Tag Archives: wow

Message from Dr Doug Lynch

Blogging of recent resuscitation literature has got a bit behind this week thanks to my pre-occupation with training new Helicopter Emergency Medical Service physicians
I would like to share with you a message I received via email from a fellow EM/critical care doctor, the poetry of which touched me. I have Dr Lynch’s permission to reproduce it here (hyperlinks added by me). If you’re a doctor, paramedic, nurse, military medic, or any other hard-working link in the chain of resuscitation, I hope you are as inspired as I am by Dr Lynch’s reflections:


Hello there Dr Reid,

My name is Doug Lynch.

I’m an advanced trainee of too many Australasian generalist medical colleges (ACRRM, ACEM, CICM) and a perpetual student. (a bit like Chris Nickson without the intellect or talent)

I’ve completed a M.P.H.&T.M. (JCU), GC Emergency Health (Aeromedical Retrieval) (Monash) and a PGC Disaster Management & Refugee Health (JCU).

I work at present in Anaesthetics in outer metropolitan Melbourne (Getting a JCCA qualification) and as a locum with Adult Retrieval Victoria having been their first registrar a few years back.

Im not writing to ask you for a job! I’m off to work with Minh Le Cong et al in Cairns next year.

I’ve been benefitting from your website and I really wanted to say THANK YOU.

I was particularly moved to write to you after hearing the second part of the interview you did some time back with the remarkable Dr Weingart, in particular the comments you made about your Podcast.

I have also searched around the world for the sort of mentors you spoke of and they are few and far between.

I didn’t find them.

It was only after getting disillusioned and demotivated in emergency medicine that I started to look into ICU, anaesthetics etc for something else.

It was the government directives, the protocols and the attempts to fix a failing Primary Care system in the ED that tired me out.

I still think ED Critical Care is the best job in the world.

The most important job in my world is now my two kids but coming in a close second is this medicine business.

I would really like to lend my support to your aim to try to help plug the hole in the ED happiness bucket.

I enjoy the work you do.

You deserve some seriously positive feedback from people like me. I hope you find time to develop your podcast idea.

I think you are on to something.

I think that this touches on the philosophical.

What we do is not just about the mechanics of life, the continuation of life…its about the joy of life and our own joie de vivre.

I find a beauty in it all.

I see nobility in the dying and the stripped bare inner strength of their loved ones.

I see the battle weary ED night shifters stepping out into the dawn eyes shielded.

I see modern heroes.

Enough of all the flowery language.

If ever you run a course in Australia I would like to come along.

I think I will go and look at some of your pictures of celestial bodies to lighten things up.

Keep it up.

Doug Lynch

Hydrocarbon lakes on Titan

It’s a stretch – but Saturn’s largest moon Titan could support methane-based life forms. It is the only other place in the Solar System than Earth that is known to have liquid on its surface. Not liquid water though – which would freeze at Titan’s temperature of minus 283 degrees Celsius, but liquid hydrocarbons.

acetylene - food for alien bugs?

An interesting finding shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan’s atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another is that maps of hydrocarbons on the surface show a lack of acetylene, (used on Earth as welding gas). One explanation is that methane-based life forms are eating it. Sensibly, Mark Allen, principal investigator with the NASA Astrobiology Institute Titan team, said: “Scientific conservatism suggests that a biological explanation should be the last choice after all non-biological explanations are addressed.”
Nevertheless, the thought of cool science like this keeps me warm at night. Nature keeps coming up with stuff far more exotic and wondrous than our own ancient magical myths ever imagined.
Saturn's Moon Titan

More information at Spaceinfo.com.au