Should Critical Care Medicine be a Formal Part of the Undergraduate Curriculum?

Medical students were surveyed shortly after completing the third year of medical school. TIle survey was designed to identify those areas of critical care medicine students had been exposed to and expressed interest in learning more about. In addition, the surveys sought to discern the level of confidence students felt with respect to different critical illnesses and intensive care unit (lCU) therapeutic modalities.Finally, the students were asked their opinion regarding the possibility or need for critical care medicine as pan of their medical school curriculum.The three most common topics of interest among medical students who had recently ftnished their third year in medical school were shock, hemodynamic monitoring, and mechanical ventilation. Less than 30% of the students surveyed felt "better-than-average" confidence on anyone of a number of critical care topics and treatment modalities. Of the 80% of students (n = 70) who completed the survey, 91% (n = 64) felt that critical care medicine should be made a pan of the medical school curriculum,6% (n = 4) felt it should not, and 3% (n = 2) were undecided.TIle survey results and the finding that most of the relevant literature acknowledges the need for critical care medicine in medical school has led us to conclude that a national core clerkship or a didactic lecture series in critical care medicine should be carefully designed and implemented into the undergraduate curriculum

Use of talcum powder and endometrial cancer risk

Purpose: Use of talcum powder in the perineal area has been associated with an increased risk of ovarian cancer, and a recent cohort study found a positive association with endometrial cancer. We sought to confirm this association using data from the Australian National Endometrial Cancer Study (ANECS). Methods: ANECS was a population-based case-control study conducted from 2005 to 2007, in which 1,399 women with newly diagnosed histologically confirmed primary endometrial cancer and 740 control women provided risk factor information via telephone interview. Unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios adjusting for potential confounders. Results: We found no significant association between ever use of talc in the perineal area (OR 0.88, 95% CI: 0.68-1.14) or upper body area (OR 0.90, 95% CI: 0.71-1.14) and risk of endometrial cancer. The results were similar when stratified by subtype. Composite variables combining frequency and duration of talc use were also not significantly associated with risk (any perineal area use p = 0.07 and any upper body use p = 0.49). Conclusions: The absence of any increase in risk and the similarity of our results for talc use on the upper body and in the perineal area do not support the hypothesis that use of talc in the perineal area is associated with an increased risk of endometrial cancer. Our data do not confirm the positive association between perineal talc use and endometrial cancer observed in the only previous study