Monday, February 22, 2016

Max and Min

A bit of background explanation for my non-medical readers is required.

In pharmacology, the points at which a drug reaches the highest and lowest concentrations in the body are called Cmax and Cmin, respectively.


Last week I was at a meeting where the speaker kept pointing to graphs and saying things like "we obtained Cmin from testing healthy volunteers," "Cmin samples were analyzed by Whatzefukk chromatography," and "Overall, we were surprised by the Cmin values that were obtained."

And through it all... She didn't seem to realize what Cmin sounded like phonetically.

Immature as I am, it was hard not to snicker.

17 comments:

a.generic doc said...

Aw, cum on, Grumpy. You're a doctor, not a 12 year old boy!

Then again, Tom Lehrer did tell us, "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd. "

Anonymous said...

The German electronics firm Siemens is correctly pronounced Zeemans, not...

Anonymous said...

My inner 12 yr old boy gets me in trouble an awful lot .... and in reality I'm a 50+ yr old woman. I would have snickered every single time.

Yoko Drāno said...

"But, as you can see from the high standard deviation on this scatter plot, Cmin is all over the place."

Ms. Donna said...

Given your specialty, I assume this was not some Viagra-like substance . . .

And having had a 12-year-old male to raise once upon a time, I can attest that those with the XY chromosome pair never entirely grow up.

Anonymous said...

Did you find their conclusions believable, or were they hard to swallow?

Anonymous said...

I'm sure it was a relief to finally collect your check and go home, after hours of having your eyes and ears filled with Cmin.

Alexander Portnoy said...

Due to its role in clearing drugs from the body, do you find the highest Cmin levels in the liver?

Jono said...

Whatever it takes to stay awake during a meeting. I would have snickered and tried to cover it up with a cough.

Steph B said...

I have a 12 year old son who snickers and fidgets every time someone mentions Dick's Sporting Goods. He can't handle it. :-)

A. Marie said...

I confess that both this post and the comments have done wonders for clearing my sinuses. Not exactly the bodily fluid under discussion, but...

Oldfoolrn said...

We used to call it "peak" and "trough." Leave it to whippersnappers to come up with a clever sounding term. Could someone from the aerospace industry pronounce "Fokker" for me?

Anonymous said...

I went to Seaman High School. In our lunchroom was a plaque that read "Erected 1969." You've got to appreciate the funny things in life.

Anonymous said...

In the world of molecular biology we have abbreviations like Cox1 for cytochrome oxidase (try giving a talk on that). But my favorite is FUKUTIN, a protein that when mutated can cause some very nasty muscle-related diseases.

Anonymous said...

My 12 year old grandson would be quite embarrassed. One the other hand, his still 12 year old grandfather shares the amusement

Anonymous said...

My 12 year old grandson would be quite embarrassed. One the other hand, his still 12 year old grandfather shares the amusement

David said...

A 50 yo woman should not have a 12 yo boy in 'er

 
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