Sunday, January 3, 2010

"We need somebody to just do the right thing"

Is there any greater proof that our healthcare system is broken when I read this paragraph and think, "good god, I'd get written up if I straight up tell a patient this?"
"We don't throw antibiotics at every person with a fever. We tell them to hang on, wait and see, and we give them a Tylenol to feel better," says Haug.

Convenience stores in downtown Oslo are stocked with an amazing and colorful array — 42 different brands at one downtown 7-Eleven — of soothing, but non-medicated, lozenges, sprays and tablets. All workers are paid on days they, or their children, stay home sick. And drug makers aren't allowed to advertise, reducing patient demands for prescription drugs.
I knew it. Someone in the health care world is making sense, hell froze over, and that's why it's so cold here right now.

For all our technological coolness and fancy suit regulations and "quality control" and JCAHO crap...well, it's all kind of a moot point isn't it? Regulations mean nothing if we still fail at the basic goal of improving our health.
"Nobody is accountable to our recommendations," he [Dr. John Jernigan] said, "but I assume hospitals and institutions are interested in doing the right thing."
One would think. Unfortunately, until the low life knuckle dragging entitled lazy slobs who populate this country learn better...we're screwed.

Read the entire article here.


...The CDC needs to "eat a little crow and say, 'Yeah, it does work,'" he said. "There's example after example. We don't need another study. We need somebody to just do the right thing."

2 comments:

Filia Dei said...

So, essentially, every sick person who goes into a hospital would be screened for MRSA and isolated if positive, and doctors would stop using the antibiotics most likely to cause MRSA to morph from relatively harmless to killer infection?

kaley said...

you need to move. you're too bitter. go to the mountains and heal.