Primum Non Nocere
“First, do no harm” A nice little aphorism associated with the practice of medicine. It would be nice if it were applied.
A neighbor has a condition that periodically flares up and requires a course of antibiotics. There is no real ‘cure’, but he is aware of the symptoms when it occurs, and knows enough to take care of it before he ends up in the hospital.
So, he had an episode on Monday, the 5th, and called his doctor to get a prescription. Unfortunately his doctor wasn’t in, and the doctor covering, told my neighbor to go to the emergency room.
I am aware of this because the neighbor called me to give him a ride home, as the person who took him to the emergency room, had to leave him.
At the emergency room they gave him the prescription, and decided to start him off with an antibiotic administered through an IV.
On Saturday, the 10th, my neighbor called to tell me he was in the hospital with a staph infection caused by the IV.
In the hospital everyone wears rubber gloves when dealing with patients. They have boxes of them all over the place. The thing is, those gloves are not sterile. They sit out in the open where people can sneeze on them, and everyone who uses them pulls them out with bare hands. My vet washes his hands before and after touching an animal, the hospital staff don’t seem to bother, and use the gloves instead.
The worse part of this, assuming the infection doesn’t kill my neighbor, as happened to one of his uncles, is that the hospital will bill my neighbor for the infection they gave him.
14 comments
Something similar happened to Stella’s (now deceased) father, only the infection was MRSA. Yes, his bill arrived on schedule.
Rule One of staying healthy is simple: avoid hospitals like the plague… or staph… or MRSA…
It’s absurd, in what other situation can you legally be billed for mistakes by a service provider?
If a plumber makes things worse, you don’t pay. If a mechanic damages your car, you don’t pay. If a doctor gives you a disease, you have to pay. It isn’t even logical.
I don’t touch anything in an emergency room, and use a hand sanitizer liberally. I won’t sit on the furniture or touch anything unless absolutely necessary, and then, the sanitizer.
It’s the same with doctors’ waiting rooms. I don’t want to catch anything that someone else had, and these are focal points for sick people.
That is just adding insult to injury. We have a problem with MRSA and C difficile here which is a dreadful state of affairs. I suppose it is some cold comfort that our hospital care is free. The idea of someone dying in hospital from an avoidable disease is then charged for the privilege appalls.
If he gets out today, it was staph, but if they hold on to him, I would suspect MRSA.
The for-profit hospitals in this country don’t have enough cleaning staff, and they don’t disinfect as frequently and thoroughly as they should. Why should they when they reduced costs by not paying workers, and increase their patient count with unsanitary conditions?
Once upon a time there were actually government inspectors who inspected hospitals for cleanliness (gasp! Big Government!) and who would fine — or even shut down — hospitals that didn’t meet basic cleanliness standards. Then the inspectors got scarcer on the ground. Then they disappeared, courtesy of “austerity” or the GOP mantra of “gummint is de problem, not de solution”. And the majority of people *voted* for that, WTF? And hospitals make more profit if they skimp on cleaning and skimp on sterilization, so…
Main reason my mother retired from nursing was that she was tired of making patients sick. That wasn’t what she’d signed up for, and complaints to regulators about understaffing and reuse of steriles and etc. went nowhere, so (shrug). She had in her years, so she retired.
He got out of the hospital, and there is no doubt as to the site of the infection – the damage starts at the IV point and traveled up to his bicep. It looks like a bad burn on the outside.
I’ve seen guys injected with morphine ampules right through their uniforms, and IVs started on a stretcher in the mud, but I don’t ever remember anything like that happening in the field.
The guys who headed out didn’t wash uniforms when they got back, they burned them, boots included. because of the mold and mud after a couple of weeks, so I know that it doesn’t take much to keep things under control, but you have to make the effort.
My oldest friend down here got himself in deep trouble jumping barefoot into the water in his boat house. One of his feet got sliced up by oyster shells and had a hell of an infection. They called in a specialist, and the first thing the guy did was get him out of the hospital. He flat told my friend that the average motel room was more sanitary than that hospital, and it was highly unlikely his house would have the infectious possibilities of the emergency room.
During a two week stay my Mother had in the hospital, neither she nor I saw anyone mop a floor, or wipe down anything. If she had stayed longer, I think she would have had her cleaning lady do her thing in the hospital room, rather than her house.
A nursing home where my mother was DoN (Director of Nursing) actually got *FINED* for having *DUST* in one little corner of one room. ‘Cause that shoulda gotten mopped up with the rest of the room. That’s how it *USED* to be, before all the regulators got fired as “big gummint imposin’ on da little peeples”. And that was a *nursing home*, hospitals got even tighter scrutiny.
Of course, that was back when you were a youngster sitting in the back of spook gooses listening to Reds jabbering, and I was happily scribbling in coloring books with crayons, so… sigh.
Seems we’re going backwards in far too many important measures because of this whole anti-government austerity thing that has been pushed ever since the Reaganauts came to power.
We are definitely going backwards, Badtux. The global meltdown couldn’t have occurred under the system of regulations that were in place prior to the ‘Reagan Revolution’. The S&L crisis should have been a warning, but it was ignored.
They claim that the market will take care of the problems without regulation, then they systematically destroy all of the forces that the market has used in the past to punish bad practices, through things like ‘tort reform’ to keep injured parties from imposing penalties for bad behavior. There is no capitalism without risk.
Hiya all… Long time, no see… etc. 🙂
Yeah, I’m still alive *shrug*
I’ve survived 2 golden staph infections in my life. Both a gift from a hospital (though to be fair, the first was a field hospital in Cambodia after I was shot), the 2nd was about 14 years ago. It almost got me, took three attempts with different antibiotic cocktails to kill it. Pretty much every time I got into a Hospital, I end up coming out with some illness I didn’t have before (usually a lousy cold or something like that. I got a bad cold last year because I was in a small, cramped, waiting room for over two hours while all around were people coughing and sneezing, I actually asked the triage nurse for a face mask as I knew I’d get a cold, and was told that they’d have to give one to everyone and didn’t have enough! Some people there were mothers with young babies! They should have all sued the Hospital. I actually suggested it, and just got a few smiles or shrugs. Apathy is everywhere and why the Hospitals get away with murder, literally!
Curiously, A friend told me last week that a friend of her’s is a Doctor who went to the USA a couple years ago and came back. She said her friend stated that the biggest problem with the US health system is that Doctors and other medical *professionals* there are way over paid! Much higher than anywhere else.
So.. on my personal front, I’ve been really busy, and sometimes unwell. I also don’t have Internet due to various issues. I’m using a WiFi stick, but it only has 5GB/mth data. Anyway, I’ll try to stop by more often, but no promises. 🙂
I hope you all are doing well, and your families also.
Cheers! 🙂
Good to hear from you, m8. Your weather down under is just a bad as last year, with floods and typhoons, so I wasn’t surprised that you weren’t around.
We should still be around when you can get back on the ‘Net with some regularity – climate change won’t get my town for a few years yet, but DSL will be gone before then because they have the local switch about 4 feet above sea level.
The main reason I haven’t shifted to satellite yet is the restriction on data transfer. I don’t watch much in the way of video, but when software gets upgraded, it really eats up the bandwidth. Five gigabytes per month sounds like a lot until you start looking at the M$ updates you have to load every month.
Funny you mention the M$ updates! I just had to reinstall XP & W7. With Office 2010, the updates (inc. drivers) were almost 2GB! So there goes a big chunk of this month. *shrug*
Yeah… weather sux. So what’s new? 😉 Same all over now. *shrug* Farms just up Nth of us are already flooded. I actually had a little frog find it’s way into my little unit the other day! LOL Everything’s wet here… but it’s been humid also! Reminded me of the tropics. I don’t remember ever having that kind of weather this far Sth. But… There. Is. Nothing. Wrong. With. The. Weather. It. Is. All. Just. A. Big. Scam. By. The. Libruls! Right?
Glad to see you still here. 🙂
Well… It’s late (or early, depending on how one looks at it), and I have a day in Court to prepare for. I almost killed a guy a couple weeks ago, but managed to stop myself and only severely dislocated his shoulder and bruised a kidney. He was an ex-Army moronic grunt trying to show how tough he was cuz he was in de Army, ya know? He took a swing at my friend and I reacted. I guess he learned that 2+ years of advanced training + actual combat trumps 6 weeks basic, even if his was much more recent & he’s 20 years my junior. *shrug* So, I have to explain myself. It’s part of having a security license. Have to explain everything. *sigh* Anyway, the guy is lucky to be alive (and knows it! I made sure of that!) Turns out he was given a dishonorable for being trouble, so I (and my lawyer) don’t expect any problems when the judge compares records etc. 😉
Morons are everywhere. *shrug*
See, in Florida you simply say ‘I was afraid for my life’ and you can gun down anyone, anywhere. It doesn’t make any difference about size, or firepower, in Florida you pull out your gun and shoot them, so they can never steal that parking place from anyone, ever again.
When they were talking about the ‘Stand Your Ground’ law, the prosecutors told the state legislature it sucked, the cops said it sucked, even defense attorneys said it sucked, but they passed it anyway because the National Rifle Association wanted it, and a bunch of paranoids with concealed weapons permits wanted it.
We are left with the reality that you can’t arrest gang members for murdering members of rival gangs, because ‘I was afraid for my life, so I shot him’ and local ‘neighborhood watch’ activists can gun down unarmed teenagers without being arrested. See, things are much simpler in Florida. You can murder anyone you don’t like, and not worry about the consequences because there aren’t any.
Your problem is that you live in a civilized country where people still take a dim view of violence.
Hmmmmm… I will admit that things are not quite that insane here, but we get close. 😉 🙂
The only reason I had to *please explain* to a Judge is that we will give a security license to just about anyone who can pay the fees (for *training* and the license itself). Over the past decade in particular, thanks to *big brother* camera’s all over the place, and mobile phone cam’s, too many *security personnel* at major venues have been videoed beating or kicking the crap out of some poor slob while the other security morons watched and laughed. Before it got too embarrassing for the Politicians, we never had to explain anything, unless it was too blatant.
We have always been able to get away with murder here if you are smart. I was told by a Police Sargent in Sydney in the 80’s that he told his friends (during a spate of burglaries) to keep a shotgun ready and if someone tried to break in, just shoot them. You only have to ensure a) they are on your property, and b) they have some kind of weapon, if they don’t, give them one. 🙂
People here are the same as pretty much everywhere. They only take a dim view of violence when it affects them. For anyone else… well, they probably deserved it.
So, yeah… civilized. Has a nice sound to it at least. Never seen it personally, and I have traveled extensively. Wherever I have seen it, it usually ended up just being a facade. *shrug*
Things always get worse when the economy goes into the tank. people get paranoid.
Yeah, there are no standards for ‘security’ personnel in the US, and few enough standards for law enforcement. The ‘get tough on crime’ and ‘they had it coming’ morons never even consider that they might be on the wrong side of problem, because they don’t break the law [well, hardly ever, and then just little laws… everyone cheats on their taxes… no one strictly obeys traffic laws… it was just laying there with no one around…]
All of the ‘restrictions’ placed on police behavior are the result of egregious conduct by police officers that ended up in the Supreme Court. None of them ever bothered me, I just followed them and won my cases. Trials were much shorter because the defense attorneys didn’t have the opportunity to complain about the evidence, in fact, the majority were settled with a plea bargain. Warrants are easy to get in most jurisdictions, and people will talk to you even after you tell them they don’t have to, if you know what you are doing.
The jerks make life miserable for the people who are really trying to do their job. The problem is that the jerks are always looking for a shortcut so they don’t actually have to do any real work. That is the real reason that the Shrubbery embraced torture – it was going to get the job done much quicker and cheaper. Alas, there is no cure for stupid and lazy.