March 13th, 2010 by DaveMunger in Better Health Network, Opinion
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Population increases when the birthrate exceeds the death rate, and decreases when the reverse occurs. So what does the world look like when there are too many people?
One way to approach this question is to consider what the limiting factors in population are. When, exactly, does the death rate exceed the birthrate? A key consideration is mortality. If people live shorter lives, the death rate goes up, and population goes down (or at least grows more slowly). What causes mortality to increase? Obviously things like wars, pandemics, and famines have an impact, but economist Robert Fogel argues that these are actually a relatively small part of the global mortality picture. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Daily Monthly*
February 20th, 2010 by Paul Auerbach, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Tips
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Dog attacks are a major public health concern worldwide. In the United States, dogs bite more than 4 million people each year, occasionally resulting in fatalities. In an issue of Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (2009;20:19-25), Ricky Langley from the Division of Public Health in Raleigh, North Carolina published an article entitled, “Human Fatalities Resulting From Dog Attacks in the United States, 1979-2005.”
The statistics are instructive. In the years studied, there was an average of 19 deaths each year from dog attacks. Not surprisingly, males and children less than 10 years of age had the highest rate of death from dog attacks, with Alaska reporting the highest death rate. The number of deaths and death rate from dog attacks appear to be on the rise, perhaps for no other reason than there are more people and more dogs, in both absolute numbers and in proximity.
I am a dog lover (of friendly dogs), but am aware both as an owner and as an emergency physician that dogs will sometimes bite people, sometimes with serious consequences. Read more »
This post, Killer Dogs And US Dog Bite Statistics, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..
January 27th, 2010 by DrRob in Better Health Network, True Stories
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One of my favorite patients died last week.
My reaction to this was not quite what you would think: I smiled. No, I didn’t smile because of his death; I smiled because of his life. I smiled because I got to be a part of that life. His death wasn’t his tragic end, it was the exclamation point to his life.
I am around a lot of death – it’s one of the things that makes being a doctor different from other jobs. My goal with all of my patients is to keep them healthy, to relieve their pain, and to do my best to keep them alive. Ultimately, though, it’s a losing battle; 100% of them will eventually die. That’s why I don’t like statistics about how many people who die due to inadequate doctoring. Our job is to resist an irresistible force. We are standing up to the hurricane, the avalanche, the flood. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*
January 21st, 2010 by Debra Gordon in Better Health Network, Opinion, True Stories
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Back in the day when I was a newspaper reporter I completed a biomedical ethics fellowship at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, VA. In addition to sitting in on the hospital’s bioethics committee discussions, I spent much of the week shadowing a nurse in the ICU.
They called her the Death Nurse because her job was to intervene with doctors, nurses, patients and families when the time came for a patient to move from the ICU to hospice. While her title was Supportive Care, she flat out told her me her job was to help people die; not actively, but from behind the scenes by helping patients and those caring for them understand when the time had come to move from curative care to supportive care (email me if you’d like a copy of the article I wrote about her). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Debra Gordon on Medical Writing (and other medical topics of interest)*
