dr-exmedic.com

Whatever its utility for actual medical news, the BMJ is endlessly entertaining.  They recently ran a story about the likelihood of a physician having to treat a medical emergency on an airplane.  While such events are fairly uncommon, there is no shortage of medical personnel with stories of treating someone at 30,000 feet.  (I’m not one of them, fortunately.)  However, few of them have a story as good as the doc referred to in the story (which, I suspect, directly inspired the episode of ER in which a nurse treats a gunshot victim’s collapsed lung using a tampon applicator and Ziploc bag):

In 1995, a professor of orthopaedics famously rescued an airline passenger from a potentially lethal tension pneumothorax using little more than a coat hanger, a urinary catheter, and a bottle of Evian water.

The thing that I can’t figure out is how, exactly, a urinary catheter made its way onto an airplane.  It certainly wasn’t part of the plane’s emergency kit–was the doc carrying it in his bag?

(The one thing I’ve learned about BMJ articles, by the way, is that you should always read the “rapid responses.”)

Filed under: Medical Humor