GI Rap

The "peacock" maneuver to finish off our bhangra dance.

Here's a link to the GI sequence rap: http://www.supload.com/listen?s=B75TNW#

With all this humor writing, ethnic dancing, and rapping, I almost feel like I'm getting a degree in music and arts rather than medical school. In fact, last week was the first week of rehearsals for the Smoker, an annual musical put on by the medical students to satirize the faculty. I'm playing Dr. Abrams, a wise white-haired pathologist. My part was originally cast with only two "guffaws" but a lot of standing around, so I added in two lines for myself. I get to dance a little bit too.

On Monday last week I went to a poetry recitation to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. This featured Angel Nafis, a former Huron High School student who is now apparently studying and/or writing poetry in New York city, and Val Gray Ward, an internationally-known actress. Nafis was introduced by her high school English teacher, who noted that she struggled in his class but was quickly becoming a famous young poet. Nafis's poems were powerful and witty, written in stream-of-consciousness style, about what it was like to be black in America. For example, one poem alternated between the word "black" and things she associated with being black. The word "black" resonated in the audience's ears, so that we couldn't escape it, just as African Americans cannot escape their skin color and all that goes along with it. Val Gray Ward recited stories and poems, like the story of Harriet Tubman, with an improvisatory style, moving freely from one piece to the next. Sometimes it was a little hard for the audience to keep track of where she was. Her accent and voice changed to match the character she was playing, and one part in which she portrayed the suffering and helplessness of slaves was particularly moving.

On Wednesday I went to a talk on the business of pharmacology by Rajesh Balkrishnan from the Michigan Center for Global Health. His talk was on "Pay for Delay," a concept I had not heard of previously. By the time a typical drug gets on the market, the big pharmaceutical companies have about ten or twelve years before their patent expires. Because drug development is such a costly process, the companies have to make the drug very expensive during that ten or twelve year period in order to recoup research costs. In Pay for Delay, a strategy that has become increasingly common in the last few years, big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline will pay millions of dollars to the generic drug companies not to produce their drug once the patent expires. The big pharma companies do this because they can still make massive profits on their expensive drug even if they are paying off the generics, and the generics are happy because they get money for doing nothing. The big losers are insurance companies and patients, who have to keep paying ridiculous prices for the drug. This is obviously a major problem, and one that requires congressional intervention to fix.

And yes, I'm still in medical school as well. We just finished up the gastrointestinal sequence, which was heavy on anatomy and biochemistry, but also had some pharmacology, which is my favorite subject. I've also signed up to coordinate the Delonis Clinic, the free clinic that Michigan medical students can volunteer at. Right now the volunteer opportunities are frustratingly small in number (students are lucky if they can volunteer one night per year), so my number one priority is to get more slots for med student volunteers, either at Delonis or another clinic in town.