I Tweeted this, but I thought it was worth sharing (and I’m trying to blog more). From the New England Journal of Medicine (which I grabbed the RSS for years ago and am always excited to run across), a bit of a post-mortem on the medical response to the Boston Marathon bombings. The whole thing is interesting (and very different than most of the stories on the bombing you’ll read), but the most interesting tidbit to me was this:
Although most health care providers in the United States have never treated a bombing victim, lessons learned by military surgeons, emergency physicians, and nurses in Iraq and Afghanistan are progressively percolating through the trauma care community.
April 25, 2013 // This post is about: boston marathon bombing, Health, medicine, The New England Journal of Medicine
More fun Christmasy stuff, this time it’s from The Week and comes in the form of a doctor examining the true extent of the injuries to the burglars in Home Alone. I’m partial to his explanation of the effect of the burning-hot doorknob:
If this doorknob is glowing visibly red in the dark, it has been heated to about 751 degrees Fahrenheit, and Harry gives it a nice, strong, one- to two-second grip. By comparison, one second of contact with 155 degree water is enough to cause third degree burns. The temperature of that doorknob is not quite hot enough to cause Harry’s hand to burst into flames, but it is not that far off… Assuming Harry doesn’t lose the hand completely, he will almost certainly have other serious complications, including a high risk for infection and ‘contracture’ in which resulting scar tissue seriously limits the flexibility and movement of the hand, rendering it less than 100 percent useful. Kevin has moved from ‘defending his house’ into sheer malice, in my opinion.
[Via Consumerist]
December 24, 2012 // This post is about: Christmas, Health, Home Alone, MOVIES
The story of Fabrice Muamba from yesterday is hard to imagine. A professional football (the English kind) player had a heart attack during the game. The facts themselves are pretty crazy, but this article does a great job giving the broader context to what happened around the story:
Many said yesterday evening that football becomes irrelevant in such circumstances. This is partially true, but doesn’t tell the complete story of last night. When something such as this happens, the match that is taking place ceases to be of much importance, of course. The game, however, to the extent that “football” exists as an entity in and of itself, certainly doesn’t become irrelevant, and this much was demonstrated by the messages of support and concern that we saw last night. Football frequently seems to exist in a bubble, isolated and insulated from the outside world. When the full horror that real world can occasionally offer came calling last night, though, its humanity shone through. Considering what happened at White Hart Lane last night, it’s a tiny consolation. But a tiny consolation is better than no consolation at all.
March 18, 2012 // This post is about: culture, epl, Health, heart attack, soccer, sports
Australia is banning all “industry logos, brand imagery, colours and promotional text” on cigarette packaging. Each pack will feature “pictures of diseased body parts, sickly babies and dying people” instead. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the landscape. Will people stop smoking fancy brands because you don’t get any of the brand ruboff when you pull out a pack? Will the cigarette companies just brand the cigarette itself way more?
[Via Nick Parish]
November 21, 2011 // This post is about: australia, branding, cigarettes, Health, marketing
Congress is fighting back on school lunch nutrition guidelines: “The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to only count a half-cup of tomato paste or more as a vegetable, and a serving of pizza has less than that.” To some extent I understand the worries about government dictating personal choice, but we’re talking about public schools. Is it any wonder that obesity is a problem if we’re teaching kids that pizza is a vegetable?
November 17, 2011 // This post is about: education, food, Health, nutrition, politics
