The Medical Thread

...Geez, they have scores for those now? C'mon, when did they ever come up with thi- *checks* 1974? *kills self in shame*

EDIT: Put this comment in the right place.

I don't remember being taught any trauma scoring systems (okay, except the obvious stuff: GCS, triage assessment, classes of haemodynamic shock, that kind of thing) back when I was in med school, although they might've changed the syllabus since then. The ISS seems to be more of a research scoring system rather than something you'd use in the emergency department, anyway, and definitely not something that a news reporter would bother looking up before using the term "minor injuries" in a broadcast.

edited 12th Jul '14 10:24:34 AM by Pyrite

No! Don't kill yourself! Who will answer Roy's questions about poop? OR OR OR medical trivia?! Or things like "Can a human physically break a horse's rib with only his arm"?! OR -

- BANG -

Pyrite? PYRITE? PYRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE!

Ooh, interesting.

Hey, I ask more than just about poop. I also occasionally ask whether a human jaw can break walnut open with his teeth.

edited 12th Jul '14 9:19:43 AM by dRoy

I think in common usage, a "minor injury" is one that doesn't require a hospital stay (for people who have or have had small children) or medical attention (for non-parents). Thus to a non-parent, something that requires stitches isn't "minor", while to the parents of a small child, stitches are minor.

Kinda sorta relevant:

Apparently the absolutely worst pain a human body can go through is the pain of getting burned alive. Hmm...not sure if that's a reliable truth or not.

Pain levels are not really something measurable, they are more like an opinion. There are some efforts to scale it, though.

Yeah, that's why I don't trust that notion.

Say, is there any way to measure the...what was the term? The strength of sensory reaction or something?

Suffering is relative. Really less the sensation of pain that is people can't cope with but the anxiety of pain.

It's a cliche but there is truth in the saying pain is an illusion. It's just an illusion that really really hurts.

Ah, well, pain scores are commonly used in the ward, and we're well aware that they're subjective, especially for patients with low pain thresholds. Unfortunately, one person's "the worst pain you've ever experienced in your life" is another person's "only a flesh wound", so a common reference point for a 10 on the pain scale would be labour pains / childbirth, which makes things awkward for more than half the population - and is probably still better than comparing it to something rarer. (And having said that, I do need to emphasise that as long as a person is genuinely suffering from pain, it should be controlled, even if they do have a low pain threshold.)

edited 12th Jul '14 10:24:03 AM by Pyrite

It makes sense that the pain of being burned alive is hard to top. It's got immense heat on your skin (largest organ ahoy!), smoke inhalation (lungs/mouth/throat/nose), and I hate to think what your eardrums and eyes would be going through with all the pressure from said immense heat.

Been set alight is apparently the worst way to go. I've worked on the burns wards it wouldn't surprise me.

Most people who die in housefires, get do in from smoke inhalation. Which apparently is kind of a peaceful way to die. Not that you can ask anyone.

edited 12th Jul '14 4:43:51 PM by joeyjojo

Woman grows nose tissue in spine

1500 year old skeleton is the oldest know skeleton with Downs Syndrome and researchers noted the body was not treated any differently than any other during burial, suggesting no stigma against the child , at least in death.

I hope so for the kid, but we actually know little to nothing about burial rituals of the Neolithic period.

Remember the evidence their used for the First-homosexual-caveman?

Assessing pain is even harder in animals, because you can't ask them how much it hurts. Plus animals' first instinct is usually to hide pain. Our pain score goes from 0-4 and includes things like "If you touch the area do they look around sharply".

And while people seem to understand that just because a person isn't screaming or crying non-stop doesn't mean they aren't in pain, some apparently have difficulty extrapolating that to animals.

edited 14th Jul '14 3:10:00 AM by LoniJay

Well, yeah. What Measure Is a Non-Human?, after all.

Strange question—strange because I thought I could find an answer pretty easily, but I ended up neck deep in mommy blogs for episiotomies.

If you've recently gotten a wound stitched up, say a really bad dog bite or a large cut, what do you do (or what typically happens) if your stitches tear? Like, if you had stitches near your knee and the day after you tripped and staggered to catch yourself, then suddenly the wound's bleeding again? Are the stitches simply replaced by a doctor?

From what I understand, yes. /not a doctor disclaimer

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