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Beta‐blocker blues: pharmacology with a blues beat

2006· article· en· W2051907957 on OpenAlexaff
Ewen MacDonald, Jarmo Saarti

Bibliographic record

VenueMedical Education · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicScience, Research, and Medicine
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBluesBeat (acoustics)Clinical pharmacologyMedicinePsychologyPharmacologyArtArt history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Context and setting There are many ways to describe the side-effects of beta-blocker therapy, but for the past few years our students have been able to recall the liturgy of unwanted effects by remembering the lyrics to the ‘Beta-Blocker Blues’: ‘Got the blues; got them beta-blocker blues, Cold feet, cold toes, cold fingers, ice-cold beta-blocker blues.’ Why the idea was necessary The enthusiasm of our students for this unique form of teaching has been the impetus to create more ‘pharmacology blues’. The repertoire now includes ditties describing the side-effects of glucocorticoids (‘Moon-Face Blues’), problems of polypharmacy (‘Potentol Rag’) and an explanation of the Henderson−Hasselbach equation for absorption of weak acids and bases (‘Messrs H & H’). The song entitled ‘Zero Tolerance for You’ describes a series of pharmacological definitions defined in terms of a (decaying) romantic relationship. In addition to detailing drug side-effects, the songs can highlight other problems associated with drug use. For example, the benefits and drawbacks of prophylactic therapy are illustrated in a song about cholesterol-reducing strategies (‘Down to Five’). The problem of using 1 drug to treat the side-effects of another is dealt with in the song ‘Mr Miller’s Magic Panacea Pills'. The exotic sources for many widely used cytostatics are described in ‘Cancer Chemotherapy’. In this way, students can be made more aware of aspects of drug therapy that might not otherwise be covered in the lecture course: ‘My baby’s gone and left me – she says our love is dead, But bradycardia all day long stops fireworks in our bed.' What was done Last year, we were able to record the songs digitally in a professional studio. They can now be accessed by the global community of students and faculty staff from our web page (http://www.oppi.uku.fi/opk/video/ujbb/). The songs are available in mp3 format and the lyrics can be downloaded separately in either pdf or Powerpoint®. Evaluation of results and impact We have found that students can and do learn basic pharmacological facts simply by listening to the songs at home (pre-CD scores 30 ± 3%; post-CD 72 ± 4%), but we frequently incorporate the songs into appropriate lectures (e.g. ‘Alzheimer Blues’ in a lecture on antidementia drugs). In addition, they fit very well into revision quiz sessions: interspersing the songs between the rounds of a quiz makes it entertaining; more like a TV show rather than a dull revision session. In the months that the songs have been online, we have received positive responses from pharmacology teachers all over the world. These songs can be considered as ‘light edutainment’ but we are gratified that students' examination answers on the side-effects of beta-blocking drugs have improved since the advent of the ‘Beta-blocker Blues’: ‘These pills don’t stop my heartache – beta-blockers go to hell.'

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.156
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.012
GPT teacher head0.371
Teacher spread0.359 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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