Posted on 04/03/2020 2:07:15 AM PDT by wastoute
People looking a month inside...
So, anyone have any medical questions today? We have been doing masks, drugs, what ever. My first day in my first month in ICU my “mentor” (2nd year Resident) told me, “Dude, you are gonna love this. When the month is over you will ‘Fear NO Disease’.” Which I thought was curious because as a new Surgical Intern you pretty much fear everything that moves and a lot of things that don’t. He was right. 30 days later I was invincible. NO ONE was gonna die if I was at the bedside.
No question, more a statement; it's no wonder we're screwed.
i worry about apparent lack of concern for economic hardship leading to massive psychological stress on the population at large.
Because no one has any questions? Or because Surgeons used to be abused relentlessly for years while they were in training?
I’m sure no one does a solid month in any ICU in training nowadays. That was cruel then. A heart surgeon who did his fellowship there told me he felt sorry for the guy, one was married so he told the guy he could go home for the weekend and he (the fellow) would cover for him and “take up his cross” for the weekend. “The guy was married, for God’s sake!” HE was told never to do that again. People remember DeBake as a great hero of Surgery, and he was, but he wasn’t above terrible cruelty. IMHO.
Some people remember the y at the end of his name. Just messing with you. I spelled Ecuador with a q yesterday.
It’s a real problem. “We had to destroy the city to save it.” I saw the debate on Tucker as I’m sure you all did. I have said from the beginning, it’s a legit argument. As they pointed out Sweden is pursuing that path. Who knows? It may work for them. Clearly that plan was a failure in places like Italy, France, Spain, etc.
I keep talking about The Patient vs The Community and the Flexner Report. This really is the heart of the issue though most people at this time can see it that way, IMHO.
Of course, if we are to continue to “be Americans” the Rights of the Individual have to once again be reasserted. That is not the realm of Medicine. Doctors WANT (at least my generation) to Practice Medicine in a Country where the Rights of their Patients are sacrosanct.
Everything is “in the wind” unless it’s actually on fire now.
Funny. 40 years I have been spelling it that way. LOL.
Do you mean Michael DeBakey?
I may have done so yesterday myself and my daughter spent a summer there her senior year (Minor in Spanish).
Sorry. Been spelling it wrong all my life.
This is probably the first time I have repeated that story in print, though. In my defense.
That’s quite alright. I haven’t heard his name mentioned in years.
Seems kinda weird to have to be under house arrest in order to fight the enemy.
As I have said before here on FR, in my younger days my School was one of the first two to have a “Preventative Medicine Department.” More than a few of the “old doctors” were scandalized. They publicly stated they didn’t think it should exist and were actively trying to get rid of it. I thought they were just crotchety old geezers. Now decades later I see how things play out when the tension between two diametrically opposed philosophies play out when people “try to split the baby”. There may e such a thing as a “prison of two ideas” but in matters where the “middle ground” results in a baby in pieces, there really isn’t.
It does, and I posted way back in the beginning, there is a great argument to be made for “Do Nothing”. They say it was The Black Death that “redistributed the wealth” that paved the way for The Renaissance. That path requires the death of a good number of those who previously held the wealth.
Now of course, the “Do NOthing” path also could very well lead to social instability, Revolution, etc., etc.
I just remembered the story because people are chafing at being restricted in their movements.
I’ve been watching videos at the MedCram youtube channel. The doc there was talking about treatments before the days of antibiotics. Hydrotherapy involving heat to boost the immune system was one of the things he was discussing. The importance of sleep. And I notice in all the old photos of the Spanish Flu pandemic everyone is wearing masks. Wonder what may have been forgotten over the years since the rise of pharmaceuticals..
I told a story the other day about “Chief”. I still remember that day, him bawling in my yard because the Army was kicking him out and I’m standing there thinking how jealous I was. I would have paid a lot to have been in his shoes.
Anyway, he had practiced in his home country before moving to NYC. We were BSing one day and he told me a story. “When I was in my country we couldn’t get antibiotics. We had an STD clinic once a week where the men came to get their “gonorrhea treatment” (I can’t remember if it was gentian violet or potassium permangenate). The men would line up and we would flush their urethra with stuff. You could hear them screaming for quite some distance.” I was horrified. To him it was “just life”.
Little known fact. “The Trendelenburg Position” is a “setting” on hospital beds. Everyone knows that but few people can tell you why. I the days before antibiotics nowadays we just assumed everyone with “peritonitis” died. Which is curious because if that were the case we would call it celoemitis (which was the preferred noun for some of the old geezers) a name that more accurately describes the condition. So why Perotonitis and who was Trendelenburg.
People weren’t idiots before antibiotics. Far from it. They discovered you could offer a patient a chance by placing them in “The Trendelenburg Position” and letting the pus in the abdomen drain into the pelvis. Eventually it would “find” it’s way through the facial planes of the pelvis and exit through the PERITONEUM. So it became known as “peritonitis”. Now we know the reason this works is there is actually an inter abdominal “circulation”. All the membranes in the abdomen “weep” serum. Every breath you take causes a negative pressure in the space above you liver. This fluid does not accumulate because there are channels to dump the fluid into the lymphatics.
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