Last weekend the U.S. changed back to Standard Time. I went through the semi-annual ritual of changing all the clocks in the house and I was a bit surprised at the variety of ways in which devices needed to be changed.
Last night on the way home from teaching a class in Chicago I was seated next to a very nice woman from Purdue University who was on her way to San Antonio to make a presentation to a nursing association. The title of one of her slides, "Differential Diagnosis," caught my eye and I asked her about it. I watch Fox's TV show House and I've heard that term a lot. Every week Dr Greg House and his team throw up on a whiteboard all the diseases or conditions that could cause the symptoms they see in a patient. And then they almost kill the patient before they narrow it down to the right (rare) condition--but that's what makes the show interesting. As she explained it, that's pretty much how one gets started treating a patient using this method.
