h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmmm... sounds a lot like the Planned Parenthood clinics here in the US, although those aren't anonymous. Many counties here have public health clinics which deal with those sorts of things as well, and some services at those can be anonymous (like HIV testing).

Yeah, I got into medical school here, but my health ended up just not being up to me going. If I had done developmental/behavioral peds, I would have had to do a general pediatrics residency and then a dbpeds fellowship. For pediatric neurology, you only have to do the first two years of a peds residency, and then switch to a pediatric neurology fellowship. I had applied knowing that it would probably take me longer than the others to graduate with time off for being sick, etc. -- but my health tumbled quite bit between the time when I applied and when I was accepted, and I finally decided that the idea of trying to go to medical school while on immunosuppressants just wasn't a good one for me.

That's okay, though -- I do enjoy the research I do, and I don't know that I would have liked feeling as "tied down", career-wise, as doctors are here. With my research degree, I can still feasibly take time off to have children, if it comes to that, or switch temporarily to another career field if I crave a change. With medicine, both of those are pretty difficult here.

I think the thing is that whilst you're asked your name and adress at a STD clinic you don't actually have to give the correct one to recieve treatment!

I suppose one of the things that I like about medicine here is that it is structured.. but then again people do take time off to have children, and their are part time specialist training schemes.

As long as you enjoy the research that you do, for some reason I assumed that you were already medically trained. I do enjoy this side of it, and critically reading papers, it's like getting power away from the recieved wisdom.

Humm that ourght to have been more fluffy as well for coping with it all and still having a career of some nature afterwards.

Ps. and I know that you never wanted to hear about AMH again, but I'm having a blonde moment, is the specificty of a test affected by the prevelence of a disease in the test population? or is it a proportion?

Okay, so specificity is the proportion of people who didn't have hematuria, out of the number who didn't have cancer -- again, D/(C+D).

Because this measure *only* includes people who don't have cancer in both numerator and denominator, it's not affected by the incidence of cancer in a population. It *is*, however, affected by the incidence of hematuria. So if you have a population that has lots of hematuria for a reason other than cancer, the specificity of hematuria for cancer will be lowered.

Make sense?

That makes sense, and if the "population" is people refered to the urology out patients clinic the rate of haematuria is going to be higher than in the population.

Sorry to bother you!

erm I meant incidence there not rate. I was looking at this data, thinking "it's not generalisable but I can't work out why "

Glad to help some.

And it's certainly a great help! I'm just trying to work out how to display things..

and having a little bit of a "work panic" which is good because it's 1 am here and I'm not drinking!, I'll probably carry on for a while.