Category: Medicine

  • How To Find An Alternative Career As a Doctor

    Medical students and doctors often ask me how the hell I managed to leave the hospital and work as a software engineer (and later, founder) instead. We usually would schedule a call and somewhat aimlessly do a Q&A in the optimistic hope of the other person asking me good questions, and the even more optimistic…

  • Acarbose: Life-Changing Farts You Will Remember

    As with some of my self-experiments, Acarbose is one of those where I can’t remember my reason for starting it. I think it was some sort of simplified cave man reasoning ™ along the lines of “Acarbose.. modifies gut bacteria.. good.. must try.. walking to pharmacy now.. showing doctor’s ID.. thank you”. And so it…

  • Vitamin B12: You Should Probably Be Injecting Hydroxocobalamin

    Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) is an interesting one, because many people (including doctors, and including me until recently!) don’t know much about it. Let’s take a look, and let me explain why you might want to be injecting hydroxocobalamin. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! Before we get started: What the hell is Vitamin B12?…

  • Six Years of Back Pain, Episode 1: Mouse Shoulder

    This is episode 1 of my medical mystery. As all medical mysteries, it led me to physiotherapists and doctors – but, in contrast to most medical mysteries, it also led me to stuff my scrotum into a leather-lined pouch. And I also ended up shooting gut bacteria into various cavities of my body. But let’s…

  • Making My Own Glasses

    It’s a long weekend, I’m standing in my flat, 10 lenses scattered across the desk in front of me. I’m wearing weird glasses consisting of an empty plastic frame and some lenses stuck into it. I squint out of the window, trying to read number plates of cars parked in the street. What happened? It…

  • The Correlation Project

    As a coder, concentration and mental focus become very important. Writing code is a very brain-intense activity which makes daily fluctuations of mental focus very obvious. I already noticed this while studying medicine. Luckily, studying medicine is not an activity which requires a lot of brain activity (it’s more about being organised). When I started…

  • Two Years of Sleep Optimization

    As a kid, I became obsessed with my sleep. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I panicked – oh no, I’m not getting enough sleep for school tomorrow! As a good Asian kid, that thought was very scary. I would blame my bed, mattress or pillow of making too much noise or being uncomfortable. My parents…