It's a common complaint — if you spend a night in the hospital, you probably won't get much sleep. There's the noise. There's the bright fluorescent hallway light. And there's the unending barrage of nighttime interruptions: vitals checks, medication administration, blood draws and the rest. Peter Ubel, a physician and a professor at Duke University's business school, has studied the rational and irrational forces that affect health. But he was surprised when hospitalized at Duke in 2013 to get a small tumor removed at how difficult it was to sleep. "There was no coordination," he said.
Annals of Internal Medicine is stirring controversy by pulling back the operating room curtain and exposing questionable behavior by surgeons, but it is doing so under the banner of anonymity.
It was a classic mismatch: an angry, demanding woman and an impatient, brusque man. Time and again, they pushed each other's buttons. It ended with a breakup. But these weren't lovers squabbling. He was a doctor, and she was his patient. She didn't like his drug prescription for her high cholesterol. She loudly ticked off the side effects she'd read about and demanded a regime of diet and alternative medicine instead. The doctor's frown, his tone of voice, and his reply registered his impatience. If she wouldn't take his advice, he said, he would refer her to another physician.
Competition between Valley Children's Hospital and Community Regional Medical Center for the region's youngest patients is heating up. Community Regional now has a surgical team that is performing operations on newborns and preemies who previously had to be transferred to Valley Children's Hospital on the San Joaquin River bluffs in Madera County. California Children's Services, a state program which has standards for levels of care for neonatal intensive care units, granted approval in March for Community to do major surgeries, such as for blockages of the esophagus or intestines and abdominal wall defects. And this summer, Community added a second pediatric surgeon to the team at the downtown Fresno hospital.
Amado Caballeo listened closely as Mayor Bill de Blasio warned regulars at the Leon Senior Center on East 152nd Street to seek medical treatment if they had flu-like symptoms that could signal Legionnaires' disease. "This is a form of pneumonia and we can treat it with antibiotics," de Blasio said during his Tuesday visit, an attempt to quell fears during the city's largest and deadliest outbreak of Legionnaires' disease. So far, the outbreak has been contained to the South Bronx, where it has killed 12 people and sickened a total of 119. Twenty buildings in and around the cluster zone have tested positive for legionella, the bacteria that causes the disease.
Bruised by criticism after a reality TV show surreptitiously recorded and aired a man's death, New York City hospitals will no longer allow patients to be filmed without getting prior consent. The Greater New York Hospital Association, an umbrella organization that represents all of New York City's hospitals, has asked its member institutions to put an end to filming patients for entertainment purposes without getting their permission. The move came in response to an issue raised by a ProPublica story published with The New York Times earlier this year.