Saturday, January 30, 2010

Breaking Medical News

I was relaxing in the hot tub today, catching up on cutting edge medical literature.

I learned that:

Patients on sedating drugs have a higher risk of falling than those not taking sedatives.

Patients with imbalance from inner ear problems are more likely to fall than those without balance problems.

(Archives of Internal Medicine, May 25, 2009)


I also learned:

People with a stroke, and poor blood flow to the area of brain involved, are more likely to have another stroke then people with normal blood flow to that area.

(Brain, April, 2009)

26 comments:

  1. omg, thank God you are so proactive and read up on medical journals!

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  2. ...this stands boldly in the face of everything that I thought I knew.

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  3. Well, DUH. You're reading stuff that's close to a year old! :)

    This just in: studies have shown that common sense cannot be taught, and that people will do a study to prove something obvious just so they can say that they've proved something.

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  4. I'm actually going to defend the authors of these articles because they have to say these things because so many doctors actually have no common sense. Knives are sharp, fire is hot, and people with inner ear problems are more affected by gravity.

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  5. FYI - Smoking is not healthy.

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  6. I'm so gland I chose to go to medical school so I can understand these complexities involved in cutting edge medical research!

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  7. I found this one today heres the link as well:

    title: Too Much Alcohol Impairs Seniors' Thinking

    http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_94612.html

    and this is what the nih is funding ?

    and my wor verification is shytte

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  8. Sounds like the kind of crap we get in nursing journals, too!

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  9. According to first semester physics classes, acceleration from the force of gravity affects objects (probably--to hedge my bets about changes in physical laws in the last 50 years) in the same sort of way no matter if there's an inner ear or not. Although, some of us might experience acceleration from the force gravity differently than others. Guess we could leave a scientific discourse on special gravitational forces for Annals of Enquiry as quarterly supplement to The Enquirer.

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  10. People in hot tubs are more at risk of orthostatic hypotension then those not in hot tubs, so you're also at risk of falling moreso than those who are not dizzy when they stand up.

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  11. all of those ailments can be cured through the use of leeches and a little eye-of newt...

    ...I was Googling in my hot tub today.

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  12. wow. & i'm here slaving over a biochemistry exam because....?

    how on earth do they get crap like that funded?!

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  13. Damn.....and how much money was spent on those studies??? Why cant I find something so damned obvious and get published???
    God bless the lawyers of the USA....without them, so many of those studies (i.e. HOT boiling coffee is hot and BURNS) would never have been completed!

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  14. It amazes me just how much money is spent on stuff like this...a couple of years ago, CNN ran a story about a study that concluded that people who consumed large quantities of fried potatoes had a higher rate of cancer. My husband who is an engineer alarmed me with the level of his interest in the study. Apparently, there is a chemical formed that is thought to have caused the high cancer rate. It's stupid...if you're stuffing your face with chips and french fries, wheather it's cancer or heart disease/ diabetes/ complications from obesity, you're gonna be seeing the big cheese sooner than had you been stuffing your mouth with salad and tofu!! We have people dying because they can't afford to see the doc and yet someone's funding these meaningless studies...it's downright depressing!!!

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  15. Makes me feel marginally better about my research project now, at least you can't count on common sense telling you the answer.

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  16. Thank god you're keeping up with the latest research! I shudder to think what shape I'd be in if I had to see a neurologist who doesn't keep up.

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  17. hope the hot tub was better than the quality of your reading material :)

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  18. I think it's a damn good thing I found your blog, or how would I ever learn this complicated stuff?

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  19. Reading that, I want to break something but it's not news.

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  20. Did you at least get some CE credits at the end?

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  21. Sounds just like the studies conducted on "new" drugs when the reps come around to hawk them..."People taking drug X saw a decrease in symptoms as compared to placebo"....I CERTAINLY HOPE YOUR NEW EXPENSIVE TOTALLY REDUNDANT DRUG WORKS BETTER THAN A SUGAR PILL!!!!!!!

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  22. wow...i can't think of anything witty to say to this...it's just that stupid. lol

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  23. Speaking as a librarian I'd like to remind the reading public that academic library subscriptions to journals like that sometimes cost as much as $20,000 per year, AND often the authors (or for whomever they're doing the research, realistically) have to pay a fee to get the work published in said journals in the first place.

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  24. Aw! Don't hate on the painfully self evident clinical research! I have to feed myself somehow!

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  25. Old MD Girl- Believe me, I've been there. Somewhere out there is a pissy study with my name on it that I was forced to write and publish by my chairman a long time ago.

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  26. Wow, what a racket! And we, the taxpayers are probably funding a lot of this...

    my word is "slyphers". Sounds appropriate, somehow.

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So wadda you think?