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Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lvoc
......My brother recently survived a medical error of high import. They busted a vessel installing a stent to treat a heart attack. He made it because he is an athlete in excellent shape and stood the stress. I would also certainly have not recovered from the same incident.
What would his chances have been like if he hadn't gone to the hospital when having the heart attack, to be treated by medical experts?
They're not "so-called experts", they're actually experts with a huge amount of training and experience, and they know a thing or two more about medicine than you do. But if you doubt me, go ahead and stay home if you have a heart attack.
It is trickier that that. Those who are old and/or sick have contact with the medical establishment vastly more than the rest. They are also far less able to deal with a set back. So yes medical mistakes may well have an impact...but it was more likely to shorten a limited life that to damage one in full flower.
My brother recently survived a medical error of high import. They busted a vessel installing a stent to treat a heart attack. He made it because he is an athlete in excellent shape and stood the stress. I would also certainly have not recovered from the same incident.
Glad your brother is OK!
His experience illustrates a point, though. What happened to him is a complication of a procedure that was not necessarily an error. The injury you describe could occur even when the procedure is performed by a skilled, experienced person. That means it is not universally preventable.
Hospitals have to concentrate on what they can prevent. Medication errors are at the top of the list. Wrong site surgery also has preventive processes in use.
Complications are going to occur in the best of medical hands.
What would his chances have been like if he hadn't gone to the hospital when having the heart attack, to be treated by medical experts?
They're not "so-called experts", they're actually experts with a huge amount of training and experience, and they know a thing or two more about medicine than you do. But if you doubt me, go ahead and stay home if you have a heart attack.
That is a weird message to have gotten.
Actually my brother is a lawyer who did lots of medical malpractice. And his daughter, a pediatrician, immediately replaced the cardiologist involved. She threatened harm if he touched her father again.
He did make one mistake...was driven to the nearest full blown ER rather than the Cardiac Specialty place across town. First problem was they could not find a cardiologist for the ER. Second they could not find a chest cutter when things went south. They apparently popped his chest in the cath lab to stop him from bleeding out. Interesting he was aware of a lot of this going on. Must have been an interesting couple of minutes.
Your link says that a leaked internal memo blames the WHO for botching the response. The WHO responds that the document wasn't fact checked or reviewed by staff.
I'll wait til the whole situation has been reviewed before castigating any agency.
If you're calling "rhetoric" the opinions of doctors, virologists, pathologists and epidemiologists who collectively have spent hundreds of years studying Ebola and other infectious diseases, then yes, I'm going to believe the "rhetoric."
If you believe the opinions of self-appointed internet experts, based on absolutely nothing but their own musings, then I can't help you.
As far as the WHO, do you think they have a magic wand? They can gather information and advise governments and other agencies about what to do, but they don't have enforcement powers.
How do you think the WHO dropped the ball? What did they have the power to do that they did not do?
The rhetoric that people are turning their lights off and locking their doors, as you stated in your post.
It is trickier that that. Those who are old and/or sick have contact with the medical establishment vastly more than the rest. They are also far less able to deal with a set back. So yes medical mistakes may well have an impact...but it was more likely to shorten a limited life that to damage one in full flower.
My brother recently survived a medical error of high import. They busted a vessel installing a stent to treat a heart attack. He made it because he is an athlete in excellent shape and stood the stress. I would also certainly have not recovered from the same incident.
Yes, the older you are the less likely you are to be able to correct mistakes youself, or even be aware of them. Some simply don't care as much if you're older, they take your complaints as old age grips. Still, I had a 32 year old sister in law who died of a stint placed wrong. So I share this with you.
This is the problem. It's not their job. It's their volunteer work.
If we make the burden of volunteering so hard, they won't volunteer. It isn't worth the hassle, because it isn't their job.
If they stop volunteering, who is going to help the sick in Africa? One Liberian county has TWO doctors for 89,000 people. If the American and European doctors and nurses stop volunteering - because it isn't their job and they don't have the time or patience for medically unnecessary quarantines - then the people of Liberia and Guinea and Sierra Leone are essentially on their own.
So the epidemic gets worse.
More and more Africans are infected.
People flee the area, cross the porous borders into other African countries, spreading the epidemic.
People with dual citizenship leave the continent, and possibly bring Ebola to Europe or Asia or North America in large numbers.
Now the epidemic is spreading.
WHO and MSF have been pleading for volunteers for months; they know how to contain the outbreak, and they need supplies and trained personnel to make it work.
So why the hell would we make it harder for them to get the trained personnel by unnecessarily complicating their return?
Then maybe it should be a job then, because its needed . I think that would be a better solution than allowing us to be held hostage by the picture you're painting. Blamming Americans for the spread of Ebola because they want what other countries already have is difficult for me to swallow. Why is it different because were American and not Australian? Blamming us for Ebola death is a far stretch.
It's not just America - it's everyone. WHO and MSF have been telling the world that they need more volunteers and less panic because travel restrictions are bad.
I would agree that it's "part of the job" if there were any scientific reasons to support the quarantine of returning HCW. But when every single medical authority on the subject is stating that people are not contagious until showing symptoms, and we have all HCW monitoring and reporting on their symptoms, there is no logical reason for it.
"It's a lot cheaper than treating Ebola patients" is a strawman argument, in that we are not currently treating any Ebola patients who acquired their illness through contact with asymptomatic HCW, nor will we, if the experts on the subject are believed. Or do you simply not believe them?
Fair enough, but it doesn't really matter. People who want these bans aren't doing so for fear they'll catch ebola tomorrow, they are sick of the chaos surrounding it.
The NYC 5 year old boy has tested NEGATIVE for Ebola. Hopefully, his parents will also.
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