Diabolic Medicine

I've recently come to an idea to combine parts of my OCPD personality, an addictive computer game (Diablo 2), and medicine. In the past, and in fact during most of my schooling history, study and work has been totally separated from fun and play, in my mind. Although some subjects may have interested me, or perhaps had stimulated my thinking, in the end it usually became tiredsome when I had done too much of it. Not so with games though. Here, I found I could play hours on end without a drop in the interest, nor a drop in my concentration, which was the main problem with studying. So in the past, I had thought about somehow combining them, personal extra-cirricular interest with study, but not working out exactly how this would be. Now, it seems, I may have the answer (at least for me).

In Diablo, one of the most addictive things I found, was the constant search of items. As many as I would find, there would always be more, and it was the quest to find particular ones that probably kept me playing for the length of time that I did. In particular, there were certain groups of items (sets) that had some special properties when you found all of the items of that particular group. These, especially when I had found a few of the pieces of the sets already, really motivated me to play. It was in considering this fact, that I thought of a way in which I could apply it to my studies - classifying illnesses into 'sets' and treating them like items. That way, I could 'run' patients until I had found, for example, all the major causes of chest pain. By treating it as a 'set', I might be able to find some more motivation to go and actively seek out patients.

In addition to this, I was also wondering about the difficulty I had in remembering all the details of the patient, as many had similar problems and co-morbidies - all the features seemed to be blended and blurred into a mess in my brain. Patient details were also hard to remember, just by reading their name on a list. I then thought that attaching some sort of adjective to a person would enable some sort of recall, as I could then distinguish between the patients. Seeing that there were so many patients around (especially this week in my medical ward), I decided that just one adjective wouldn't be enough. After pondering that for a while, it suddenly dawned on me in fact how similar this was to magical items in Diablo! In this way, I think the way I might go about it would be to have sets of different adjectives, perhaps of increasing strength (e.g. plump, fat, overweight, obese, etc.) that I could apply as prefixes and suffixes. In the end, I might end up with something like 'the Lithuanian (prefix) old (quality) woman (item) of incontinence (suffix)'. Of course, to make this more interesting, as well as providing me with more motivation, I might need to 'play' this game with others too, perhaps also having some sort of scoring system to it too.

Although this may seem a bit impersonal, it has to be kept in mind that the primary purposes of this is for motivation to see patients and study, as well as a potentially useful memory aid. It should in no way affect the treatment or management of patients, nor should these names be said to patients - i'm sure they might (in some cases) be less than happy to hear them. Though, this is certainly not unique to medicine, there are many other such examples of things that should not be told to patients, in some settings.

I will trial out these techniques, and see how effective it is for me.