Hot MedFax

Pretty scary.  A new study says most of us make mistakes when giving our kids medicine. One child is affected every eight minutes, usually by a well-meaning parent or caregiver unintentionally committing a medication error, according to newswise.com. The most common medication mistakes in children under the age of six occur in the children’s home, or another residence and school. The most common medicines involved are painkillers and fever-reducers like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, the Web site reports. “This is more common than people may realize,” said Huiyun Xiang, MD, MPH, PhD, director of the Center for Pediatric Trauma Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, principal investigator at the hospital’s Center for Injury Research and Policy. “The numbers we report still underestimate the true magnitude of these incidents since these are just cases reported to national poison centers.” Instances in which these mistakes can occur include caregivers giving one...

I found this really disturbing.  Thanks to what's been heralded as ground-breaking new innovations in medicine, we may be more at risk than ever. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that the risk of patient harm increased two-fold in 2006 – the peak year that teaching hospitals nationwide embraced the pursuit of minimally invasive robotic surgery for prostate cancer, according to newswise.com. “This study looked at the stages of innovation and how the rapid adoption of a new surgical technology—in this case, a surgical robotic system—can lead to adverse events for patients,” said Kellogg Parsons, MD, MHS, surgical oncologist, UC San Diego Health System and first author of the paper. “There is a real need for standardized training programs, rules governing surgeon competence and credentialing, and guidelines for hospital privileging when novel technologies reach the operating rooms of teaching and community hospitals.” ...

I don't know if you're like me but when I get a new symptom or diagnosis from a doctor, I rush online to check out what it is.  Usually, Wikipedia comes up first, and even though I knew better, I usually believe whatever it says. Now doctors are saying that a lot of that information is just, well, wrong. "I think that's the double-edged sword of Wikipedia," Dr. Amin Azzam tells NPR's Arun Rath, as reported at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). "Because anyone can edit, we don't necessarily know the expertise of the people doing the editing. One the other hand, the reason it's so popular is because everyone can contribute." Azzam is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He teaches a course that encourages fourth-year medical students to use their knowledge to improve Wikipedia, one article at a time, as RWJF notes. Azzam tells NPR there's a lot of room for improving the quality of Wiki...

Really.  A new survey says there are two reasons patients are having difficulty understanding, or getting their  medical conditions right. One, they rely too much on the Internet (to which, I can personally attest, after being diagnosed with breast cancer), where the information is often, if not inaccurate, not always applicable to every person.  And two, the reading level of educational materials medical professionals have on hand are often confusing and too hard to understand for most anyone who's not a doctor. According to a story at Reuters Health, "The average reading level of the online materials by groups ranging from the American Society of Anesthesiologists to the American Psychiatric Association fell anywhere from ninth grade to the sophomore year of college." What's the level recommended by the American Medical Association?  Fourth to sixth grade.  While that sounds pretty low, keep in mind that we're talking about very technical terms and situa...

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...