Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Med School tidbits

Here are a few morsels of knowledge that I've picked up recently.

If you crave ice, that probably means you are anemic i.e., low on the blood supply.

If you itch all over, your liver is probably failing e.g., hepatitis, cancer.

~30% of adults have an STD.


One in three women in the USA has had an elective abortion.

Yeah, kind of shocking. This isn't just taking the number of women in the USA divided by the total number of abortions performed in a year. It is surveying, "have you had an abortion?" And one in three will say yes. I still find that hard to believe, but then I worked in the OB/GYN clinic last week where I overheard a resident explaining to the attending doctor that she just sent a girl to the emergency clinic to get hydrated and she gave the patient the abortion numbers because the girl found out that she was pregnant earlier in the week. Neither she or the father want the kid, and she was really stressed about it, so stressed that she wasn't keeping herself properly hydrated. That was enough to tell the patient to abort the kid. Not exactly what I recognize as quality care that genuinely seeks to provide "medicine of the highest order." Oh, in case you don't watch tv in Rochester, that is the hospital system's slogan.