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 p...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - March 25, 2014 Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: WhiteCoat Tags: Healthcare Update Source Type: blogs
Oops - Intensive Care
Saturday, February 8, 2014, Breaking News
My sweeties and I ran a lovely marathon in New Orleans last Sunday. On Monday we flew home, and by Tuesday morning I felt a scratchy throat. That came on fast, knocked me flat (weak, fever, aches, severe cough, nausea), and by Thursday it was diagnosed at Mayo as Influenza Type A. Yes, I did get the flu shot, last November. By Friday morning I was having trouble breathing and my local doc found pneumonia. He checked me into the ICU in Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, MN.
The hospital staff treat me with respect, lots of smiles, but they put on gowns, masks, and ...
Source: Myeloma Hope - February 9, 2014 Category: Cancer Source Type: blogs
Worst Smells In The Hospital? There's a List For That!
I recently asked my thousands of Facebook readers to describe the worst smell in the hospital in their own words. They did not disappoint. The hospital setting provides the perfect opportunity to experience a crisis of unimaginable olfactory proportions. Some people thought the smell of rotting flesh was the most intolerable smell in the hospital. Other folks said the unmistakeable smell of melena was the worst. Walking off an elevator onto a floor or unit and experiencing the smells of nasal suicide is a sure fire way to create interesting conversation. Simply ask anyone who's job is st...
Source: The Happy Hospitalist - October 19, 2013 Category: Internists and Doctors of Medicine Authors: Tamer Mahrous Source Type: blogs
Medical Mispronunciations and Misspelled Words: The Definitive List.
Hearing medical mispronunciations and seeing misspelled words are an under appreciated joy of working in healthcare. Physicians often forget just how alien the language of medicine is to people who don't live it everyday. The best part about being a physician is not helping people recover from critical illness. The best part is not about listening and understanding with compassion and empathy. Nope, the best part about being a physician is hearing patients and other healthcare providers butcher the language of medicine and experiencing great entertainment in the process. Doctors c...
Source: The Happy Hospitalist - October 2, 2013 Category: Internists and Doctors of Medicine Authors: Tamer Mahrous Source Type: blogs
Breakthroughs in Bipolar Treatment
"We should continue to repurpose treatments and to recognise the role of serendipity" (Geddes & Miklowitz, 2013).That quote was from a recent review article in The Lancet, which did not hint at any impending pharmacological breakthroughs in the treatment of bipolar disorder. In other words, the future of bipolar treatment doesn't look much different from the present (at least in the immediate term). Bipolar disorder, an illness defined by the existence of manic or hypomanic highs, alternating with depressive lows, can be especially difficult to treat. And the mood episode known as a mixed state, where irritability, ex...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 2, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Lessons Learned from a Medical Mission
Nurses can serve as excellent physician extenders.My mentors in austere medicine warned me that with an interpreter I would be lucky to see 30 patients per day. That concerned me because the local missionaries indicated at our first organizational meeting in the Dominican Republic that we were expecting to see 100 patients per day. On top of that, 100 cards were being handed out at each of the four locations we would be visiting.
As the single physician in the group of 19 team members (seven nurses), these seemed like very high expectations. Working in a setting that uses physician extenders and emergency medicine resid...
Source: M2E Too! Mellick's Multimedia EduBlog - May 2, 2013 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
Use a condom!
Gonorrhea was basically untreatable, or in any event the treatment wasn't much good, until the 1930s, but that didn't last long because the little buggers quickly evolved resistance to sulfa drugs. Along came penicillin, which was good until the mid-1970s, then we lost that one. Then we went to antibiotics called fluoroquinolones. Alas, by 2007, resistant strains emerged so CDC recommended use of cephalosporins, most commonly Ceftriaxone.You know what's coming, right? Celphalosporin resistant gonorrhea has appeared in Asia and Europe, and now it's here in the Greatest Country on Earth.™ It isn't very common yet but ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs
Sharing Orders with Patients
In previous posts, I've talked about the perfect storm for innovation - alignment of an idea, policy, technology, people, and incentives. Roni Zeiger, a world class informatician who provided physician leadership for the Google Health project in the past, recently suggested an idea which I think has the potential for significant innovation in the world of patient and family engagement - Patient Friendly Orders.Here's an analogy.Last night I went to a neighborhood grocery store, Roche Brothers, to purchase a few vegetables. They were having a sale on romaine lettuce and a special bar code on ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - January 2, 2013 Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs
