Posted on 07/21/2010 10:52:36 AM PDT by george76
A schoolgirl suffered multiple organ failure and four heart attacks just days after doctors sent her home with paracetamol and told her to take 'plenty of rest', an inquest heard.
Amy Carter, 15, begged doctors not to discharge her, telling them 'I'm dying' but medics assured her she would be fine.
She developed septicaemia after being released by doctors who had diagnosed her with glandular fever. Two days later on Christmas Eve, Amy - who had not been able to eat for 19 days and weighed just six stone - was taken to hospital and died hours later.
Amy was discharged by the Worcestershire Royal Hospital before results of blood tests and a throat swab were known - the swab later revealed bacteria that entered her bloodstream and triggered septicaemia.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Parents' fury as teenage daughter dies just days after doctors sent her home and 'told her to take paracetamol'
Coming soon to your neighborhood...
Were this my child the life expectancy of the doctors who did this would be measured in hours.
Hey, another win for socialized medicine. Its a wonder they wasted all that treatment on her, they could have just as easily killed right off and saved a fortune. Sick people suck (I believe Mr. Skittles said that). Blue pill or red pill?
Lead poisoning, don’cha know.
And that's BEFORE Obamacare. Went to another neurologist who said he couldn't find anything so it was probably "conversion disorder" that would be helped by physical therapy. That at least put us on the right tract. Long story short, several sessions with physical therapists and chiropractor, and she's able to function again.
Sorry, track, not tract.
That’s outrageous that they sent her home. I was septic after my appendix ruptured many years ago and was sent home, too, because I was misdiagnosed. I then was rushed back to the hopsital two days later and finally got a correct diagnosis. I credit God, my surgeon and the good healthcare in this country for allowing me to survive it. Prayers to the kid’s family.
You’re telling a very different story than this article, though. You had the ability to go to various specialists - who were having trouble diagnosing her, and you finally struck on a right answer. The child in the article had no choice but to go home and die - and THAT’s medicine under Obamacare.
Oh yeah, The tomato brains here want to pattern our health care after these tomato brains. Sounds about right.
Well, she did save someone money by just taking a pill and dying.
That’s what it’s all about.
Got to keep that money saved to further the cause.
What is the problem here? This girl’s end-of-life care was managed very efficiently, and cost the NIH only a few hundred dollars. There is no way the US health-care system could have dealt with this case for even ten times that price.
She was clogging up a bed and costing them money. They wanted her out of the hospital.
Medical decisions take the backseat to budget decisions.
Welcome to Obamacare.
I feel sorry for the doctors.....imagine studying all those years and devoting your life to helping people and then being told who, what,when,how, and how much by the desk sitters....
I had to look up some of the terminology. “Glandular fever” is what Brits call “mononucleosis.” The article said she had that, plus pneumonia; yet they sent her home.
Septicemia is when a baterial infection in one locale in the body gets into the bloodstream and starts to overwhelm the entire body, resulting in a very rapid decline and death. Some of the symptoms are a failure to produce urine and red blotches on the skin.
Good point. Thanks.
Shrug. What are ya gonna do? Mistakes will happen.
Before Obamacare was passed, we were working with an internal medicine specialist, who said she would probably have to leave the country to practice medicine the way she believed it should be practiced. Only problem was, she wasn’t sure where she could go that didn’t have socialized medicine.
Thanks
This is the kind of thing I see a lot in medicine here - the docs saw a young teen, feeling lousy, fatigued, and heard hoofbeats, and assumed it was mono. A reasonable suggestion, but they didn’t consider the differential diagnosis, the list of all the things it COULD be.
So, there is a saying in medicine that “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Which goes to show why you shouldn’t practice medicine based on sayings or rules-of-thumb, aka heuristics. Because you’ll be wrong a certain percentage of the time.
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