TheAnatomiser

The British newsreader Carol Barnes has sadly died, from ‘a stroke’, and the actress Samantha Morton has just revealed a stroke as the reason for her 18 month disappearance from Hollywood.

In English medical vernacular, the term ’stroke’ is usually used to describe a catastrophic Cerebro-Vascular Accident (CVA). In more common English, that means something really nasty and unpredicted (catastrophic and accidental) in your brain (cerebral) to do with your blood vessels or blood supply (vascular). [Read more →]

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A lot will no doubt be written in the next few days about the undisclosed data from Seroxat trials, and the possible increase in teenage suicide associated with the drug’s use.

A lot will be said about commercial pressures, publication bias, and the like.

But the first and last word on some of the movers and shakers in the pharma sector should perhaps be left to Dr. Percival Cox of Sacred heart Hospital:

They’re bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

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As a junior doctor working in the north of England many years ago, I along with my colleagues were conscious of the ‘Westfield Grannies’.

Westfield is one of those strange health schemes that pays out money when you are ill. Not enough money to go for private treatment or anything; just a bit of money. One of the ‘triggers’ for payment is admission to hospital – you get a certain amount of cash money for every night you stay on a ward.

Now if you have a chronic illness like emphysema or cardiac disease, you soon learn those magic symptoms that will ensure your admission to hospital. If you have lung disease, just say your exercise tolerance has decreased suddenly. If you have heart disease, say you have got chest pain that won’t go away.

The Westfield Grannies were an informal group of elderly ladies, probably unknown to each other, who would get a few nights in hospital, and then claim their cash. Like Bingo with an overnight stay and antibiotics.

As soon as the Westfield cheque came through, they’d be off to Blackpool or Filey or somewhere for a couple of weeks. All courtesy of their health insurance. And the NHS of course.

These days they probably go to Benidorm to visit their son’s crystal meth lab instead of visiting Filey. But the economics of it are basically the same.

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So there’s this bloke. And he is really quite ill. When I asked him why he hadn’t called an ambulance earlier in the course of his disease, like a couple of days ago, his response is that before today he was “too poorly to come to hospital.”

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OK, this will probably only be of any appeal to other registered medical practitioners like me who pay £290 a year (£390 from next month) for the privilege of being abused, spat at and vomited on, but have you seen what the GMC (General Medical Council) have just decided to spend some of that money on?

A lucky web designer has just been paid a small fortune to produce an interactive video web tutorial to teach doctors how not to be complete idiots. You can see it here. It’s very pretty and very well done, but as to the content…

In fact that’s the problem with a lot of the GMC’s guidelines. I guess they have to be actually written down somewhere, but if a doctor really needs to be told that it’s best to be polite where possible, honest, not to kill patients or to have sex with them (with or without their informed consent), then that person is probably already heading down the wrong career path.

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12 BILLION pounds they’ve spent. Of your money. And to show for it? Well, we can now get xray images electronically, which is nice. But also means that instead of losing the odd xray like we used to, now when the server goes down (which it does about once a fortnight – despite promises made that it never would) we can lose all the xrays at once. That’s progress. [Read more →]

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The Welsh Assembly have just announced that hospital parking in Wales is to be free. Where I work, and in just about every other hospital in England and Scotland, you have to pay money to the hospital if you want to visit a loved one, or even if you need to attend the hospital as a patient. [Read more →]

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Colin Norris has just been convicted of the murder of four women at hospitals in Leeds. His chosen weapon appears to have been insulin, a drug which is used to control levels of sugar in the bloodstream. In large overdoses it quickly causes coma, followed by death, unless sugar (glucose) is administered intravenously, and quickly. [Read more →]

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You might have heard about the lottery winner who had to be within half an hour of a hospital at all times because of his medical condition – an aneurysm. An aneurysm is caused by a weakening in the internal wall of an artery, which allows the artery to bulge alarmingly under the pressure of blood inside. Eventually they can burst. If the aneurysm is on an artery inside your brain (as many as a third of us walk around with these potential widow-makers inside our heads I’m afraid) the result is a brain haemorrhage. If the aneurysm is situated on your abdominal aorta (the main artery that carries blood away from the heart and down towards the pelvis), then the result of rupture is usually immediately fatal. A thoracic aortic aneurysm is higher up, and more difficult to operate on. This story had me a bit confused.

[Read more →]

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I’m going to bet you’ve never heard of saccades. Or saccadic movements. They are the jerky movements our eyes make when moving from one object to another. It’s pretty much impossible for most people to move their stare smoothly across the room – our brains naturally jump our eyes from one point of interest to another. Try it now. See? That’s saccades that is. The best way I know of moving your eyes smoothly is to fix on a point and turn your head.

Because your eyes move with incredible speed ( there’s a wikipedia explanation of the arcs and angle and things involved here) when ‘jumping’ from one point to another, you can experience some cool side effects. Some can be experienced when you’re out driving on a motorway. Best done if you are a passenger if you want to avoid crashing. Look at a car in the lane next to you. Now glance forward. Due to ‘persistence of vision’ you will experience, for a split second, a frozen image – in particular you’ll see the car’s wheels appear to have stopped turning. It takes a bit of practice, which is why it’s definitely best not to be driving at the time.

You can notice a similar effect with certain types of lights – do a saccadic jump and you’ll get a ’strobed’ effect trail if the light in question is an LED brakelight, or a 50Hz streetlight. With some of the new xenon headlamps, you can also get a streaked-out spectrum as these lamps emit over a range of light frequencies.

Anyway, that’s saccadic eye movements.

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