Hot MedFax

We're all so used to picking on our kids for playing video games but the next time he's in the ER, you just might be happy that doctors do it, too. According to new research, video games improve doctors' recognition and triage of severe trauma patients, newswise.com reports. Playing an adventure video game featuring a fictitious, young emergency physician treating severe trauma patients was better than text-based learning at priming real doctors to quickly recognize the patients who needed higher levels of care, according to a new trial led by the  University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine .  The results held, even though doctors assigned to the game enjoyed it less than those assigned to traditional, text-based education. This indicates that if game enjoyment can be improved, the already favorable results might be enhanced, the web site notes.  “Physicians must make decisions quickly and with incomplete information. Each year, 30,000 preventable deaths...

I've been there. I lost two jobs in a row in my 20's.  Neither was really my fault (in one case, I accused a vp of sexual harassment) and in the second, my boss accidentally stepped on the toes of her boss when hiring me.  But there I was, out of my second job in less than six months. Fortunately, I went on to have success at my next job and this was just a bitter memory.  But why do some people recover from job loss , while others don't? A new study by Syracuse University provides a deeper understanding of why some people recover after losing their work identity, while others languish and develops interventions that facilitate recovery from job loss, according to newswise.com. “It can be a devastating loss of identity when someone loses a job they’ve held for decades,” says Trenton Williams, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the Whitman School. “For some, the loss might come in the form of an injury, such as a professional athlete, but for others, ...

Don't get mad if your child is caught doing drugs in school.  A new study has found that t eens caught drinking or using marijuana at school should be screened for exposure to trauma, mental health problems and other serious health risks, according to newswise.com. It may be a cry for help. UCLA researchers found that the use of substances at school was associated with significantly increased odds of serious problems such as depression, being the victim of intimate-partner violence and attempting suicide, the Web site reports. "At-school substance use is not just an isolated event requiring simple disciplinary action but an important signal identifying teens in need of urgent psychosocial assessment and support," said lead author Dr. Rebecca N. Dudovitz, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA and the UCLA Children's Discovery and Innovation Institute, at newswise.com. In the study, students who reported using either alcoh...

I don't know about you but I've always pretty much lived my life like danger was always lurking just around the corner.  Probably because I've experienced a number of traumatic things, but as Mark Epstein writes at The NYT, you can grow up all you want, but " Trauma never goes away completely." He adds that it changes perhaps, "softens some with time, but never completely goes away." Epstein, a psychiatrist, says an undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, "shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence." There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster.  Not my words.  Epstein's.  But exactly the way I feel.  " One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us,"he writes. "Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advance...

This probably won't come as a surprise to very many, but did you know that 25% of young people injured in assaults own guns ? According to Michelle Healy at usatoday.com, "Among young people ages 14 to 24 who received care in a hospital emergency department for assault-related injuries, 23% said they owned a firearm in the past six months." Even worse, only 17% of those who said they owned guns got them legally, says the report, in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics , published online today, Healy reports. Almost 700 young people who sought care at a major trauma center in Flint, Mich., were surveyed by the  University of Michigan Injury Center for the study.  About 14% were younger than age 18, and "32% had children of their own," Healy notes the shocking facts. Not surprisingly, "those with firearms were more likely to use illegal drugs, have been involved in a serious fight, and to endorse the position that 'revenge was a good thing...

If you're a woman hurt in a serious car accident, you'd be better off, well, being a man.  That's because a new study has found that women with severe injuries are less likely to be treated in a trauma unit , where they have a better chance of surviving. According to newswise.com, 98,000 men and women with serious injuries in Canada were followed -- and only 49% of the women were transferred to trauma centers while over 63% of the men were. At the same time, even when they remained at hospitals without trauma units, women less often received trauma care than men. Study authors weren't sure what to make of this, but it does follow the old scientific model of trying out research on treatments and drugs on men, not women (and also why more women die of heart attacks because their symptoms are not the same as men's).   On top of all that, more money is spent on research for men.  A study in 2000 alleged that women were less likely to volunteer for research tria...

Soldiers know what survivors of rape and assault and crime know.  Once you have been traumatized , your brain never goes back to what it was, even when there is no stress in your life. According to a story at newswise.com, once the brain has endured enough trauma, it functions abnormally even in the absence of stress. Previous imaging studies of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, have shown that these brain regions "can over-or under-react in response to stressful tasks, such as recalling a traumatic event or reacting to a photo of a threatening face." But now researchers at NYU School of Medicine are studying what happens in the brains of combat veterans with PTSD when there are no external triggers, newswise.com reports. PTSD is known for triggering nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks and instability. As someone who has suffered from PTSD also, it's not something you ever want to relive.  And yet, you relive it almost every day. S...