slow news day.

I am slow in posting medicine today, because all the headlines are nonsense: Obvious stuff like "the sky is blue", not news.

80% of doctors see mistakes....Duh. I have seen 30+ patients a day, five to seven days a week, for 40 years. That comes to 360,ooo patient encounters...now, if I said I never made a mistake I'd be lying---and if you include things missed by honest error, and the untoward side effects of treatment, you have a lot of "errors"...If I were sued for every one, I'd be living in the courts.

The problem is that the "cure" is usually to "document" better. But the more time you spend documenting trivia, the less time you have to spend talking to the patient about what is really important to them (and often discovering the reason behind their illnesses, for example, that meth induced their heart attack, or the spousal abuse behind their fibromyalgia)...

Then we have:

Drinking water can cause problems
Yup. That's why they invented Gatoraide. Does the reporter own stock in that company?

Half of Premies disabled... not the 4 pound premies, but the tiny little ones at 26 weeks...But another way of writing the headline would be "Half of very early prematures saved have no major medical problems"...

Caring for these tiny ones is one reason our health care costs are so high...so make the headline negative, and you imply two PC things: One, don't waste money treating these tiny babies, they're only going to be retards. Two: you imply partial birth abortion is okay, because if you delivered the kid, the kid would be a gook anyway...and better off dead.

Then there is "Seattle fittest, Houston fattest"....This is, of course, implies redstaters are lazy...but I suspect the real reason is that Seattle has a lot of fitness loving yuppies who imigrated there, and Houston has a lot of poor Hispanic immigrants, and the dirty little secret is that Hispanics, like American Indians, have a high rate of metabolic syndrome, associated with obesity and Diabetes...

And the ultimate slow news day headline: the TV show I just KNOW you want to watch...Katie Couric talks sex
Thank GOD for animal planet...