A nurse gives the patient in Bed A the medicine for the patient in Bed B. What do you say? “The nurse made a mistake”? That’s true, but then what’s the solution? “Nurse, please be more careful”? Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable that way. Some are better than others, but nobody’s perfect. You need a solution that’s not about making people perfect.
So we ask, “Why did the nurse make this mistake?” Maybe there were two drugs that looked almost the same. That’s a packaging problem; we can solve that. Maybe the nurse was expected to administer drugs to ten patients in five minutes. That’s a scheduling problem; we can solve that. And these solutions can have an enormous impact. Seven to 10 percent of all medicine administrations involve either the wrong drug, the wrong dose, the wrong patient, or the wrong route. Seven to 10 percent. But if you introduce bar coding for medication administration, the error rate drops to one tenth of one percent. That’s huge.
oday medical scans produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a single patient in mere seconds, but how do doctors parse this information and determine what’s useful? At TEDxGöteborg, scientific visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools — like virtual autopsies — for analyzing this myriad data, and a glimpse at some sci-fi-sounding medical technologies in development. This talk contains some graphic medical imagery.
The study, which took place from 2001 to 2005, and was published in 2006 in the journal Psychopharmacology with a follow-up in 2008 in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, made news around the globe and was greeted by nearly unanimous praise by both the scientific community and the mainstream press. Flying in the face of both government policy and conventional wisdom, its conclusion — that psychedelic drugs offer the potential for profound, transformative, and long-lasting positive changes in properly prepared individuals — may herald a revival in the study of altered states of consciousness.
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081023/lf_nm_life/us_norway_eye
Transplanted cornea in use for record 123 years
OSLO (Reuters Life!) – Bernt Aune’s transplanted cornea has been in use for a record 123 years — since before the Eiffel Tower was built.
“This is the oldest eye in Norway — I don’t know if it’s the oldest in the world,” Aune, an 80-year-old Norwegian and former ambulance driver, told Reuters by telephone on Thursday. “But my vision’s not great any longer.”
He had a cornea transplanted into his right eye in 1958 from the body of an elderly man who was born in June 1885. The operation was carried out at Namsos Hospital, mid-Norway.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the oldest living organ in the world,” eye doctor Hasan Hasanain at Namsos hospital told the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang.
(more…)
Why isn’t medical care a right?
26-Sep-08
Azalynn asks:
As in, making people fear for their lives if they don’t do a particular thing is always bad — unless it’s a corporation wanting you to do that thing.
Here’s my take on it. Please take it in the same spirit of your original post. If any of it comes across as an attack please attribute it to my lack of grace, and not to any ill will on my part.
Your fundamental objection appears to be: “I will die unless I get adequate food, shelter, and medical care. Therefore, unless I want to die, I’m forced to work (most likely for a corporation) to earn money to pay for these necessities. Therefore, someone else should provide me with sufficient food, shelter, and medical care such that I’m free to work on whatever on choose.”
1. What ethical rule gives you the right to the forced labor of someone else? I will die in 30-40 years unless aging research advances dramatically. Does that give me the right to point a gun to your head, and force you to pay more for this research? After all, you have enough disposable income to afford a computer, and probably many other luxuries (cars, books, movies). If I don’t have the right, what gives you the right to demand the same of me?
2. If you do force someone to pay for your healthcare, suddenly they have an incentive to dictate what you do with you life. Want to smoke? Eat Big Macs? Ride a motorcycle? Engage in anal sex? Too bad. Now that I’m paying for the risks you take, I’m going to pass so many nanny state regulations that living in a nunnery will seem like Vegas.
3. When the government controls the market for medicine, how open do you think they will be to paying for new medical technologies? If you were contemplating starting a biotech startup, how much would you invest knowing that you’d have to persuade the U.S. government to buy your product before it would be economically viable?
4. We already have universal coverage for people 65 and older. How well is the government doing managing that? According to this 2004 New York Times article (Entitlement Costs Are Expected to Soar)
“The annual reports on Social Security and Medicare will include new estimates showing that the total gap between the cost of promised benefits and the revenues to pay for them is close to $50 trillion, the experts said. By contrast, the Bush administration estimated last year that the long-term gap was $18 trillion over the next 75 years.”
If we’re already $50 trillion in debt just from seniors alone (albeit the group with the highest medical needs), what do you think will happen when everyone is covered?
I emphasized healthcare above, but the same applies to food, and shelter. (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two quasi-governmental organizations at the heart of the current mortgage meltdown, were started by New Deal Democrats who wanted to help more low income people own their own homes.)
Rather than more subsidies, how about we try a little increased freedom? Abolish the FDA and/or the patent monopolies, and we’ll see an explosion of new medical devices and drugs. Abolish medical licensure and immigration restrictions on foreign doctors, and the cost of medical care will fall dramatically as many more people (both foreign and domestic) enter the profession.
If we passed such reforms, we could have both increased freedom and much lower healthcare costs.
The Checklist
16-May-08
The Checklist by Atul Gawande.
“…In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist…” (emphasis added)