November 6th, 2009 by GruntDoc in Better Health Network, Opinion
Tags: Costs, Finance, healthcare, Just To Be Sure, Unnecessary Testing
1 Comment »
Kevin, MD linked to this, and I really must comment.
Here’s the abstract, and I hope you’ll read it all:
For years I’ve heard friends describe experiences of being caught in a web of excessive and unnecessary medical testing. Their doctors ordered test Z to investigate a seemingly incidental finding on test Y, which had come about because of a borderline abnormality on test X.
I often wondered why test X was done in the first place. As a primary care physician, I would have treated them for the likely diagnosis and done diagnostic tests — especially a series of diagnostic tests — only if they didn’t respond as expected…. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
November 6th, 2009 by Bongi in Better Health Network, True Stories
Tags: Bleeding, Emergency Medicine, Gastroenterology, General Surgery, Peptic Ulcer
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Recently I had a moment to reflect on adrenaline and adrenaline inducing sports. It was a bloody moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Bleeding peptic ulcers occasionally cross the path of general surgeons. Usually they stop bleeding with conservative treatment. But sometimes they don’t. Then you need to whip out the trusty knife. Even then usually the operation is little more than routine. This case, however was exceptional.
He was white as a sheet. He had been bleeding for three days but only decided to come to the hospital when he started falling over. It seemed he could at least recognise falling over as not normal. The initial gastroscopy showed a penetrating duodenal ulcer with no active bleeding. the body had managed to curtail the bleeding, partially because of vasoconstriction, but mainly due to a low blood pressure which in itself was due to loss of blood. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at other things amanzi*
November 5th, 2009 by Gwenn Schurgin O'Keeffe, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Tips
Tags: Accident, Danger, Escalator, Parenting, Pediatrics, Stroller
1 Comment »
There’s an epidemic at our malls: parents taking their small children up and down escalators in strollers of all sorts of sizes and shapes. I ended up behind one such parent yesterday and found strollers heading up and down all afternoon. Some were small, some large. Some had bags dangling off of them, others not. Sometimes parents had both hands on the handles, other times they were balancing the stroller and a drink or cell phone. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr Gwenn Is In*
November 5th, 2009 by Nancy Brown, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Book Reviews
Tags: Choices A Novel, Parenting, Pediatrics, Psychology, teens
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Choices: A Novel is a must read for teachers, parents and teenagers, everywhere. A combination of coming-of-age textbook, conversation starter, bite-your-nails, and gotta finish book, it took me by surprise. Laughter, tears, and some great conversations have filled our home this week as we read Choices.
In a nutshell, the main character, 15 year-old Kara, lives in a very sheltered world, attends a girls school, is an outstanding student. Kara seems to know very little about her own feelings and body, and less about those of others, until the star jock from a local school catches her eye and introduces her to the world of parties, drinking, drugs, and sex. Fearing that she is losing his attention, Kara binge drinks, has non-consensual unprotected sex, and gets pregnant. Her life is immediately turned upside down and Kara feels like she is all alone. Read more »
This post, Book Review: Choices: A Novel, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Nancy Brown, Ph.D..
November 5th, 2009 by Steve Novella, M.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed
Tags: Behavioral Optometry, Charlene Werner, Homeopathy, Illiteracy, Pseudoscience
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Charlene Werner is getting a lot of attention she probably did not anticipate or desire. She is the star of a YouTube video in which she explains the scientific basis of homeopathy. Before you watch it, make sure you are sitting down, relax, and brace yourself for an onslaught of profound scientific illiteracy combined with stunning arrogance. For those with more delicate constitutions I will give you the quick summary:
Einstein taught us that energy equals matter and light, but because matter can be condensed down to a very small space if you remove all the empty space between the elementary particles (I am paraphrasing to make her statements minimally coherent), we can mostly ignore matter. Therefore energy is light, and we are all made of energy – not matter (or at least so little matter, you can ignore it). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
