March 28th, 2011 by Medgadget in News
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Engineers at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital have been trialing a new system that uses Microsoft’s Kinect to allow surgeons to browse through diagnostic images without having to physically touch any controls. Using the system surgeons can manipulate images without losing sterility, without any assistance from a nurse or other person in the OR, all while not having to move away from the patient.
Here’s a report from The Globe and Mail:
More from The Globe and Mail: Toronto doctors try Microsoft’s Kinect in OR
Flashbacks: Microsoft Kinect 3D Camera for Hands-Free Radiologic Image Browsing;
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
March 23rd, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Health Tips, Research
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Physicians and surgeons all agree on the link between smoking and postoperative complications. We don’t agree (or know) how much time is required between cessation of smoking and surgery for optimal risk reduction.
Dr.Thomas Fiala wrote a nice blog post, Smoking Cessation and surgical complications, recently discussing the 3rd reference article below.
Smokers that quit smoking before surgery had 41% fewer complications. The researchers found that each week of cessation increases the effect by 19%.
Trials of at least 4 weeks’ smoking cessation had a significantly larger treatment effect than shorter trials (P = .04).
Smokers that quit had lower rates of total complications, fewer wound healing complications, and fewer pulmonary complications.
Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
March 21st, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Health Policy, News
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Researchers concluded that surgical triage following a nuclear detonation should treat moderately injured patients first, then severely and mildly injured people, because of the limited medical personnel and material resources that would be available.
The model of time and resource-based triage (MORTT) tests different hospital-based triage approaches in the first 48 hours after a nuclear detonation of an improvised nuclear device. It’s not a tool in and of itself, but it examines the effect of various prioritizations and focuses primarily on the surgical needs of trauma victims.
The report appears in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. The entire issue, devoted to nuclear preparedness, is open access. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
March 19th, 2011 by DrWes in Opinion, True Stories
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Every day, doctors do risky things for their patients, often because they have no other options. Today is such a day for me.
I don’t know how it will go, and because of privacy laws I really can’t tell you about the case, I’m sorry. (Nor will you get an epilogue, that’s not the point of this post). But let’s just say that any normal person would consider the case I’m about to perform very high risk because of the patient’s condition. Even though you tell people they could die and take care to mention that fact time and time again, you wonder if they really can comprehend the significance of what you’re saying – after all, there is a fine line between being reassuring in a time of crisis and telling it like it is. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
April 8th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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One of the things about science-based medicine that makes it so fascinating is that it encompasses such a wide variety of modalities that it takes a similarly wide variety of science and scientific techniques to investigate various diseases. Some medical disciplines consist of mainly of problems that are relatively straightforward to study. Don’t get me wrong, though. By “straightforward” I don’t mean that they’re easy, simply that the experimental design of a clinical trial to test a treatment is fairly easily encompassed by the paradigm of randomized clinical trials.
Medical oncology is just one example, where new drugs can be tested in randomized, double-blinded trials against or in addition to the standard of care without having to account for many difficulties that arise from difficulties blinding. We’ve discussed such difficulties before, for instance, in the context of constructing adequate placebos for acupuncture trials.
Indeed, this topic is critical to the application of science-based medicine to various “complementary and alternative medicine” modalities, which do not as easily lend themselves to randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials, although I would hasten to point out that, just because it can be very difficult to do such trials is not an excuse for not doing them. The development of various “sham acupuncture” controls, one of which consisted even of just twirling a toothpick gently poked onto the skin, shows that.
One area of medicine where it is difficult to construct randomized controlled trials is surgery. The reasons are multiple. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
