pandemic this week to our residents here at MonteCedro and it set me to thinking about my life in medicine and how things have changed -- and how they have stayed the same. To do the presentation we had to do a quick review of what has happened with up-to-date statistics. There are multiple wonderful Internet sites that have those statistics and the people behind them vet the figures and update them daily. We were able to gather that data almost effortlessly and further, make a presentation that was clear and visually appealing. 

When I began presenting years ago there was no Internet. I spent many hours in the library searching out sources that were on paper -- and not current by any means. My first efforts to make slides for a presentation were horribly amateurish and I am embarrassed to think about them. My photographic skills were, to put in kindly, rudimentary and the slides showed it. Of course the camera (it was a nice Konica SLR) used film and you had to get it developed. Ugh. It was slightly better when I used acetate overheads because you could put them into a copier and display graphics from textbooks and journals, but the quality was low. When I was in the Navy, we could have our slides done by Med Photo -- Navy photographers who knew what they were doing. It was still a chore because they preferred typed slides and my typing was poor. 

Then came PowerPoint and it was awesome. Sometimes too awesome. But it allowed a presentation to be made that included high-quality photographs, screen captures from the computer, and more. I am still working on the “less is more” principle and I think I have become more effective with that. For the presentation this week I limited the slides, kept them simple, and made the points necessary. I have learned a lot about the art of presentation over time.

I remember as a medical student having a rotation where the mentor made the point that my medical education was only beginning and would never really end. She was right. Even though I am retired I still use many of the same tools that were available in the 1970s. I still love textbooks but have found they spend more time now on the shelf because they are outdated by the time they are printed. Medical journals remain a mainstay but more and more I find the publications I want online because they are most current. In the time of Covid-19 the time crunch is so acute that knowledge gained in any other medium is stale by the time it reaches me. Margan and I talked about what would change once the pandemic is controlled; we agreed that the old style medical conferences with flying to a destination, staying in a hotel, and clustering in a conference room were likely to be victims of Covid-19, killed not by the virus but by the technologies such as Zoom that make travel for such purposes quaint. We will still exchange knowledge but in a far more environmentally sound form.

So, my ruminations this week are just an old guy who had a wonderful career in medicine thinking that it was fun to be thumbing through the journals at 2:00 AM when I was a resident, trying to answer the questions about the sick patient I had just admitted, but thankful that a new generation has a better way to gain information and then to share it with others. A fun look in the rear-view mirror.