4 July 2008
Just thought I’d return from vacation with a link to this timely column decrying restrictions on fireworks, which are safer than ever: over the last decade and a half, there have been between 8-10,000 injuries a year despite the ever increasing amounts of fireworks Americans are using. According to one source, there has actually been over a 90% decrease in injuries per pound of fireworks since our nation’s bicentennial. (For added humor, read some of the descriptions of the fatalities in the CPSC report, like the guys letting off bottle rockets in the dorm.)
So let freedom ring, and bang, and boom…just be careful doing so.
Filed under: Other random stuff
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1 July 2008
I’ve occasionally noticed people who don’t live in my apartment complex sitting in their cars. I’d always assumed they were meeting their dealer, but when I noticed one of the drivers today wearing scrubs and taking a long drag on a cigarette, it finally clicked: they were getting around the campus smoking ban. So by taking steps to “promote health” by disallowing smoking anywhere on campus, the university has managed to convince people to hop in their cars for a 30-second drive to a parking lot where they can smoke, thereby burning added gasoline. I guess it all comes down to their belief that the inconvenience will force people to quit, thereby making the added pollution a temporary thing.
Filed under: Random Humor
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29 June 2008
Mythbusters is a great show, but there are some pressing questions they just don’t answer: How much alcohol can you get into a Jell-O shot? How do you make ballistics gelatin at home? How many condoms can you wear at once? Fortunately, My Science Project has these answers and more.
Filed under: Sunday Silliness
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26 June 2008
When I saw a link to a story titled “Song Helps 3-Year-Old Call 911 for Mom,” I fully admit that the first song that jumped into my head was the wrong song.
Filed under: Medical Humor
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25 June 2008
The ACEP annual meeting is closely followed by that of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and they provide me with a listing of all the abstracts to be presented there as well. One studied fatality rates of drivers based on BMI. While I only have an abstract and cannot comment on how well the study was done, the conclusion was that overweight drivers have the lowest death rates, slightly obese (BMI 30-35) had a death rate indistinguishable from normal-weight drivers, and the more severely obese people had higher death rates.
The kicker in all of this was not the findings but the study title: “The Influence of Obesity on Mortality of Drivers in Severe Motor Vehicle Crashes: Does It Help to Bring Your Own Airbag?”
Filed under: EMS Research, Medical Humor
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24 June 2008
I alluded recently to the fact that a lot of cardiology trials have word-based names, which makes it fun to listen to cardiologists talk, because they bandy these trial names about throughout any discussion they have. What I didn’t realize is how creative some of the trial names had become: I was becoming comfortable with HOPE, LIFE, ALLHAT, JNC-7, and a few others (for you prehospital types, OPALS), but I didn’t realize that people had gone as far as inventing acronyms to create words like CARPORT, HELVETICA, ESCOBAR, EXACTO, and OXCHECK.
We were making fun of named cardiology trials one day when I was on cardiology service. We were noting our attending’s compulsive hand-washing (not a bad thing, really) when I remarked that there was probably a named trial about handwashing. Without missing a beat, one of the other students said: “Yeah, that was the HANDJOB-2 trial.”
Filed under: Medical Humor
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23 June 2008
Since the famous Dr. Peter Safar did most of his work on resuscitation at the University of Pittsburgh, it was only fitting that Pitt’s center for resuscitation science should be named after him. When Virginia Commonwealth University chose to create a similar hotbed of research, someone apparently noticed that VCU could have a few letters added on to become VCURES.
Then, like many cardiology trials seem to do (think HOPE, LIFE, ALLHAT, CARP, many others), they tasked someone else with figuring out what words would come up with the desired acronym. The unfortunate result is the VCU Reanimation Engineering Shock Center; in my mind, “reanimation engineering” sounds vaguely Disneyesque, with perhaps a Victorian twist. While I very seriously doubt that the actual institute is situated in a castle on a hill with lightning flashing ominously in the background, populated with hunchbacks and people dressed like extras from The Mummy, that’s definitely the image that comes to my mind.
Filed under: Medical Humor
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22 June 2008
Via William Gibson’s blog, a treat that he describes as “as solid an icon of Progress as we’ve seen this year:” the cheeseburger in a can; I must admit I agree with this writer that this is “both the best and worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Filed under: Sunday Silliness
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18 June 2008
A group out in Seattle did a nice study on the use of needle chest decompression within their patient population. It was not entirely surprising that they found the procedure rare (39 cases out of more than 20,000 searched through). It wasn’t even particularly surprising that they found four “unexpected survivors” (although they couldn’t track those four to hospital discharge, so who knows how well they actually did).
What I found most surprising is that they found one case of intracardiac placement of the needle. They don’t specify whether the medic putting the needle in really screwed up, or the patient had very unusual anatomy, and I would really love to know that answer.
Filed under: EMS Research
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16 June 2008
There have been several attempts to figure out what factors can help predict which students will pass the infamous National Registry exam; hopefully, programs somewhere are using this data to design their classes in such a way as to maximize student success. (Meanwhile, other programs will fail miserably. I’ve heard terrible things about what’s become of the program I attended, which wasn’t spectacular to begin with.)
While we’ve been assuming for many years that patient contact was indeed important for learning, we finally have numbers to show that high patient volumes are as good for test performance as they are for street performance. The number of hours spent, either in the field or in the hospital, had no correlation with passing rates. (I was one of the last classes under the old paramedic curriculum, and our criteria for hospital exposure was based on hours, not patients.)
Here is the graph from the study for total patient contacts, but the graph with “number of ALS runs” on the X-axis is even more impressive.
Filed under: EMS Research
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