Premeds - take chemistry more seriously
Started by Teleologist
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I've had it before for much less trivial things. But my prior edited post had post-hold written all over it.
I'm just repeating myself, but Dichloromethane, also known as Methylene Chloride, has only one carbon. There is no double bond. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloromethane
That is why Dichloromethane is more commonly used since the Methylene is misleading.
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To be fair that's the whole point of the post. Girl gets DCM in eye, goes to doctor. Doctor's question is whether the compound is acidic or basic. Ergo doctor doesn't remember jack about chemistry.
Though I entirely and wholeheartedly agree with your tone as I'm not convinced the OP understood that to be the problem in the first place since he's concerned with performing titrations on neutral compounds in someone's eye, a la
@Teleologist , premeds should take communications more seriously as well. Otherwise they look like blathering idiots who are so "knowledgeable" that they can TA gen chem courses from atop their high horses and convince an entire thread of people to hate their guts all within the first page of the thread.
Man, you people are all going to get probation !!1!1 Be nice to OP !!1
That makes so much more sense. Thank you for clarifying.
I have a PhD in medicinal chemistry, but I'll admit that I have found very little use for my mad chem skills in clinical medicine.
In all honesty, the vast majority of people using very dangerous chemicals (HF, sodium borohydride, raw metal catalysts, concentrated sulfuric acid, etc) know exactly what to do should they be doused. I used to have a friend stand next to me with a jar of base for certain reactions just in case something went wrong. And when things did go sideways, most of us ran to the eyewash rather than the ED. As far as I'm concerned, if someone comes to the ED and their skin isn't actively peeling/bubbling off, no one is even going to consider throwing another chemical on them. They will give them fluids, watch their labs, and adjust electrolytes/etc as necessary, things any trained physician is capable of doing.
When is in-depth chemistry knowledge actually useful? It can help when a patient comes in with a toxic ingestion of something and you're trying to figure out what it is. Or when patient has a strange fibrotic lung disease or an unusual presentation of cancer. But…if there isn't literature on it, no one if going to take your chemistry theories very seriously. More than likely the diagnosis will be something generalized like "lung disease secondary to chemical exposure".
In all honesty, the vast majority of people using very dangerous chemicals (HF, sodium borohydride, raw metal catalysts, concentrated sulfuric acid, etc) know exactly what to do should they be doused. I used to have a friend stand next to me with a jar of base for certain reactions just in case something went wrong. And when things did go sideways, most of us ran to the eyewash rather than the ED. As far as I'm concerned, if someone comes to the ED and their skin isn't actively peeling/bubbling off, no one is even going to consider throwing another chemical on them. They will give them fluids, watch their labs, and adjust electrolytes/etc as necessary, things any trained physician is capable of doing.
When is in-depth chemistry knowledge actually useful? It can help when a patient comes in with a toxic ingestion of something and you're trying to figure out what it is. Or when patient has a strange fibrotic lung disease or an unusual presentation of cancer. But…if there isn't literature on it, no one if going to take your chemistry theories very seriously. More than likely the diagnosis will be something generalized like "lung disease secondary to chemical exposure".
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deleted380953
That was my thought as well. I imagine you'd utilize the secular (characteristic) equation to determine the eigenvalues.
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deleted380953
Yep, its apparently in a Feynman lecture where he uses the diagonalization of the hamiltonian matrix equal to 0
Oh no, I'm letting physics forums leak in..
He didnt get it
i feel smart that i actually have a reasonable idea of what you're talking about. unfortunately, i cant provide a solution to this. <H/psi> = <E/psi> psi is the wave function. something along those lines, right? did you make this question up?
You could've thought of a million trillion things more clinically relevant than chemistry. Almost completely useless.
I was actually doing a similar reaction to the one she was doing one day in the research lab I worked in. The post doc I worked under told me this story about the UCLA researcher...literally as I was drawing up a syringe full of t-butyl lithium. I just wondered why he couldn't have mentioned that 5 mins prior...
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It was more just a test to see if OP could provide the quantum basis for the MASER, which you seem to have be on the right track for. The actual answers are pretty trivial.
Is the double bond in blue in the picture I showed you?
No.
Therefore methylene doesn't imply presence of a double bond.
Err yeah, you're right.Is the double bond in blue in the picture I showed you?
No.
Therefore methylene doesn't imply presence of a double bond.
But can we let this thread die already. : P
You really expect people to keep this ridiculous thread civil? Either close it or allow people to speak their minds. There's no intellectual discourse to be had here.
This. Like the wise Carlos Pestana, MD, once said: "Do not 'play chemist' and attempt to neutralize the agent."
The reason why you shouldn't try to neutralize an acid with a base or vice-versa is because neutralization reactions are always exothermic, and thus you can potentially make a burn even worse.
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literally one of the only posts in this thread worth anything.
I don't remember 99% of general/organic chemistry now.....I know organic has the hexagons and ****, and chem lab is where you mix things in a beaker, it doesn't make anything, and you write a lab report on how much you sucked at it.
...well you are in the pre-allo forum...
In my recombinant DNA lab I put sodium acetate into ethanol waste in a beaker..voila a mini eruption...it was terrible and I almost had to sing because of it (our TA makes us sing karaoke style in front of the class if we screw up) but luckily she was talking to someone else!
Yeah, like whatever happened to rinsing with water?
this is the best post I think ive ever read on sdn.
Is the double bond in blue in the picture I showed you?
No.
Therefore methylene doesn't imply presence of a double bond.
While you're using a picture from wikipedia, you might as well quote the first line: "In organic chemistry, a methylene group is any part of a molecule that consists of two hydrogen atoms bound to a carbon atom, which is connected to the remainder of the molecule by a double bond. "
But I guess it's all semantics. Happy Monday! 🙂
Now I understand why people in the allo forum get annoyed when premeds post there...
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Semi-necro, but I just had to add my voice to the chorus of "you are a raging dick". Your tone of condescension for something that is so far removed from clinical medicine exemplifies the very worst of premed arrogance. Also, your credentials of gen chem TA and "I can answer every gen chem question on the MCAT sub forum" that you consider as a soap box to talk down to your peers is laughable.
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