Skeptical Scalpel Surgeon

Should medical personnel be allowed to practice procedures on patients who are newly deceased?

Recently, a doctor writing in the Wall Street Journal highlighted a $10,000 charge for a trauma team activation that apparently never took place.

Google ER expansion and after you get past a few articles on endoplasmic reticulum, you will find many links about hospitals in all parts of the country building new, larger emergency departments.

Bad news for patients and doctors; effect on addicts questionable.

What happens when defendants blame each other for a complication?

A paper by a couple of public health researchers created some media buzz because it suggested that cardiac surgeons’ performance deteriorated when they took even one day off from surgery.

For a sample of over 56,000 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in Pennsylvania over a 5-year period, the average 1-day mortality was 0.62% and average in-hospital mortality was 2.72%. That means 349 patients died within 24 hours and 1532 died in-hospital.

Something seemed odd when I first read that 90% of medical articles on Wikipedia contained errors. The paper was from an obscure osteopathic school called Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.

Like most abstracts you read, this one was a little fuzzy about the methods used. The top 10 most-costly medical conditions were identified, and a Wikipedia article for each was reviewed by 2 randomly assigned investigators.