Common things

"When you hear hooves, think of horses first, not zebras"

i'm not really sure of the source of this saying but it's a principle in medicine. it means that COMMON THINGS ARE COMMON. some of u might be rolling ur eyes and saying "well now, that's obvious".

but in reality, we, med students tend to think of the most interesting things first and those would always be the rare and uncommon diseases.. and the doctor would say "common ones first please".

if i had a penny for every time the word common is said by the lecturers, i'd be a millionaire by now =P

in my pre-clinical years, i used to get tired of hearing them say this phrase. believe me, u can even find it in the books but i can't remember which one. how are we supposed to know what's common. the books' statistics don't help much esp not in the health statistics of malaysia. asyek kene gune statistics US or UK je.

only now, when i visit the wards can i know the actual frequency of the occurence of the diseases. just yesterday when me and asma' were practising clerking patients in the female surgical ward, we clerked two cases of cholelithiasis (stones in the gallbladder)one after the other. macam deja vu plak. pastu my friends said there were also cases of cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder) and choledocholilithiasis (stones in the gallbladder wall).

hmm, i'm convinced now that females are very susceptible to suffer from stones in their biliary system.

common things ARE common. now i can know what those common diseases are :)