Nurses must acquire some skills that non-medical people find embarrassing, disgusting, maybe even childish. Such knowledge can be difficult to obtain from the standard medical books and journals. A monograph called How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces aims to remedy one such gap in the literature. Gaye Kyle, a senior lecturer at the […]
Tag: medical
Some medical hazards of/re pizza
Pizza is dangerous. Pizza is beneficial. If you hold either of these opinions, published research agrees with you, especially research in England and Italy. Two British studies highlight, darkly, some dangers that accompany pizza that’s served too speedily or too heartily. One, a monograph in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, explains that, whatever the good […]
The original planetary medical stars
Behold an all-star team of physicians with planetary family names (thanks to investigator Adrianne Appel for suggesting the idea), announced in the May 2010 issue of mini-AIR: Joseph Venus, MD, Concord, New Hampshire, USA P.G. Earth, MD, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Audrey Mars, MD, Flemington, New Jersey Jesse B. Jupiter, MD, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Selman Uranus, […]
New straw reaches into quasi-stomach
Investigator Alan Dove reports: The world’s leading manufacturer of artificial laboratory stomachs has just introduced a line of special pipettes designed to reach all the way to the bottom of said stomachs. They posted the news yesterday: The Simplette Straw has been designed specifically to reach the bottom of all Stomacher® bags. This means that […]
The case of the Xerox repairman
A Xerox repairman supplied a clue — indeed was a clue — in detecting a medical hazard. Mark Pendergrast‘s book Inside Outbreaks explains: In April 1973 the New York State epidemiologist, EIS alum Alan Hinman, called the CDC for help. In early March, a second-year resident in radiation therapy at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, […]
Marmite and its side-effects
Britain is trying to come to terms with the launch of extra-strong Marmite, but it seems the original born-in-Blighty foodstuff with a whiff-of-superhero-comic-book name is more than just a condiment. Marmite, together with its younger, Australian kinsman Vegemite, is an ongoing biomedical experiment. Streaky dabs of information appear here and there, spread thin, on the […]
When Is a Lung Abscess Like Popcorn?
“When Is a Lung Abscess Like Popcorn?” asks Dr. Mark Crislip, in a Medscape Today report on December 29, 2010. (Thanks to investigator Edwin Spector for bringing this to our attention.) Dr. Crislip, musing about an odor associated with a particular patient, muses: The patient is a 17-year-old girl who had been sick for 1 […]
The Medical Danger of Kissing Toads
A 1999 medical report [see below] warned about children kissing frogs or toads. The Star newspaper says says of the new movie “The Princess and the Frog” that “More than 50 children have been taken to hospital in the US suffering from salmonella poisoning after the fairytale hit screens there in December.” The medical report […]
History of homeopathic overdose
The vast archives of homeopathic literature do describe — once, in an 1864 book (see below for detail) — the danger of homeopathic medicine overdose. We mention this as background to today’s worldwide demonstrations — volunteers take massive amounts of homeopathic medicines (medicines from which all the medicine has been removed) to demonstrate that those […]
2 King medical double dactyls
Fred King [grainily visible in this photo], a medical librarian at a large hospital, sent in two original double dactyls inspired by his surroundings: 1. Neatness Counts Wiggledy squiggledy Sarah the resident write your prescriptions so they can be read. Patients affected by pharmacological illegibility could end up dead.