mind-reading

i couldn't resist... 'twas going through some old ophthalmology papers and found this gem. i needed to immortalize this in print somewhere other than its original place of print. hoping to compile a list of some of the better student comments during the annual review of exam papers later on.. here's this one as an appetizer.. word for word, spelling, grammatical and all sorts of other mistakes in their birthday suit.

Q: A 70 year old woman presents with vomiting and a left red eye. She is so distressed that she cannot give a satisfactory history. Her relative says she does use a green topped eye drop, but ran out recently.

a) What is the drug in the green topped bottle?

A: a) pilocarpine

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scribbled at the bottom of the page as students' feedback to the question:

If you are going to refer to the colour of an eye drop bottle, could this please be stressed in the lectures as required knowledge (fair enough a comment eh?)

I have a green white top jar in the fridge at home. is it a) mayonnaise b) olives? (hee, this was the comment that inspired this post!)

kinda reminded me of my OSCA station last year where they were talking about their blue and brown inhalers for asthma. i understand the validity of knowing your colors ~ met a couple of patients who couldn't remember what inhalers they were on. all they could tell me was that they decided to stop their blue one, but kept the green.. and the purple one was making them sick and they've never heard of the brown one. the hell if i know which inhaler they're talking about! especially if their idea of blue is more of a green and brown is actually orange. in the real world, you'd just grab a whole buncha samples the drug rep gave you and ask your patient to pick out the puffer they had at home.. or look up their medication history on Medical Director, as most GPs seem to be using nowadays.