"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
A lady reports that hugging has spread to medical laboratories. 'The problem, chiefly of concern to women, is unwanted hugging and other pseudo-affectionate, nonmedical touching by medical personnel,' she writes. 'The intent seems to be to develop an instant relationship. A number of medical technicians hug the patient far too tightly and with far too great affection as they escort the patient to the X-ray room. They then take the mammogram, all the while hugging the patient between X-rays, and they then hug the patient on the way back to the waiting room. This has happened to me three times, at three facilities. On the last, I told the technician as she was walking me from room to room, tightly hugging me all the while, to stop hugging me. That angered her, and she went out and complained to the staff personnel that I was irritable.
And it was impolite to call her "irritable," within earshot, too.
The former licensed practical nurse gave milk of magnesia to five residents of Wildwood Care Center on Hadcock Road in Brunswick, knowing it would act as a laxative. She told a probation officer that she did it to get back at the day-shift nurse.
Serious enough that she's going to jail for 10 months.
Just about every doctor with an established and busy practice will tell you that the phone calls are a very real problem. Some doctors no longer take telephone requests for refills because they jam the phones so much. Others have gone to automated phone attendants - those push button menus that are such a pain in the neck. It's this frustration that has even myself - an internet phobe when it comes to privacy and security issues - looking toward email communication as a means to relieve the phone stress.
Last week I signed up with RelayHealth, one of the secure email companies mentioned in the article. Today, I begin promiting it to my patients. I'm not sure enough will embrace it to ease our phone burdens, but it's worth a try. posted by Sydney on
3/03/2005 08:18:00 AM
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The team analysed semen samples from a group of patients with testicular cancer, men with other types of cancer and infertility problems and a group of apparently healthy young men.
Dr Hoei-Hansen said: "When we were evaluating the first series of semen samples we detected AP-2gamma positive cells in a sample from one of the healthy controls.
"He was a 23-year-old man who was having a routine semen analysis because he and his partner had been trying for 18 months to have a baby. Further clinical evaluation revealed CIS [carcinoma in situ -ed] in his left testicle."
It's only a case report, involving just one "andrological" subject, so it's impossible to say whether or not it would pan out as a screening test, but it's an interesting finding. posted by Sydney on
3/03/2005 07:42:00 AM
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In this latest study. a team of researchers examined the medical records of 31,426 children born in one area in Japan, Yokohama, between 1988 and 1996. During that period - in 1993 - the MMR vaccine was withdrawn and replaced with single vaccines. This gave the researchers an opportunity to examine rates of autism both before and after the vaccine was used.
The study found that before the vaccine was withdrawn, between 48 and 86 children per 10,000 were diagnosed with autism. After it had been withdrawn and replaced with the single vaccines, the number of children being diagnosed with autism actually rose to between 97 and 161 per 10,000.
'The findings are resoundingly negative...(the vaccine) cannot have caused autism in the many children with autism spectrum disorders in Japan who were born and grew up in the era when MMR was not available', Dr Hideo Honda of the Yokahama Rehabilitation Centre told New Scientist magazine. posted by Sydney on
3/03/2005 07:30:00 AM
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