Come on ASN, respect your audience.

I am working on a review of electrolyte disorders in geriatric patients. As part of gathering data I found a resource at ASN Online. They have an entire geriatric nephrology textbook that is available as a PDF for members. That looks awesome. They also have the slide sets from the 2009 and 2008 Renal Week post graduate courses on Geriatric Nephrology, subtitled: An Epidemiologic and Clinical Challenge.

I was looking at those slides sets when I came across this clunker by Myron Miller from Johns Hopkins. Here are some of the low-lights:

I swear the camera on my phone does a better job of scanning image that the undergrad he enslaved to do this transfer.

Nothing says you care, like handwriting the reference.

What a hot mess. It's hard to imagine you could make a 4x2 chart worse than this one. 

These are the worst slides I have seen in a long time. People who sign up for the post grad classes take an additional two-days off of work and stay in a hotel for what is supposed to be the highest quality nephrology education available. Dr. Miller expresses disdain for his audience with his all-caps, poor scanning and hand scrawled notes. ASN, I'd be happy to talk at any of your sessions. Call me. Maybe?

I tweeted about that last slide and got the following response.

@kidney_boy Take the one that you posted & repost after applying the @kidney_boy filter. Curious what you would do.
— Jim Smith (@jklm) January 31, 2013

I didn't apply the Kidney_boy Filter™ but I did rework and bring up to date my hyponatremia lecture. Here it is in Keynote (25mb) and PDF (12mb). Feel free to download, comment, remix and rework at your discretion.

The lecture is about an hour long.
Credit (along with a link to pbfluids.com) is appreciated.

Update March 20, 2013: I recently received this e-mail

I am a big fan and review your posts frequently. I saw your recent post on Myron Miller’s slides and agree that they are “clunky” without the mastery that you provide in your lectures, pdf, and posts. I will tell you though that Myron (though an Endocrinologist and Gerontologist by trade) is in part responsible for me becoming a Nephrologist as he guided me through my Residency, exposing me to the wonders of renal physiology and fluid and electrolyte issues. His early work on fluid and electrolyte issues was done in the “low tech” days before IRBs, evidence based medicine, and sophisticated statistical analyses. I am fortunate to work with him as a colleague and continue to learn when he lectures. I have many of his original papers and share them with our fellows. Best.

Paul Segal
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Nephrology,
Johns Hopkins, Clinical Nephrologist and Informatician

BTW…no nod to IS Edelman in your Sodium lecture?

In a follow up letter he elaborated on Edelman:

Getting back to Edelman, to me, the equation essentially describes everything you need to know about treatment by examining both the numerator and denominator. In addition, it reminds students that potassium is an important component of plasma sodium (as per T Berl and A Rastegar’s AJKD article 2010), and a component of EFWC.

Great stuff thanks.