Hooked On Gaming

From the Chicago Tribune:

"We already know that excessive amounts of video-game playing is bad," Kraus said. "What's important here is what is good for your child. The issue is not going to go away."

At least one Chicago clinician who has treated adolescents who have played video games so excessively they don't go to classes thinks a classification by the AMA as an addiction would be an over-reaction.

All right, let's look at this objectively. Sure, plenty of folks waste a lot of time playing games. Before that, they were watching television, and before that they were probably reading books. When a musician practices his instrument for days on end, is he or she addicted to their piano? I think that only when these folks stay up for days straight, forget to eat or even take a bathroom break are we in addiction territory. Remember, they made these games so that people would want to play them, and perhaps they did too good of a job.

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Doctors Selling Spots On White Coats ???

From Congressional Quarterly:

Critics say physicians who speak at medical society meetings are so compromised by industry sponsorships that, in the words of an Ohio retinal surgeon, “we have reached the point where it would be more convenient for speakers to simply wear NASCAR-style jackets emblazoned with their sponsor’s logos.”

Concerns about industry marketing practices were addressed at a hearing Wednesday in which witnesses said much needs to be done to clear away an enormous web of conflicts of interest spun among physicians by drug industry marketing dollars. Most agreed that the federal government should publicize how much money drug companies are paying to individual doctors, but that should only be the first step.

While I'm not saying that reform couldn't improve things, however, Doctors that do have a financial relationship with a manufacturer are required, and I've heard plenty of them do it, state that at the beginning of a lecture.

It's also ironic that Congress, who are on the take from just about everyone, and receive campaign contributions from big business in far excess than most Doctors make in a lifetime, are going to tell us how to clean things up.

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Smoke gets In Your Eyes...

From Scientific American:

Even brief exposure to secondhand smoke in bars and restaurants can result in measurable levels of a toxin in workers' bodies that is known to cause lung cancer, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

They found nonsmoking workers in Oregon who worked a single shift in a bar or restaurant that allowed smoking were more likely to have a detectable level of NNK -- a carcinogen linked with lung cancer -- in their bodies than those who worked in nonsmoking establishments.

Well, this is yet another good argument to ban all smoking from these types of establishments, or at least open the window.

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One More Reason Not To Fly

From Bloomberg:

Flights lasting more than four hours about double a traveler's risk of life-threatening blood clots, World Health Organization studies found.

The clots, called venous thromboembolism, can form in the legs and can be fatal when they move into a patient's lungs. The risk of VTE also applies to travel such as car, bus and train where passengers are seated for long periods, the Geneva-based agency said in an e-mailed statement.

More than 600,000 people in the U.S. have a pulmonary embolism every year and more than 60,000 of them die, according to the country's National Institutes of Health. The disorder is one of the most common causes of death in bed-bound hospitalized people. Long airplane journeys or car trips, childbirth within the last six months as well as use of drugs including estrogen and birth control pills have also been linked to clots.

We once had a foreign exchange medical student who needed to fly home to Germany with an ankle fracture as she wasn't covered in the States for this type of thing. Before she left for the plane, we found her some heparin, and gave her some SQ for the transatlantic flight home. She made it fine, and didn't get a DVT. In retrospect, this was a really good idea. Maybe they should put coumadin in the coffee that the flight attendants serve...

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Pyxis @ Home

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared for marketing the INRange Systems' Electronic Medication Management Assistant (EMMA), a programmable device that stores and dispenses prescription medication for patients' use in the home.

Essentially a computerized medication box, EMMA was designed to be used under the supervision of a licensed health care provider. EMMA can reduce drug identification and dosing errors, and allow health care professionals to monitor patient adherence to medication regimens in an outpatient setting. It may be especially useful for aging patients, as well as those with complex medication regimens such as patients with HIV.

"FDA's clearance of the INRange remote medication management system puts an important safety tool directly in the hands of patients and their health care providers," said Daniel Schultz, M.D., director of FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. "It will help take away some of the confusion patients can experience when taking prescription medications, and allow care providers to more closely monitor their patients' medications between office visits."

More.

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Hospitals Cardiac Stats

From ABC News:

For the first time, a government agency is telling patients how hospitals stack up when it comes to treating heart attacks and heart failure.

But since its interactive Web site categorizes an overwhelming majority of the hospitals simply as average, the data may leave some consumers begging for further guidance.

After years of hospitals keeping their death rates private, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of the Health and Human Services Department, today posted online a ranking of more than 4,800 hospitals nationwide.

At first thought, Mark Twain's famous quote comes to mind: "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Here is another misuse of information so that hospitals will care more about their stats than about taking care of a sick patient. We've already seen hospitals getting their sicker patients transferred to other institutions so their numbers look better, now this will only encourage it. Why operate on a high risk patient when there are likely to be complications secondary to advanced age and comorbidities? On the other hand, the public is clamoring for this type of info, and traffic is so high I can't even get on the site to see where my hospitals rank. Also, do we take the data to the "next level"- do we break it down by individual doctors?

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Two Points Makes A Difference?

From Forbes:

First-born children possess IQs that are 2.3 points higher, on average, than their younger siblings, a new study contends.

This finding held true even when first-born children didn't survive and a younger child was reared as the eldest, scuttling the idea that genetics determines the difference in IQ among siblings, according to the Norwegian researchers who authored the report, published in the June 22 issue of the journal Science.

No word yet on what goes on with middle children...

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Women Liberated In Their Dreams

From Forbes:

A new Canadian survey, apparently the first of its kind in four decades, reports that 8 percent of dreams swirl around sexual situations.

Men are much more likely to have fantasies about sex with imaginary people, while women prefer current or past sexual partners and celebrities.

Women, meanwhile, report about as many sex dreams as men, a sharp contrast with previous research from the 1960s. "Men used to report many more sex dreams, twice as many as women, and we don't find that difference anymore," said study author Antonio Zadra, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Montreal. "Either women are having them more, or they're more likely to report them. Either way, it's interesting."

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Woman Dies On ED Floor

From Mercury News:

Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, once a symbol of hope in the inner city, struggled Wednesday to survive amid new reports of breakdowns in patient care, the replacement of its chief medical officer and an ultimatum to correct long-running problems or close.

The treatment of a woman who was ignored as she died on the floor of the emergency room last month "was callous, it was a horrible thing," Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Burke said.

Earlier this week, the county Board of Supervisors grilled health officials about conditions at the public hospital and ordered them to return in two weeks with a plan to deal with a hospital shutdown if it is unable to correct deficiencies laid out in a federal inspection that concluded emergency room patients were in "immediate jeopardy."

If we really think about it, this is rather unbelievable. How many folks were present that didn't recognize a sick patient and get them some much needed healthcare?

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Dr. Hepatitis

From The NY Times:

The city’s Health Department said late last night that it was urgently contacting 4,500 patients treated by a Manhattan doctor after the discovery that three of them were found to have hepatitis C, a virus that can damage or destroy the liver.

The doctor, an anesthesiologist whom health investigators did not identify, administered pain-deadening drugs by needle at 10 Manhattan outpatient centers, including clinics and doctors’ offices, but not at hospitals. The patients were treated between Dec. 1, 2003, and May 1, 2007.

Like many others at this point, I'm trying to figure out how this could happen. First of all, I'm assuming, always a dangerous thing, that they've analyzed the viruses and confirmed that they're all from the same source. Given that assumption, and that they really trace back to this doctor, I'm still not sure how he could gave passed it along three times. Could he or she really have stuck themselves with a needle that then got used in patient care three times that we know about? I'm not mythbuster, but that seems more than a little implausible in this day and age.

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Wii-itis

From Mlive.com:

Back when Nintendo first unveiled the motion-sensitive controller that makes Wii so much fun, gamers went nuts with speculation. Would our flabby, atrophied bodies be able to handle actual, physical movement?

Of course not! It took a Spanish doctor playing hours and hours Wii Sports tennis to discover that too much Wii can make your arm hurt.

I'm thinking we can add Wii-itis to iPod-itis...

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Big Blue Tracks Flu

From San Jose Mercury News:

IBM said Thursday that it is giving health authorities and others around the world expanded access to free software it partly developed in San Jose to help track bird flu and other infectious diseases.

The software - dubbed Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler, or STEM - can create computer models of how diseases spread geographically. IBM said it would make the software available on the Web site of the Eclipse Foundation, which provides open-source software.

What an idea! Using a computer to track a disease in the information era! Why didn't I think of that...

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Green Blood ???

From Canada.com:

The green blood came as a bit of a shock to Dr. Alana Flexman and her colleagues when they tried to put an arterial line into a patient about to undergo surgery in Vancouver's St. Paul's Hospital.

The 42-year-old man was already a bit of a medical departure. He'd fallen asleep while kneeling, and developed compartment syndrome in both legs.

Seriously folks, has anyone ever seen green blood outside of a sci fi movie?

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Transplant-a-thon '07

From The National Post:

Six doctors took part in a record-breaking 56-hour marathon at the University of Alberta Hospital last month, when they gave 18 new organs to 15 patients.

There were four new hearts, four sets of lungs, six kidneys, three livers and one pancreas -- all from four organ donors whose deaths gave life to others.

Normally, it would take three to four weeks to transplant that many organs. And normally, the hospital only does just one combination heart-double lung transplant in a single year.

Now that's a lot of surgery all at the same time. No word, but they probably took the rest of the month off after this feat.

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Heeling to the Floor

From ABC News:

Even if one hasn't had firsthand experience zipping across sidewalks on a pair of shoes with wheels in the heels, most everyone is familiar with "heeling," as the activity is called.

Now, doctors are worried that the footwear may put young users at increased risk of sprains and fractures, and a new study may further justify their fears.

According to a study released today in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics, 67 children were treated for injuries from footwear known as Heelys and similar products at Temple Street Children's University Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, over a 10-week period last summer.

I've seen plenty of kids in malls rolling around on these things to wonder why they don't fall. Unfortunately, it looks like they do.

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Traveling Tuberculosis

From ABC News:

The Atlanta lawyer quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized to fellow airline passengers in an interview aired Friday, and insisted he was told before he set out for his wedding in Europe that he was no danger to anyone.

"I've lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn't want anyone to feel that way. It's awful," Andrew Speaker, speaking through a face mask, told ABC's "Good Morning America" from his hospital room in Denver.

Let's just remember that this guy is a lawyer...

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