I don’t know why every other thing in medicine has to be named after someone. I know it happens in other fields; I swear it happens more here. It happens so much that sometimes multiple, unrelated things are named after the same motherfucker.
A motherfucker named Allen Whipple, for example, has both a “procedure” and a “triad” named after him, and neither of these has anything to do with the other.
The “Whipple procedure” is a complex surgery you perform on people who have pancreatic cancer. (According to Wikipedia, Whipple did not even invent this surgery; he merely popularized it, yet despite this he seems to have had no problem naming it after himself. Nice guy.)
The “Whipple triad” is a set of three “diagnostic criteria” you use to figure out whether someone has “fasting hypoglycemia,” which is an odiously jargoned-up way to say “unusually low blood-sugar.”
The Whipple triad is interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “infuriating”) because (even though I’m required to fucking memorize it) it is totally unnecessary and does not need to exist.
It consists of three questions you’re supposed to ask yourself when you suspect that a patient might have low blood sugar. Here they are: 1). Do the patient’s symptoms suggest low blood sugar? 2.) When you measure the patient’s blood sugar, is it low? and 3.) Does giving the patient sugar relieve his symptoms?
If the answer to all three of these is “yes,” then you can make the diagnosis: your patient does indeed have low blood sugar. That is how the Whipple triad works.
How retarded is that?
Can I get my fucking name in the pathology books too if I refine that “triad” a little? Call it the “Jutla monad.” It only has one question: Does your patient have low blood sugar? If the answer is yes, then your patient has low blood sugar.
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