A new stroke treatment recently studied in the Netherlands is giving the medical community hope that it will soon have another treatment for patients who suffer from ischemic strokes. The treatment involves threading a stent with a snare at the end up through an artery in the groin to grab and pull out the clot in the brain.
Blood-thinners are important medications to prevent the formations of clots that can harm and kill patients, but the use of these drugs must be weighed against the risks of dangerous bleeding that can occur while on the medications.
Technology has the potential to improve health care, but it also carries with it a number of risks to patient safety.
Apology laws are laws that allow a doctor to apologize for a medical error without his apology being used against him in Court. Although I understand wanting to incentivize doctors and other health care providers to apologize when they’ve caused harm, it’s often a hollow gesture when it’s not followed up by some action to make things right.
Some doctors, and many insurance companies, like to talk about "frivolous" malpractice cases, and the problem of paying money to plaintiffs who sometimes don’t even have a valid claim. The reality is that our judicial system has numerous safeguards in place to practically guarantee that a non-meritorious case will not be successful.
Modern medicine has solved many problems, but it hasn’t yet solved hospital-acquired infections. Unfortunately for people harmed by such infections, it is very difficult to bring a claim for injury.
Hand-offs – patient information communicated from one provider to another – are a source of many errors that lead to patient injury. A new study and associated solution is hoping to cut those errors and increase patient safety.
Ambulatory Surgical Centers (ASCs) are a relatively new phenomenon. While there can be some benefit to having a surgical procedure at an ASC, there are good reasons to be careful, not the least of which is that surgeons and anesthesiologists often have a strong financial interest in performing your surgery there, when it may not be the safest choice for you.
