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medpundit |
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Wednesday, October 30, 2002About 2 percent of all children's ER visits are for head injuries. Major trauma definitely requires a CT scan, but Atabaki noticed that doctors gave widely varied reasons for scanning kids with minor injuries -- some merely cited pressure from worried parents. Together with four other hospitals -- Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital and Inova Fairfax Hospital in suburban Washington -- she studied 1,000 patients. CT scans found an intercranial injury in less than 7 percent -- just 65 children. There's another diagnosis in kids that gets over-scanned because of parental pressure - headaches. It's hard to convince a parent to wait and see if the headaches their child has had for two weeks will go away, as most do. And if by chance the child happens to be in the small percentage who have a tumor causing the headache, the doctor gets blamed for delayed diagnosis and faces not only parental anger, but a potential lawsuit. posted by Sydney on 10/30/2002 07:07:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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