Haiti: Life And Death Decisions
No Comments »A premature baby and a woman giving birth must share the only oxygen tank in a hospital in the poorest part of Haiti, Port de Paix. Dr. Jon LaPook recounts the harrowing experience.
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Plastic Surgeon Is The King Of Donkey Kong
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Donkey Kong has a new recordholder — and he’s a plastic surgeon.
Hank Chien, M.D., scored 1,061,700 points in 2 hours and 35 minutes, breaking the world-record score for the classic arcade game.
Read the piece to learn how he did it, and more interestingly, the painstaking steps he had to take to verify his score.
The feat does lend some anecdotal support linking video games and the hand-eye coordination required for surgery. There are small studies linking the laparoscopic skill of surgeons with how well they do on video games. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
An Earful And A Mouthful: Insulted Woman Bites Off Man’s Ear
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So I’m listening to the radio [yesterday] when I hear a story about a woman who was called “fat” by a 24-year-old man at a party. What does she do?
The Omaha World Herald is reporting that she bit off more than she could chew by literally biting off his ear.
Police at a Lincoln, Nebraska hospital responded to a call in the emergency room at 3:25AM on April 28th when the unnamed, one-eared man claimed 21-year-old Anna Godfrey bit off his ear for calling her “fat” at a party. The ear chunk is missing in action. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*
Most Primary Care Doctors Using Wrong Colon Cancer Screening Test
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A recent article found that primary care doctors the United States are providing sub-standard care when it comes to colon cancer screening.
In the Journal of General Internal Medicine, researchers found that 25% of primary care doctors used in-office stool testing to screen for colon cancer. Specifically, doctors do a rectal exam and then swipe the rectal contents off their gloves onto a stool-testing card. A positive test result indicates the presence of blood, which can be invisible to the naked eye. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis*
Working In Primary Care: Two New Surveys
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Two new surveys take the temperature of the primary care working environment.
In the first, a collaboration between the Medical Group Management Association and the Association of Staff Physician Recruiters, recruiters took a median of six months to fill positions for internal medicine or family practice physicians, according to the In-House Recruitment Benchmarking Survey: 2010 Report Based on 2008 Data.
Among the findings:
— It cost less to recruit specialists, due to the economic downturn and a 30% rise in the use of Internet job boards as a primary recruitment method.
— It takes longer to fill a position in non-metropolitan areas, where the impact of the primary care shortage is greatest. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
