Medical Mistakes

This Office Spam article highlights some humorous medical mistakes, but unfortunately, not all mistakes are quite so funny, and some can be deadly.

Office Spam
February 10, 2007
Embarrassing Medical Exams

These are the Embarrassing kind of mistakes that turns a doctor into a plastic surgeon.

1. A man comes into the ER and yells, "My wife's going to have her baby in the cab!" I grabbed my stuff, rushed out to the cab, lifted the lady's dress, and began to take off her underwear. Suddenly I noticed that there were several cabs ---and I was in the wrong one. So I shortly after moved my practice and am now doing Beverly Hills plastic surgery.
Submitted by Dr. Mark MacDonald, Beverly Hills, CA.

2. At the beginning of my shift I placed a stethoscope on an elderly and slightly deaf female patient's anterior chest wall. "Big breaths," I instructed. "Yes, they used to be," replied the patient.
Submitted by Dr. Richard Byrnes, Who is now practicing plastic surgery in Seattle, WA

3. One day I had to be the bearer of bad news when I told a wife that her husband had died of a massive myocardial infarct. Not more than five minutes later, I heard her reporting to the rest of the family that he had died of a "massive internal fart."
Submitted by Dr. Susan Steinberg who specializes in cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles, CA.

4. During a patient's two week follow-up appointment with his cardiologist, he informed me, his doctor, that he was having trouble with one of his medications. "Which one?" I asked. "The patch, the nurse told me to put on a new one every six hours and now I'm running out of places to put it!" I had him quickly undress and discovered what I hoped I wouldn't see. Yes, the man had over fifty patches on his body! Now, the instructions include removal of the old patch before applying a new one.
Submitted by Dr. Rebecca St. Clair who is now performing plastic surgery in San Diego, CA.

Store Wars

This witty and truthful parody of Star Wars shows just how dangerous the food we eat can be. We really are fighting a war to be able to eat organic, non genetically modified foods.

News on HPV Vaccine Push

I am sure you are all aware of the recent ad campaign pushing the new HPV Vaccine Guardasil. Thankfully, the opposition is not only limited to parents now. An increasing number of doctors are starting to oppose mandating the vaccine also, saying that it is too soon.
Read the story here.

Following the Money Trail; The Truth Behind Cloned Meat

There has been a lot of press lately about the new technology of cloning animals to increase production of meat. Despite the fact that our bodies do not need much, if any, meat, the meat that is widely available today is hormone filled and grain fed. Now, on top of that, they are trying to clone the meat as well. As with most things of this nature (pharmaceutical drugs, cancer treatment, heart disease prevention, hormonal birth control, etc) the reason is of course, financially motivated. This article uncovers a lot of the hidden agendas behind the new technology of cloning animals for food.
Read the article here.

McDonalds Marketing

This article really shows how the fast food culture is contributing to an obese America.

The Truth About McDonald's And Children
By Morgan Spurlock
The Independent - UK
5-22-5

Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald's food every day for a month, and recorded the stomach-churning results in his film 'Super Size Me'. Here, in an extract from his new book, Spurlock reveals the things he didn't say in the movie about Ronald McDonald and his campaign to win the hearts of our young.

Every waking moment of our lives, we swim in an ocean of advertising, all of it telling us the same thing: consume, consume. And then consume some more. The epidemic of overconsumption begins with the things we put in our mouths. The United States is the fattest nation on earth. Sixty-five per cent of American adults are overweight; 30 per cent are obese. In the decade between 1991 and 2001, obesity figures almost doubled.

But the truly shocking thing is that we've taught our kids how to be fat, too. Obesity rates in American children remained stable throughout the 1960s, but they began to climb in the 1970s. In the past 20 years, the rate of obesity has doubled in children and trebled in teenagers. Kids are starting to clock in as obese as early as the age of two. If we find that surprising, we shouldn't.

During the McMonth I endured for Super Size Me, in which I ate every meal at McDonald's, every day - taking up the option to have a Supersize portion whenever I was offered it - I couldn't get over how many kids there were in the restaurants almost any time that I walked in. Children with their parents. Gaggles of them stopping off for breakfast or for a pre-dinner snack in their cute little school uniforms. Kids in all the play areas. Kids as little as three and four having Happy Meal McBirthday parties. Or, in a McDonald's in Houston, at 9am, a mother with her two very overweight kids who, having just finished their fat-filled breakfasts, were now eating hot fudge sundaes.

Ray Kroc, the man behind the McDonald's empire, understood from Day McOne that youngsters were his target market. He had no sooner bought the company from the McDonald brothers than Ronald McDonald was brought in to attract the kiddies to the burgers and shakes.

The first Ronald was the TV weatherman Willard Scott in his younger, but apparently not leaner, days. Scott had been doing Bozo the Clown on local television. When the show was cancelled, an enterprising McDonald's franchisee asked him to come up with a clown figure that would lure the kids into the restaurant. Kroc saw it, liked it and extended the idea to the whole country.

But first he canned Scott. Kroc understood the negative publicity implications of an icon who looks as though he's been eating too much of the company's food. To this day you'll never see Ronald McDonald eating the food; not in any commercial. He dances and sings, grins and giggles, and smiles at the kids while they stuff their faces, but he never touches the grub. Why? Presumably because, as the late Eazy-E said in the song "The Dopeman": "Don't get high off your own supply."

Kroc also understood the value of promoting McDonald's as a caring, family-friendly sort of place, a place with a heart, not heart disease. Early on, he began linking McDonald's with various children's charities. One executive told John F Love, author of McDonald's: Behind the Arches: "It was an inexpensive, imaginative way of getting your name before the public and building a reputation to offset the image of selling 15-cent hamburgers. It was probably 99 per cent commercial."

Thus the Ronald McDonald House Charities were born. They have now provided housing (and McMeals) for the families of more than two million seriously ill children. Never mind the fact that today an increasing number of children are going into hospital because of eating-related illnesses.

Talking of which, one of the most shocking things I saw during my McMonth was a McDonald's in Texas Children's Hospital - a hospital that is now stapling obese children's stomachs. To me, that seemed utterly irresponsible, a flagrant violation of the doctor's pledge of "Primum non nocere" (First, do no harm). In fact, hospitals across the US have fast-food franchises in them. The top-ranked paediatric hospital in the country, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, has a McDonald's outlet. Why shouldn't there be one in Houston?

Recently, a combination of good information and bad publicity has encouraged some hospitals to reconsider their food-service contracts. But Ronald won't always leave without a fight. The Cleveland Clinic, for example, wants to rid America's leading heart hospital of its McDonald's. But according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer of 22 November last year, the clinic's chief executive, Dr Toby Cosgrove, received a letter from a McDonald's corporate vice-president called Marty Ranft, which "defended the franchise, and vowed ... that 'McDonald's has no intention of terminating' the remaining 10 years on its lease".

The doctors at Texas Children's Hospital told me they had young patients who were dying of cancer, and it was hard to get them to eat anything. At least these poor kids would eat some fries, take a bite of a burger: food they were familiar with. It was junk that they had been eating all their lives.

But it's not enough to get young people to come to your restaurants; you have to get them to keep on coming back. McDonald's operates something like 8,000 Playlands around America. They're especially attractive to children in neighbourhoods in which playgrounds are scarce. Burger King has about 3,200 of its own. Then there's the Happy Meal, launched in the US in 1979. It cost a buck in those days. Inside a cardboard box with a circus theme, children found a McDoodler stencil, a puzzle book, a McWrist wallet, an ID bracelet and McDonaldland character erasers.

The meal-plus-toys packaging proved to be an instant hit, with the first Star Trek Happy Meals that very year. Soon, toy versions of all your favourite McDonald's mascots were included: Ronald, Grimace, Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, Big Mac, Birdie and Captain Crook. Later, toys would be themed for tie-ins with brands and films such as Barbie, Hot Wheels, The Little Mermaid, Finding Nemo and so on. By 2003, Happy Meals accounted for about 20 per cent of all meals sold (about $3.5bn in annual revenue).

And let's not forget the Mighty Kids Meal, introduced in America in 2001. McDonald's realized that by the time kids were eight or nine years old they felt they had outgrown the Happy Meal. Those were for little boys and girls. So the Mighty Kids Meal comes in a slightly more "grown-up" package. It offers bigger meals: a double cheeseburger, double hamburger or a six-piece chicken McNuggets, but still comes with a toy. We may be older, but we still like toys.

In 2004, McDonald's celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Happy Meal with a year-long barrage of promotions and advertisements. The company also launched a version for adults, the Go Active! Adult Happy Meal. This included a salad, a bottle of water, a book that told you how to exercise, and an adult "toy": a Stepometer, so you could measure how few steps it was from the counter to your car.

Good old Ronald. Under his smiling, caring guidance, an entire generation of overweight American adults who grew up following him into their local McDonald's are now raising their own overweight children to follow in their heavy footsteps.

Recently, the magazine Advertising Age cited Ronald McDonald as No 2 on its list of top 10 advertising icons of the 20th century. Who was No 1? It was the Marlboro Man.

Not Milk?

With all the recent news on the possibility of GM organic milk, I thought this was an interesting article.

With the advent of cloned livestock, yet another biotech science experiment may soon find its way to the American dinner table. In December 2006, the FDA essentially told the public that the meat and milk from cloned livestock are safe for human consumption. FDA's action flies in the face of widespread scientific concern about the risks of food from clones, and ignores the animal cruelty and troubling ethical concerns that the cloning process brings. What's worse, FDA indicates that it will not require labeling on cloned food, so consumers will have no way to avoid these experimental foods.
Animal cloning is a new technology with potentially severe risks for food safety. Defects in clones are common, and cloning scientists warn that even small imbalances in clones could lead to hidden food safety problems in clones' milk or meat. There are few studies on the risks of food from clones, and no long-term food safety studies have been done.

Numerous opinion polls show that the majority of Americans do not want food from animal clones and are opposed to cloning on moral or ethical grounds.

The FDA's veterinary medicine advisory panel rebuked the agency in 2003 for its position, declaring that not enough research has been done to determine whether food derived from cloned animals is safe. In fact, livestock cloning raises numerous health and ethical concerns. Over 90 percent of cloning attempts fail, and cloned animals that are born have more health problems and higher mortality rates than sexually reproduced animals.

Given that researchers do not understand many of the health problems that arise throughout the lifecycles of cloned animals, the FDA acted irresponsibly in assuming that the foods produced from these animals are safe for humans to eat. According to Ian Wilmut, the leader of the team of scientists that cloned the sheep Dolly, determining the health impacts of food derived from clones must be based on the animals' complete health profiles. Such studies have not been done.

View the complete article here.

Supplements

In today's world of processed foods and nutrient depleted produce, it is virtually impossible to get the nutrients we need from our food. While a healthy diet is important, it is not enough anymore. I suggest glyconutrients, a revolutionary new neutraceutical that helps the body fix problems on its own without drugs. E-mail me for more information.