More pontification than a 15 minute office visit
John Goodman had a nice blog post today. I typically enjoy reading his stuff and recommend it to my readers.
After reading his post linked to above, particularly the very last paragraph just above his signature, take a look at this MSNBC story.
Cheers,
…Sam
I saw a sort of neat story on the BBC News website about researchers in Louisiana who are taking proteins from alligator blood and trying to use them to develop new antibiotics.
Other than handbags and good eating, alligators are mostly just a bit of a nuisance in these parts.
I think it would be great if these researchers are successful in their quest.
Of course, natural selection being what it is, I’m sure that MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) would likely eventually evolve into GRSA (Gator Resistant Staph Aureus).
By the way, the picture above of the little alligator is one I took back in 2003 at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab Estuarium.
He always sort of reminded me of Schnappi, the darling of German MTV, when my wife and I were living over there in 2004-2005.
(Oh, and before some smarty-pants feels the need to correct me, I do know the difference between alligators and crocodiles, but “See ya later, alligator” didn’t seem nearly as original for the title of this post.)
There was an interesting story on MSNBC.COM about hands-only CPR.
As a physician, every two years I get re-certified in Basic Life Support (BLS), which is essentially what most folks know as CPR, as well as Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), which is essentially what they try to portray in shows like “E.R.” when everyone is dramatically yelling stuff like “Give him an amp of epi, stat!”.
Since finishing residency, I no longer practice any obstetrics (for reasons discussed in my medical liability and malpractice reform blog post), so I no longer get re-certified in Advanced Life Support in Obstetrics (ALSO).
I have never gotten certified in Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS), which is something that the surgeons and ER docs all get certified in. I don’t do ER medicine, so I haven’t really been able to justify the extra expense and time involved with getting this certification. I keep thinking perhaps I will get it someday though, as moonlighting in the local ER may be something I’d like to pursue in the future. For now though, I’ll leave the chest tubes and tracheotomies and such to others. Continue reading ‘Hands Only Cardiopulmonary Resucitation (CPR)’
“Huh, this post title sounds different than what you emphasized in your last two weight-loss posts Dr. Sam?
I thought you said it was all about the calories.”
If that’s what you thought, go read those posts (The Hacker’s Diet and How to Lose Weight) again, a little more closely.
What I was emphasizing with those posts was that when it comes to losing weight (fat), it’s primarily all about the calories you consume.
I don’t want this message however to be misinterpreted as saying something along the lines of “As long as the calories are where they need to be, eat whatever the heck you want.”
That is most definately NOT my message.
Sometimes I like to surf around news sites in other parts of the globe to get a better feel for what’s going on in other countries, as well as how the foreign press is presenting what’s going on here in the U.S.
In my opinion, access to folks in all the far flung places of the world is the greatest thing about the Internet.
Anyway, I was buzzing around the website for England’s The Daily Telegraph the other day, reading all the news that’s “Fit for Brits,” when I came across an interesting story about some breakthrough medical research being done at UCLA on Alzheimer’s Dementia.
Here’s the story titled UCLA drug aids Alzheimer’s patient ‘in minutes’. Please give it a read, and then come back here. It’ll only take a minute or two.
Okay, the following is a totally political rant. If you aren’t interested in a bunch of political ranting about socialized medicine, or the problems with Medicare funding, etc, (which, by the way is probably indicative of sanity and common sense on your part) then you should probably skip this post as it will most likely just irritate you. There is nothing in it that is informative about any particular medical topic or anything. It is not categorized under the “How to stay healthy” or “Silly Fun Stuff” categories for a reason. Disclaimer over with now. If you read further, don’t say you weren’t warned.
This will be a quick post, which I think is only fair considering the Epic War and Peace style dissertation I put the readers through with my last post on How to Lose Weight.
This is just a sort-of follow up to my post about Penumbra. If you remember, at the end of that post, I posed a couple of questions about potential other uses for this technology.
One of those other uses I wondered about was whether or not this treatment could be used for occlusive arterial conditions other than strokes, such as heart attacks for instance.
Well, it seems I’m not the only one who considered this sort of idea. A study published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine titled Thrombus Aspiration during Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention shows very promising results from a study in the Netherlands looking into just just this sort of thing.
As promised, I will keep this post short by avoiding going into a lot of details about this study. Hit the link above if you wish to get into the nuts and bolts of it.
In a nutshell however, the Dutch researchers compared doing a conventional stent placement in a heart attack victim vs first using a device (that sounds very much like the Penumbra device) to vacuum the clot out of the blocked coronary artery prior to placement of a stent.
They found that using the vacuum technique resulted in better perfusion and outcomes compared to conventional stent placement alone.
I just read an interesting story about a new treatment for occlusive strokes.
The device is known as Penumbra and is being put out by the company of the same name Penumbra, Inc.
From the story I read, and from my brief visit to the company website, it looks like it might have promise to treat some stroke victims who otherwise would be sort of out of luck.
Basically, from the description, this is a catheter type device that is threaded into the femoral artery (The great big artery in your groin that feeds blood to your leg), and is worked in retrograde fashion up the aorta and then into the appropriate arteries (carotid, etc.) until reaching the site of the blocked artery inside the skull. It then acts basically like a vacuum cleaner and sucks out the blood clot that is blocking the artery and causing the stroke.
