No matter what profession, the reality is that wholesale change is seldom welcomed with open arms. Indeed, most workers will prove reluctant to alter routines or procedures that they have not only mastered, but which have consistently produced favorable results. This is especially true in the medical profession, where surgeons and anesthesiologists adhere to time-tested […]
More people here in Pennsylvania and throughout the nation are becoming committed to living healthier lifestyles. For some this means making a conscious effort to eat better foods while for others it also means incorporating more exercise into their daily routine. While this focus on self-improvement is laudable and will undoubtedly translate into a reduced […]
There has been a growing debate over the course of the last few years over the safety of power morcellation in laparoscopic hysterectomies and laparoscopic myomectomies, two minimally invasive surgical procedures in which the uterus and uterine fibroids are removed respectively. For those unfamiliar with laparoscopic power morcellation, it essentially involves a surgeon using an […]
Back in 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education made the controversial decision to amend the work hours for doctors-in-training. Specifically, the organization set the maximum number of hours that interns and residents could work in a given week to 80 hours. The ACGME revisited this issue again eight years later, making further refinements […]
When medical malpractice lawsuits make national headlines, it’s most often because the specialist’s error was particularly egregious, resulting in incredibly severe injuries to the patient or worse. For example, a plastic surgeon may botch a procedure leaving a patient with permanent scarring, an anesthesiologist may stop a patient’s heart after administering the wrong dose of […]
Last time, our blog discussed how so-called incidental findings — unintentional yet important medical discoveries that appear in as many as one third of all imaging tests — were being grossly underreported in radiology reports or even to patients. In particular, we discussed how this type of medical mistake was most likely to occur in […]
While the term “incidental finding” may sound like something found in a police report, it is actually a very significant medical term found in a patient chart. It essentially describes an unintentional yet important discovery made during an imaging test — CT scan, X-ray, MRI, etc. — undertaken for a completely unrelated purpose. To illustrate, […]
For the last several years, our blog has been carefully following the progress of robotic surgery here in the U.S., meaning those procedures in which scalpels and other surgical instruments are taken out of the hands of the surgeon and replaced with joysticks and a control panel connected to multiple robotic arms. Advocates of robotic […]
Anyone who has undergone any sort of surgery requiring the use of general anesthesia to render them unconscious knows from firsthand experience just how long and intricate the list of preoperative instructions can be. Chief among these preoperative instructions is the command that the patient abstain from either eating or drinking for a set amount […]
While it may sound more like urban myth than reality, the fact is that surgical teams can — and do — leave foreign objects inside a person’s body after an operation. Indeed, previous studies have found that foreign objects are left behind in roughly one out of every 5,500 to 7,000 procedures. While this may […]
