Shout Outs

 Updated 3/2017-- photos and all links removed as many are no longer active and it was easier than checking each one.

Dr. Charles, The Examining Room of Dr. Charles,  is the host for this week’s Grand Rounds! You can read this week’s edition here.

Hosting Grand Rounds is a rewarding experience in that it compels you to read through a wonderfully diverse, informative, and insightful collection of thoughts from around the health care world.

Here are some highlights from the past week, and thanks to all who contributed. Enjoy, and read as many as you can:

Dr. Val shares a book review that she published on Scientific American’s website about “Tabloid Medicine: How The Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit.” In this important book Robert Goldberg, PhD, explains why the Internet is a double-edged sword when it comes to health information, empowering some to better decisions, while misleading others into dangerous ideologies such as the anti-vaccine movement. A must-read post and book!

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H/T to @scanman for the heads up on the New York Times article by Walt Bogdanich and Kristina Rebelo:  The Radiation Boom  -- X-Rays and Unshielded Infants

It was well after midnight when Dr. Salvatore J. A. Sclafani finally hit the “send” button.  …….

A day earlier, Dr. Sclafani noticed that a newborn had been irradiated from head to toe — with no gonadal shielding — even though only a simple chest X-ray had been ordered. ……….

And the problems did not end there. Dr. John Amodio, the hospital’s new pediatric radiologist, found that full-body X-rays of premature babies had occurred often, that radiation levels on powerful CT scanners had been set too high for infants, and that babies had been poorly positioned, making it hard for doctors to interpret the images. ……….

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H/T to @murzee (Healthcare, etc) who shared the link to this story on twitter:   "The Chemist as Murderer" by @deborahblum

On January 14th, a 39-year-old computer engineer was admitted to Princeton University Hospital in New Jersey with nagging, flu-like symptoms. The man was nauseated, suffering from severe joint pains, wracked by a strange, convulsive trembling in his legs. Doctors at the hospital tried one treatment after another but Xiaoye Wang only became weaker.

Finally, a nurse at the hospital stepped hesitantly forward. She remembered a 1995 case in China in which a student at Beijing University became mysteriously ill. The cause was eventually found to be poisoning by the  toxic element thallium.  ……

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H/T to @hrana for the link to The Washington Post article by Mike Stobbe:  Past medical testing on humans revealed

Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.   …….

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It’s that time again, St. Baldrick’s, but this year it’s different for our friend Movin Meat: The Cause of My LIfe

When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer eight weeks ago, at the age of 36 and with four kids, the youngest of whom was 4 months old, it was what one might call a shock, the like of which you don't get too many times in a lifetime. It was a life-altering moment. As we walked out of the hospital, numb, one thing was clear, above all else:

This Changes Everything
There were so many decisions to be made. ……What was I going to do about St Baldrick's? ……….

Oh, and if you’d like to help me help Movin Meat, consider purchasing this quilt.

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From  @MarianneDiNaps, M.D. to be, presented a case related to President’s Day last Monday:  Medical Mystery Monday #24: the case of the bumpy tongue

A 16 year old boy comes to the doctor because of “weird bumps” on his tongue that have been bothering him lately. ……

She followed up on Tuesday with the answer.

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From Burda Style Blog:  Making Button Rings

There’s no way around it, buttons are magical. They are both commonplace and remarkable, functional and decorative. Did you know that, even though buttons appear as far back as 2000 BC, the buttonhole did not appear until the thirteenth century? …….

Rather than drawing diagrams for something this simple, I’ve produced a short, simple video on the making of button rings. Head over to the “Learning” section here and take a look.   ………..