Healthcare Update Satellite — 03-25-2014

Patients gone wild. Really wild. 70 year old Brookdale Hospital nurse Evelyn Lynch gets knocked to the ground by patient Kwincii Jones and has her head stomped. She was knocked unconscious and suffered severe facial fractures. Also underwent brain surgery, so it is likely she suffered a brain bleed or has brain swelling as well. Congratulations to the antivaccination movement for increasing the worldwide incidence of pertussis and measles. Measles and mumps are now “crushing” the UK. Patients with “religious exemptions” to receiving vaccinations were reportedly the source of one recent California pertussis outbreak. Rise of the machines. I thought I was pretty good at spotting patients in fake pain. Turns out that most observers are only slightly better than chance at picking out fakers from the real deal. This computer program can achieve 85% accuracy in picking out patients who are truly in pain just by analyzing their facial expressions. Of course, watching the surveillance video of people skipping in the parking lot, then limping into the ED hunched over in “pain” is also a dead giveaway. Machines are also pretty darn good at sniffing out cancer. A device called BreathLink can detect changes in a woman’s breath that suggest breast cancer and has a diagnostic power similar to mammograms. The device may also be able to test for tuberculosis. The article also has a neat table about the odors different disease processes cause. Did ...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Tags: Healthcare Update Source Type: blogs