Life-Saving Emergency Trach Performed in Restaurant

On Sept 23, 2013, a physician performed a life-saving emergency tracheotomy in a restaurant on a patron who was choking on a piece of meat. [ link ] While eating dinner at The Mark Restaurant in California,  Dr. Royce Johnson , an infectious disease doctor affiliated with UCLA, performed this procedure on Pauline Larwood, a female supervisor and a community college trustee. Dr. Johnson saved this woman's life using a pocket knife and the hollow cylinder of a pen after a Heimlich maneu…

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What is the Best Antibiotic for Strep Throat?

The traditional answer for the best antibiotic to treat strep throat is penicillin. This antibiotic works astoundingly well... until it doesn't. Why is that? Although in the lab, penicillin is probably the most effective antibiotic against Group A beta-hemolytic streptococci (GABHS) or "strep throat" infection, when it comes to human beings, it doesn't always work. A recent paper out of Georgetown elucidates the reasons why that might be the case and also explains why …

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Accurate Hearing Testing Using an iPhone

There is an iPhone app called " EarTrumpet " that apparently can provide accurate hearing testing... almost as good as a professionally administered test ( conventional audiometry ) and certainly as good (if not better) than medical-quality automated testing machines (ie Otogram ). Created with the assistance of the ENT department at the University of California, Irvine... According to one study , this iPhone application provided results as good as one administered by an audiol…

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Don't Like a Research Paper? Sue the Journal and Authors...

What is a lawyer to do if medical research produces results that make it more difficult to win lawsuits? Why you sue the medical journal and the researchers who authored it. And you ask the medical journal to retract it. And than you ask for a court order forbidding the report to be entered as evidence in future litigation. Sound like a joke? Wish it was, except it happened... is happening... A Boston lawyer has sued the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology for a case re…

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Opera Music Improves Heart Transplant Survival

Sara Maines of The MaineStudio Not kidding... This research  was actually published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 2012. I should add that the research was done in mice rather than humans and won the 2013 Ig Prize in Medicine. To quote from the abstract : "recipients of a B6 cardiac graft that were exposed to opera music and Mozart had significantly prolonged allograft [transplant] survival... whereas those exposed to a single sound frequency (100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,…

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Don't Like the Research Conclusions? Here's How to Belittle it...

Love this blog post published in the Washington Post by Dylan Matthews. Look at the flowchart below, but it's worth reading his WaPo article here .

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Did a Case of Lemierre's Syndrome Influence Super Bowl XLVII?

Image by Keith Allison from Wikipedia Lemierre's syndrome is an exceedingly rare complication of tonsillitis characterized by an infected clot of the jugular vein leading to sepsis. It may also have potentially influenced Super Bowl XLVII due to an interesting quirk in history. Back in 2008, a former Heisman Trophy winner from Ohio State University named Troy Smith was the quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. Great things were expected of him as he was gearing up to start in th…

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Law Firm Launches Website for Tinnitus Sufferers

It would be a sad day indeed if a patient google searches a medical condition or symptom and the first page of results are all pointing to a law firm. In perhaps the beginning towards this possibility, personal injury law firm, Mercury Legal Online , has launched a website dedicated to patients who suffer tinnitus and hearing loss sustained from time working in a job that contained a lot of loud noise without using hearing protection . Thanks to  @earsurgeonuk who brought this to my att…

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Lawsuit Alleges Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Paralyzed Patient's Face

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is being sued by a patient who underwent an experimental transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy which allegedly caused a facial paralysis which was than negligently treated. The trial is scheduled for Oct 13, 2013. [ link ] Briefly, the patient in 2008 underwent experimental TMS to treat constipation and incontinence. TMS is a noninvasive method to cause depolarization or hyperpolarization in the neurons of the brain using pulses of electr…

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Malpractice Lawsuit for Nerve Damage Sustained After Neck Cyst Excision

Earlier this month, a malpractice lawsuit resulted in a $4 million dollar award to the patient plaintiff who suffered permanent nerve damage after a family practice physician excised a cyst from the neck. [ link ] Briefly, the patient visited the family physician in July 2009 for a lump in his left neck . The family physician recommended that the mass be surgically excised which was subsequently performed by the same family physician (not a surgeon) in the office. After the procedure, the p…

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Teens (People) Who Listen to Music Loudly... A Possible Solution

Now parents may not like this, but I do have a possible solution to getting teenagers to turn the music volume down so not to damage their hearing ... Get them noise-cancelling headphones . As an occasional audiophile myself, I understand that when listening to music with headphones, you invariably HAVE to turn the music volume up in order to hear everything clearly, especially when listening to music in noisy environments. Such environments include city sounds while walking, airplane buzz …

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