Dr. Grumpy: "What have your blood pressures been running at home?"
Mr. Decimal: "They average 127.384 over 73.879"
A Blog detailing the insanity of my medical practice and the stupidity of everyday life.
Dr. Grumpy: "What have your blood pressures been running at home?"
Mr. Decimal: "They average 127.384 over 73.879"
9 comments:
He must be a neurologist - very precise but not very useful.
I doubt I would use his BP machine!!
bobbie
Is that the mean, the median, or the mode? Do the measurements form a normal distribution? What are the skewness and kurtosis?
"I'm upping your daily dosage of lisinopril from 8.743 grams to 9.208 grams."
"That's before I apply the leeches."
Of course that is the average. The figures are a bit different if you look at the mean, or the max and mins.
It’s actually an interesting point. When I first leant to measure blood pressure manually with a mercury sphygmomanometer and a stethoscope, it was usually done to the nearest 5 or 10mm. It simply wasn’t possible to do it reliably more accurately than that. Does measuring it today to an accuracy of 1mm with a digital automatic machine make any difference to treatment or outcome? Probably not.
"So can I review the graphs and tables of data you've amassed? I'll be sure to include you in the authorship of the case study paper my med student is writing."
Lately, about a mile in 3.5 minutes because there's a lot of pressure to improve.
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