What's your personality?

A topic that I've found a renewed interest in recently is differences in personalities. It started with talking to someone recently about the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, which basically puts people into one of 16 personality categories. You're supposed to take the "official" test, which you can learn how to do here. There are also a few fake online ones floating around out there. (For what it's worth, I've taken both with the same result.) Basically, there are 16 Myers-Briggs types, because there are two "preferences" for each of the four categories they measure personality with. The four categories are favorite world (introversion or extraversion), how you get information (sensing or intuiting), how you make decisions (thinking or feeling), and how you deal with the outside world (judging or perceiving). For example, your personality could be ENTP, for extraversion, intuiting, thinking, and perceiving. (My personality is, to no surprise to anyone who knows me, INTJ.) I sort of like this kind of qualitative measure of personality, because it's quite non-judgmental, and forgives us for being different (for example, I can't feel guilty about not wanting to socialize for hours at parties; now I can think that it's not a character flaw, being introverted is hard-wired into my personality). I also think that we are pretty much born with our personality, and it changes very little. (Which might explain why I was such a terror as a child, sorry mom and dad.) There are a couple websites where you can read about the different personality types, and from the people I know, the descriptions seem pretty accurate.
The second reason I was thinking about personality differences is because I am doing a psychiatry rotation, and I feel like there's often a very fuzzy line between personality and pathology; i.e. what some clinicians want label psychiatric disorders or personality disorders I sometimes have a hard time viewing as little more than differences in personality. I mean, where does the line between high-energy and hypomanic lie? There are, of course, real, quantifiable criteria for diagnosing, say, depression or generalized anxiety disorder, but people who fall on one side or the other of the diagnosis aren't radically different. I think we're all lying along a spectrum somewhere, and the idea of where personality differences end and pathology begins is an interesting one.
I highly recommend looking into the Myers-Briggs stuff, if you never have. It's very interesting, and might tell you something about yourself or how you interact with others that you never knew before. When I read about my personality for the first time, it definitely taught me something (and, alas, not all of the information was good ;) ).

It's here! It's finally here!

What we've all been waiting for for the past 364 days...International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Before you think I'm totally crazy, this day is bona fide: it was in the New York Times crossword puzzle today (8 down: "Well I'll be" as might be said on Sept 19. Answer: Shiver me timbers). And no holiday can be solely in the counterculture if it makes it into the crossword puzzle. So why have TLAP day? Why not! According to the website, the whole point of TLAP day is that there is no point. So have a great day! And remember, today's the one day of the year you can't make too many harrrrrible pirate jokes. :)

p.s. whoops, somehow I neglected to actually post this one. okay, it's now a week after TLAP day. well...close enough. :)

Pica

A quick google search turned up that pica stands for: 1. The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, 2. the Podiatry Insurance Company of America, and 3. the Printing Industry of the Carolinas. However, the Pica that I am endlessly fascinated with is the "persistent eating of nonnutritive substances." According to emedicine, people with pica eat substances, "including, but not limited to, clay, dirt, sand, stones, pebbles, hair, feces, lead, laundry starch, vinyl gloves, plastic, pencil erasers, ice, fingernails, paper, paint chips, coal, chalk, wood, plaster, light bulbs, needles, string, cigarette butts, wire, and burnt matches." Um, ew. Though pica has always held a morbid fascination for me, this post is inspired by a patient today (not mine, hipaa) who was found by the nurse eating baby powder, and subsequently found to have an earring in her colon on xray. And I had a patient a couple weeks ago who admitted to eating cigarette butts (seriously), but flat out denied eating coins (her exact words: "I save money! I don't eat it!"), though clearly there was a quarter in her cecum on xray. Crazy. Factoids about pica: eating ice chips can be a sign of iron deficiency; and eating clay or dirt is acceptable and a learned behavior in some cultures. Not helping Worcester's infant mortality problem: pregnant Ghanaian women eat clay (though I've heard that this problem gets more press than it's really worth in terms of actual harm to infants). Anyhoo, I got off track. Pica is weirdly cool. Except for the people that eat, you know, razorblades and whatnot.

Happy International Women's Day!

International Women's Day was first celebrated on March 8, 1909 (well, that year it was National Women's Day), a year to the day after 15,000 women marched in the streets of New York demanding shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights, and an end to child labor. The day is an official holiday in many countries, such as those of the former Soviet Union. You can read more about its history on the IWD website.

On the first IWD of the 21st century, the UN issued this statement:

"...members of the Security Council recognize that peace is inextricably linked with equality between women and men. They affirm that the equal access and full participation of women in power structures and their full involvement in all efforts for the prevention and resolution of conflicts are essential for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security."

The UN has taken on Women's Rights, and specifically the Elimination of Violence against Women, as a major issue in the past 30 years; gender equality is one of its Millenium Development Goals. Two weeks ago, at the opening meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women, the UN Secretary-General said:

"Violence against women is an issue that cannot wait. A brief look at the statistics makes it clear. At least one out of every three women is likely to be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime....No country, no culture, no woman young or old is immune to this scourge. Far too often, the crimes go unpunished, the perpetrators walk free."

Lest we delude ourselves into thinking that women and men live as equals in the United States in 2008, consider an article from today's Boston Globe about a professor of anesthesiology at the BI who is filing a lawsuit against the hospital, its president, and the chief of surgery, alleging years of sexist treatment (the chief of surgery reportedly told a group of nurses that he preferred to hire residents who were "tall, light-skinned, Western-taught men"), at the end of which she was demoted. And although women enter medical school at nearly the same rate as men, they are still under-represented in the upper ranks of academic medicine and in certain specialties such as neurosurgery. It would be naive to think that the dearth of full-fledged female professors in medical schools and teaching hospitals is because women haven't been entering medicine at high rates for long enough. Discrimination, both overt (like that referred to in the lawsuit against BI) and subtle, is everywhere, and the lack of female professors (of all specialties) and mentors creates a dangerous pattern of not encouraging young women to take career paths so often taken by young men after medical school. There was an interesting article in AMSA's magazine this month called Breaking into the Boys' Club. You can read it here.

Ok, enough on this (albeit interesting) topic for today. (*alights from soapbox*)
[But this is IWD, after all. If you can't rant about gender bias today, when can you??]

Happy February 29th!

It only comes around once every four years, so savor it. I never knew the leap year had such an interesting story until I heard about it on NPR the other day. How all this business started was that the world used the Julian calendar from the first century, until people noticed that the date Easter was celebrated (the vernal equinox) kept drifting slightly forward, since the calendar year (365.25 days) was just a little longer than the time it took for the earth to circle the sun. That meant people were one calendar day forward every 128 years. Pope Gregory XIII found that unacceptable, so created a new calendar (the Gregorian calendar), which we use today. He kept most of the Julian calendar, but added the rule that years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years. However, years that are divisible by 400 are leap-years. (The 400 rule overrides the 100 rule, apparently.)
A couple cool factoids arise from all this:
1. February is so short because Caesar's son Augustus was a brat, and wanted his month to have as many days as his father's (July), so they rearranged a bunch of days, the end result being that February has fewer days than all the other months.
2. The Russian and Greek Orthodox calendars still use the Julian calendar, so Easter falls later for them than on our (Gregorian) Easter.
3. The whole world didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar at the same time. When it was adopted, 10 days were cut out so they could start fresh. Most of the world cut the 10 days in 1582, but Russia held out until 1918. Alaska cut the 10 days when it was purchased from Russia in 1867. Can you imagine the confusion of losing 10 days? And of having different areas be so off from one another? Think of all the birthdays that got thrown off!
The moral of this post being: Who knew calendars could be interesting and cool? And savor today a little more, cause you won't see it again for a while. :)