Oh, hey there! Postcall here, popping into your inbox like a Valentine’s Day card! 💕

Here’s some trivia to take to heart:

❓Trivia Question❓: In what century was circulation of blood demonstrated?

Now, time for this week’s stories!

Table of Contents

• Neuralink has been implanted

• Is opiate agonist therapy (OAT) safe in pregnancy?

• Guideline watch 👀

• New US guidelines on HIV management in pregnancy

• Radon not so rad 

• Physician Compensation: How does your income rank …

  • Rich People Pay to Cut

  • The Bubonic Plague's Furry Return

  • SuperBowl Highlights

  • Carlson vs. Putin

  • The Best SuperBowl Commercials

• The Crossword

• ❓Trivia Answer❓

  • Share Postcall, Get Merch! 🐕

Based on popular demand (over 60% of you want economy/market updates), we’re bringing back our financial summary — in a short, but sweet format called the Postcall’s one-sip markets update:

The S&P’s 1% gain for the week meant it had its 14th gaining week out of the last 15 (and pushed the index above the 5,000-point threshold for the first time). Despite the market gains, inflation expectations remain low (which means inflation should remain low).

Is Elon Musk’s New Tech A No-Brainer? 🧠

What happened? Neuralink, a neurotech company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has implanted its first “brain-reading” device into a human.

Why it’s interesting: The FDA gave the green light for Musk and his team to start implanting the chips into humans last Sept. The chip is meant to “record and decode” brain activity and allow people with sleep paralysis, spinal cord injuries, or missing limbs to control devices with only their thoughts. 

Despite Musk claiming that the patient is “showing promising neurospike detection,” Neuralink hasn’t said anything about the product's long-term effects. Neuralink’s study brochure says patients will be monitored for 5 years after the procedure. In other brain computer interface products, the quality of the detected neuronal signals degrades over time. No information on what happens to patients beyond the 5 years has been given. 

The device was first tested on monkeys and, although their motor skills improved, some of them experienced seizures, brain swelling, and paralysis. 

Neuralink isn’t registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, despite it being a requirement for medical journals and universities to protect volunteers. Some researchers find the lack of protocol “uncomfortable,” and say that transparency from Neuralink is important because many people would be relying on the product to improve their lives.

Bottom line: Remember when people thought Bill Gates was trying to put 5G chips into your brain through vaccines? Turns out they were pretty close, we just got the wrong billionaire.

Things your attending might pimp you on 🙋🏽‍♀️👨‍⚕️ 

Women to the front, in honour of International Day of Women and Girls in Science (Feb. 11). 🤸🏽‍♀️

1. Is opiate agonist therapy (OAT) safe in pregnancy?

A population-based cohort study of >9,000 pregnant individuals has shown that the risk of major congenital malformations with first-trimester OAT was 51/1000 and 61/1000 with buprenorphine and methadone, respectively. Buprenorphine-exposed infants had lower rates of cardiac malformations, oral clefts, and clubfoot, but had a higher rate of gastrointestinal malformations (mainly pyloric stenosis). Despite a small excess risk for major congenital malformations, OAT remains crucial for optimizing outcomes in pregnancies affected by OUD.

2. Guideline watch 👀

New US guidelines on HIV management in pregnancy highlight that Bictegravir/FTC/TAF (aka Biktarvy) can now be used as an alternative initial therapy based on small studies that suggest bictegravir is safe and effective in pregnancy. Protease inhibitors are no longer preferred for most pregnant people over concerns about integrase inhibitor resistance. Infants with perinatal exposure to HIV should be screened for congenital cytomegalovirus.

3. Radon not so rad 

A prospective cohort study of >150,000 postmenopausal women aged 50–79 found that radon exposure was associated with moderately increased stroke risk. Compared with women living at concentrations of radon of <2 pCi/L, those at 2–4 and >4 pCi/L had higher covariate-adjusted risks of incident stroke: hazard ratio (95% CI) 1.06 (0.99–1.13) and 1.14 (1.05–1.22). Associations were slightly stronger for ischemic than hemorrhagic stroke.

Physician Compensation: How does your income rank compared to peers in your specialty?

The annual 2023 data is out, and once again plastics is top of the pile.

Of course, the data is relatively unchanged over the past 10 years. These compensation figures include salary, bonus, and profit-share from full time physicians.

For the full list of data, including a breakdown by specialty, check out the report here.

🍔 Quick Bites

1: 🦇 Silvered-haired bats in Canada and the U.S have just what you need to get into the Valentine’s Day mood. Cori Lausen, director of bat conservation for Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, transformed the bat’s mating call into something humans are able to hear. Aside from bat’s having their own love song, the discovery could help scientists find where the bats live and prevent them from being killed by wind energy projects.  

2: 🚗 Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash employees in the U.S and U.K are set to strike this Valentine’s Day. Drivers are accusing the platforms of not paying them a liveable wage and forcing them to work long hours. Spokespeople for these companies say they aren’t worried about the strike affecting their availability as they claim “a vast majority of their drivers are satisfied.” 

3: 🤑 The rich are getting richer… in obnoxiousness? There’s been a rise in businesses that let people pay to cut in line — like airports, theme parks, and ski resorts, according to CNN. The article points out this is nothing new — like when wealthy people tried to pay to cut in line for COVID-19 vaccines.

4: 🐈 A cat owner from central Oregon has caught a rare case of the bubonic plague. On Feb. 7th Deschutes County released a press release informing the public that anyone who was in close contact with the owner and their pet have been notified and given medication to prevent the illness from spreading. This is the first case of the plague since 2015 and health officials say no additional cases of the plague have been reported.

5: ⚠️ The Museum of Modern Art in New York was forced to shut down over the weekend after more than 500 Pro-Palestinian protestors held a sit-in on the building’s second floor. Protestors passed out flyers that accused MoMA of “providing funding and weapons to the Israeli military.” The protest lasted almost two hours before protestors left the building and continued to protest on the streets of Manhattan. 

6: 🏈 Here’s two numbers for you to remember from Super Bowl LVIII this past Sunday:

19 (years): number of years since the Superbowl was last won back to back by the same team (Patriots in the 2003 and 2004 Super Bowls).

US$332 million: The value of the extra media exposure the Chiefs and the NFL have received courtesy of Taylor Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce.

7. 🎤 Tucker Carlson, former FOX News host, interview with Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has sparked controversy among viewers. After the interview aired on X many fact-checkers and journalists responded with criticism for Putin’s misleading statements regarding the history of Russia and Ukraine. It was reported that Carlson offered no pushback but instead “praised Putin’s encyclopaedia knowledge on the region,” regarding the ongoing war. 

Postcall Picks ✅ 

💳️ Buy: The Littmann CORE Digital Stethoscope when it’s $70 cheaper here.

🥧 Learn: what happens to the economy when we eat less pork. “The American pork industry has become so efficient that demand can’t keep up with supply.“ - WSJ.

👂️ Listen: Send this to your loved one(s) — the Glaucomfleckens talk with The Flipside Life, an organization that supports partners that support physicians (through all stages of a medical career).

 👀 Watch: The 12 best Superbowl commercials from this past Sunday. This one’s our fave (if for nothing else but to imagine how much money they were offered to put on those orange suits)

The Crossword

Secure your stethoscopes and fasten your lab coats — it’s time for our weekly puzzle. It’s the Valentine’s Day edition, where all clues are related to LOVE or the HEART 💘 .

First question: What is a rare but surgical correctable congenital heart defect involving numerous structures / Olympic snowboarder Shaun White?

Average time last week: 4:36

Forgot to send someone a Valentine’s Day card? No worries! Just send them this puzzle instead! 🥰

❓Trivia Answer❓

In the 1600s, William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood. This was before anybody knew about capillaries and how blood got from arteries to veins. Prior to this, people “believed the blood to be continually formed anew from the digested food, to be dissipated and used up in the tissues, and considered that the primary function of the heart was the production of heat.”

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