For the doctors and nurses at the south London hospice it had been a wrenching weekend. Twelve patients had died between Friday and Sunday nights, and by Monday morning death’s wide swath had left the staff physically and emotionally exhausted.
Tag Archives: doctors
The Diverted Ambulance: How ER Crowding Can Kill Patients
Imagine you’re having a heart attack. Your co-workers call 911, and the medics arrive
High Weight Gain in Pregnancy: Heavier, More Obesity-Prone Babies
As doctors and researchers grapple with the U.S.’s runaway rates of obesity, they have begun to look for causes of it in a critical if little understood period of life: the nine months before birth.
What the Changes to the DSM Mean
The attempt to catalog all the ways that Americans can go crazy dates at least to 1840, when the Census included a question on “idiocy/insanity.” From those two simple categories, we now have more than 300 separate disorders; they are listed in a 943-page book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short.
Has Bangladesh’s Elite Police Force Gone Too Far?
On March 27, Bangladeshi doctors amputated the leg of Limon Hossain, a 16-year-old student, four days after he was shot during a raid by the Rapid Action Battalion , Bangladesh’s elite security force.
Medicine: Patients’ Progress
TRANSPLANTS Four little girls, bright-eyed and decked out in their best dresses, met the press last week at Colorado General Hospital in Denver. Ranging in age from 16 months to two years, all four were gravely ill, and the University of Colorado doctors who described their cases were guarded in discussing the children's prospects for recovery
Medicine: Life Jacket
It saves people who cannot eat Brown-haired, blue-eyed Jason White looks like any sturdy, active, eight-year-old boy.
Rape in Libya: The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The female doctors at one of the larger hospitals here can tell you stories — of corpses of violated women stripped and strewn on the streets of front-line Ajdabiya; of the women afraid to leave their homes in Brega; of the 13-year-old Misuratah girl gang-raped by soldiers who burst into the family’s living room, forcing her father to watch.
In Cold Blood
Last Wednesday I tried calling Father Ignacio Martin Baro, as I usually did when I was in El Salvador.
Chronic Abdominal Pain and the Radiation Risk of CT Scans
Last week, the Medical Insider column explained why doctors have so much trouble managing patients with abdominal pain in the emergency department . Not least among the challenges: the multiplicity of causes of belly pain, the lack of clarity on which tests and treatments are best for which patients, and high cost