Tag: medicine

Against Overhydration

psa for you dummies

Transplanting A Head

The human chimera that awoke from surgery wouldn’t really be the head donor or the body donor anymore, but someone else entirely. In that sense, a head transplant wouldn’t save Valery Spiridonov’s life so much as create a new one. A life with affinities to Spiridonov’s old one, certainly. But in many ways—medically, psychologically, maybe even spiritually—it would be something entirely new, unprecedented in history. “It goes beyond what we’ve ever contemplated, And by ‘we’ I mean humankind.” Spiridonov doesn’t worry much about the risks, psychological or otherwise, of waking up with a new body. Perhaps inevitably, given his handicap, he equates his personhood with his brain alone. “For me, a body is like a machine, doing some duties or some regular stuff, just to support living”. The transplant “is not about philosophy; it’s about mechanics.” He seemed to think that acquiring a new body would be akin to getting a new wheelchair. Still, the constant media attention, and the uncertainty about when and where the surgery will occur, have taken an emotional toll. “I’m really, really tired of being famous. It’s exhausting, and it takes a lot of your time, for nothing.” He doesn’t fantasize much about having a new body, in part because he doesn’t know how much control he’ll have over it. Will he wake up from surgery like the mouse treated with peg in Ren’s lab—faltering a little, but able to move under his own power? Or will he be even worse off than the control mouse—unable to use any of his limbs, and shackled to an alien body?

St. Jude is terrible

St. Jude Medical has done absolutely nothing to even meet minimum cybersecurity standards. There are steps St. Jude can take relatively quickly to protect patients, including changing the programming of implanted pacemakers and defibrillators through a method that would involve a doctor’s visit

Consume less health care

There are 2 unavoidable realities of making the American health-care system less costly: Americans must use less care, and our nation’s legion of well-paying, stable jobs in the health-care sector need to be both less numerous and less well paid.

Social Immune system

a malfunctioning immune system may be responsible for “social deficits in numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders.” But exactly what this might mean for autism and other specific conditions requires further investigation

Walking after a stroke

Their recovery was not just a minimal recovery like someone who couldn’t move a thumb now being able to wiggle it. It was much more meaningful. One 71-year-old wheelchair-bound patient was walking again

Baby sideshow performers

Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s, and though he died in relative obscurity, he was one of the great champions of this lifesaving technology and is credited with saving the lives of 1000s of the country’s premature babies.

this is a great example why the fight against luddites is always one of the most important

Telemedicine

Another form of anticompetitive state-level protectionism.

The biggest hurdle may be state medical boards. Idaho’s medical licensing board punished a doctor for prescribing an antibiotic over the phone, fining her $10K and forbidding her from providing telemedicine. State laws that restrict telemedicine — for instance, requiring that patients and doctors have established in-person relationships — have drawn lawsuits charging that they illegally restrict competition. Georgia’s state medical board requires a face-to-face encounter before telemedicine can be delivered, while Ohio’s does not.

2020-03-26: Robots could enable a form of telemedicine that would keep humans out of areas of contagion. A small example is Spot:

It’s using a custom mount and enclosure for an iPad or similar-sized screen to be used for video conferencing between doctors and other healthcare workers and their patients.

Another is the 4x speedup for hygiene theater:

It takes human cleaners 1 hour to carefully disinfect the CT scanning room, wiping down the equipment and surfaces. So when the pandemic hit, and the room had to be cleaned after each use, “a machine that used to be able to do 30 scans a day is down to 7.”

Violet can clean the room in just 15 minutes. It uses machine vision powered by Intel’s Movidius AI chips to map and navigate its surrounding environment. Though humans still have to wipe down the “nooks and crannies the robot can’t get to, like behind the door handles.” But by cutting cleaning times down from 1 hour to 15 minutes, the hospital’s capacity for CT scans increases 4x.

2020-04-15: Health care costs can be lowered by reimbursing at the same rates for telemedicine or treatments that are at home, and by paying fees per patient, rather than huge profit margins on elective procedures

The hospital may kill you

based on a recent ER experience that involved staff cluelessly looking for me for 30 min even though i was sitting right in front of them, this isn’t hard to believe at all. if you are struggling with the basics, what hope do you have with real problems? the kicker was that that hospital then spammed me a few months later with a call for donations to continue to operate their 3rd world boiler room.

Modern Wound Healing

Keep the wound moist for 10 days, and the skin will regrow without scarring. A moist wound may be more vulnerable to bacterial infection, so add a smear of triple-antibiotic ointment 3 times a day.