81–90 of 137 posts
Certainly one could understand why the dental industry would avoid the meme "root canal = bad!", but in this case the patient has little to lose, his future being lost already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a highly politicized/editorialized paper, though, with a clear opinion that really belong separate from a scientific paper. It counts every death that could have been prevented by perfect care, not only harm caused by treatment in otherwise safe individuals. For example, if someone with heart disease visits hospital and the hospital does not administer best known treatment protocol and the patient dies, that'…
I think pointing out the deaths caused by improper care are one of the few tools we have to correct the egregious errors that go uncorrected all the time in health care. For instance a family friend was told she had uterine cancer and was all set to start her doctor's protocol. But at the last minute wanted a second opinion from MD Anderson, the best cancer hospital in the world. After their team looked at her doctor…
The doctors initially suspected that he’d reacted badly to the anaesthetic, causing a brain haemorrhage – yet they failed to find evidence of injury. So he was discharged with the mystery still hanging over him, and the family moved back to England, where he was referred to the office of Gerald Burgess, a clinical psychologist in Leicester. Scouring the medical literature, he found five similar cases of mysterious me…
Earlier this year I had a medical procedure and was given "twilight" anesthesia. I was explicitly told "you need to have your spouse or a friend here because we're going to give you instructions afterward and you probably won't remember it". And, sure enough, my memory was pretty much wiped for the hour or so after the event. Later that evening I had a conversation with my wife that went like this: "Um, did you help…
To me, that (and experiments of Gazanigga etc) indicate that Jaynes was onto something with the "bicameral mind" theory, as crazy as it sounds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I've had that. Sitting in a hospital bed after my appendectomy: "Hey, I'm awake! That was easy." "You've been awake for two hours." "...Oh. Huh."
Yeah, I've had that also. Very strange, like how does one recognize that one has "woken up" from being already awake? It's like, oh, the tape recorder turned back on. Maybe we're just the tape recorder?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Are mistakes in medicine responsible for cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, or cancer? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_causes_of_death
Clicking through your link gets some stats that agree with them [1], based on this paper [2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventable_causes_of_death#Ac... 2. http://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/0...
Another well-known case of retrograde amnesia is Clive Wearing, a British pianist who was the subject of a BBC documentary, "Man Without a Memory" [2]. I recommend watching the clip. He describes his "resets" rather terrifyingly as slowly emerging from a sleepless coma. Whenever he sees his wife after such a reset, he leaps up to greet her as if they have been apart for a long time, and his evident happiness and inability to recognize his situation is heartbreaking. (His wife, unbeknownst to him, of course, has since divorced him, which only adds to the poignancy of the scene.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The use of amnesiacs like midazolam in conjunction with unpleasant surgery has become common practice because it has been shown to significantly reduce the psychological trauma associated with surgical procedures and related changes in behavior as a result. You will still experience the trauma at the time whether you remember it or not, but the experience is not persistently encoded into your brain. This is important…
And that makes intuitive sense. I'm still left with the question: is the experience of surgery really that bad?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I've had that. Sitting in a hospital bed after my appendectomy: "Hey, I'm awake! That was easy." "You've been awake for two hours." "...Oh. Huh."
After my first knee surgery, I regained consciousness midway through speaking a sentence to my mother. I was literally listening to words coming out of my mouth and had no idea where I was, who I was, or what I was talking about. My very next sentence was a panicked question to my mother trying to figure out those things. Turned out I had 'been awake and having cohesive conversation' with her for over an hour. I stil…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I've had that. Sitting in a hospital bed after my appendectomy: "Hey, I'm awake! That was easy." "You've been awake for two hours." "...Oh. Huh."
After my first knee surgery, I regained consciousness midway through speaking a sentence to my mother. I was literally listening to words coming out of my mouth and had no idea where I was, who I was, or what I was talking about. My very next sentence was a panicked question to my mother trying to figure out those things. Turned out I had 'been awake and having cohesive conversation' with her for over an hour. I stil…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that anesthesiologists apparently deliberately induce amnesia with benzos scares the shit out of me, much more so than full general anesthesia does (which seems backwards, right, because general anesthesia is actually dangerous). Why do they want me not to remember anything? Is it that horrible?
The use of amnesiacs like midazolam in conjunction with unpleasant surgery has become common practice because it has been shown to significantly reduce the psychological trauma associated with surgical procedures and related changes in behavior as a result. You will still experience the trauma at the time whether you remember it or not, but the experience is not persistently encoded into your brain. This is important…
As I understand it there's an increased risk of PTSD if people are chemically restrained, which is why some ITUs (but not in England) use physical restraints when needed.
This is a different use case from surgery, where these meds are useful.