YouTube medical grossness:
Eco-friendly medicine is finding its way into selected practice: maggots can clean out an infected wound (after all, they’re competing with bacteria for food):
and leeches help optimize blood flow for amputations via their blood-thinning saliva:
Also, a small study noted giving patients with Crohn’s disease pig whipworms improved their disease compared with placebo.
A 17 year-old girl in the UK drank 7 double espressos and started having fevers and tachypnea (hyperventilation) according to the BBC. A double espresso has at most about 100mg of caffeine in it , so that’s about 700mg of caffeine total, far below the LD50, or the dose which is lethal to 50% of adults. (The LD50 for caffeine is 100-150mg/kg of body weight.) She likely had caffeine intoxication .
Since we’re in the gross-out theme, here’s some people pulling botfly larvae out of a guy’s back . (The botfly matures inside living flesh and then hatches out.) Warning: pretty nasty, also some PG-13 swearing upon removing the larvae.
August 12th, 2007The NYT summarizes a number of studies comparing US health care to other countries in areas such as access, insurance, quality, equality, use of information technology, etc.
Some pretty gory and impressive pictures of a guy’s arm status post (that means ‘after’) rattlesnake bite and multiple surgeries to debride (that means ‘clear out or remove’) dead tissue. Not for the feint of heart or vasovagal (that means ‘passes out or gets lightheaded in response to emotional or graphic stimuli’).
I’m a “famous” medical blogger and give an interview to Science Roll about my blogging. Thanks for the opportunity! Go read.
A blogger describes, with pretty damn good insight, his struggle with his own borderline personality disorder . Sounds about right to me, and well-written, too.
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Could a general surgeon or OB please explain to me how you stuff a plastic grocery bag full of cocaine packets into your vagina and it makes its way into your abdomen ? I know the fallopian tubes connect to the abdomen, but seriously, what the hell?
You know, Medpundit’s bit on salaried doctors is really insulting to all the attendings I worked with at the VA last month (salaried), who would often be around much past 5pm if their patients needed them:
Show me a salaried doctor (without a productivity bonus) and I’ll show you one who believes strongly in his right to get home by 5PM, regardless of medical problems coming through the door, or over the phones, that day.
I’m sorry, Sydney, but not everyone practices the way you think they do, even if the financial incentives aren’t there. It’s called professionalism and patient care.
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Great ASL Video Dictionary , thousands of words, including a ton of words that’d be very medically applicable: “pain,” “where?” “read lips?” etc. Obviously not a substitute for an interpreter, but especially in the ER where time is often of the essence.
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