A BBC PASSWORD STORY
In all the years that I have been the primary physician for children and young families, especially as children start to become gradually more independent, I have promoted the idea of a family password.
A typical scenario would be that a teenager is with friends and starts to feel uncomfortable about what’s going on. In a telephone call to a parent, the teen would say a secret phrase like did you hear from uncle Sam? This would mean “I don’t feel comfortable with what’s going on, please come and get me“.
I just read an article on the BBC website saying that a secret password or pass phrase could be a weapon against scamming with AI voices.
The article suggests that if we get a call from what sounds like a family member saying they’re in trouble and need money or, worse, want us to talk to their kidnapper, we need to do something very quickly to verify their identity. Asking for the family password can quickly expose an AI imitation of our loved one’s voice.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260804-why-your-family-needs-a-secret-codeword
Lately, in my social media scrolling, I’ve seen a lot of posts about how horses, who are animals of prey, are exquisitely sensitive to our energy and seem to be able to read our minds. There’s also more and more talk about how they synchronize our heart rates when we are together or even nearby. All this reminds me of something I wrote in 2014. I’m linking to it below.
“I Also Tame Wild Horses”
A 2017 post from A Country Doctor Reads (retired blog)
The reason dogs are friendlier than wolves appears to be a genetic one, according to an article in The New York Times:
“A group of scientists from Princeton, Oregon State University and other institutions combined behavioral and genetic studies of 16 dogs and eight captive, socialized wolves to pin down changes in two genes on a region of one chromosome that were associated with hyperfriendliness in dogs. The two genes, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1, are also associated with Williams-Beuren syndrome in humans.”
I found this interesting, because of my general love for dogs and my heartfelt memories of the three extremely affable beagles I have lived with over the years. Also, I know a boy, now in his early teens, with Williams Syndrome. I wrote about him in my first year of blogging in a peace called “All God’s Children”:
“Joey didn’t reach his developmental milestones; his eyes didn’t seem right and he had an unusual, broad grin, which he always flashed. By age two he was diagnosed with Williams Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that affects one in 7,500 newborns.
Joey, in typical fashion for Williams Syndrome children, is extremely gregarious, even with strangers. He is a favorite with the nurses. He isn’t potty trained, cannot make three word sentences, and cannot make age-appropriate drawings.
His parents elected to give him the 4-6 year-old shots yesterday, and he protested loudly. Immediately afterward, he wanted to kiss the nurses.”
My 2008 piece concludes:
“We must all remember that our children are only loaned to us. We have a natural desire to see them grow up to be healthy and happy, and more often than not I think we hope they will be a lot like us. Our task and privilege as their parents is to see them for who they are, and help them reach their potential.
A youngster with Down’s or Williams Syndrome can be more capable of receiving and returning the love of their parents than a child without genetic challenges, and a healthy child can be killed in a freak accident in the matter of seconds. The wisest parents cannot protect their children from making their own mistakes, and even the elderly often have to grieve the loss of a child.”
I came across a post on a Swedish primary doctor Facebook page that mentioned a word I didn’t know existed. Eminence Based Medicine, at least according to some, is when there is no evidence to base your treatment plan on and you instead choose to trust experts. I guess in some cases, if we’re high enough or long enough into our careers, we might even venture to assume on our own what the best course of action is. “Expert opinion” is often used these days, but it doesn’t have the aura of eminence…
Intrigued by the expression itself, I started researching how new Eminence Based Medicine is, since it was all new to me. I found to my surprise that it was coined by Isaacs and Fitzgerald in 1999. They wrote:
Clinical decisions should, as far as possible, be evidence based. So runs the current clinical dogma. We are urged to lump all the relevant randomised controlled trials into one giant meta-analysis and come out with a combined odds ratio for all decisions. Physicians, surgeons, nurses are doing it; soon even the lawyers will be using evidence based practice. But what if there is no evidence on which to base a clinical decision?
They introduced a bunch of other terms in the same vein as Eminence Based. Some were more comical than others. So here is a table from that 1999 article:
From a Tattered Merck Manual to All the World’s Knowledge on my Phone
Published May 25, 2026 Progress Notes Leave a CommentA clinical encounter from 1980 recalled in a 2010 blog post and just think how far we have come since then.
We certainly live in the knowledge economy, a world where having information and knowing how to use it is the key to success in just about any field.
And there’s so much more of it now. I remember having a book when my children were young titled something like encyclopedia of trivia. Just one thin volume? That’s unfathomable now.
Back in 1980 in one of my first rotations in my Swedish internship, which was a 20 or 21 month affair, I was a prison doctor in a sparsely furnished room with only two books on the bookshelf. One of them was a well read older Merck Manual which helped me make a diagnosis that seemed life-changing to one of the inmates.
I now can check Google AI, Epocrates, Up-to-Date, the National Library of Medicine and countless other websites from my iPhone 13 mini, which fits easily in my left front pant pocket. If I’m looking for the exact name or the exact treatment or the main criteria for any diagnosis, it is literally at my fingertips and it has been for several years so I think I am part of a groundbreaking generation of physicians who went from looking things up in a book to checking them out on my personal iPhone.
It’s a little bit like my grandfather‘s experience with cars, having been the first one in his village to drive one, or my parents experience with charter flights to the Mediterranean. Once exotic, later commonplace inventions changed the world in less than a generation in the last 100 years.
Snap Diagnosis
A Country Doctor Writes: 
