Monthly Archives: October 2004

Comments

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by

Comments are currently set to require registration in order to block a comment spammer who has broken through my other safeguards. It blasted about 200 comments in 30 minutes (all different names and ips) before I got it turned down.
So, since I haven’t set up a registration mechanism there will be no comments for a while.
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Friday Ark

This entry was posted in Friday Ark on by

Cats, Dogs, Spiders and ? every Friday.
I’ll post links to sites that have Friday (or shortly thereafter) photos of their chosen animals as I see them (no photoshops and no humans).
Leave a comment or trackback to this post and I’ll add yours to the list. If there is interest I’ll keep this as a weekly feature.
Privious editions: 10/22/04, 10/15/2004, 10/8/2004, 10/1/2004 and 9/24/2004.
Cats

DogsBirdsOther Vertebrates

Invertebrates

  • Dope on the Slope: Slugs

Didn’t Make It

Zombie Medicine

This entry was posted in Capitalism Constitution Economics Health Care Libertarianism on by

This morning, sitting in a waiting room, I read about the sleepless residents who provide sleep deprived health care patient sitting. Well, I said to myself, I’ll have to blog about this later. I couldn’t believe that supposedly intelligent people would have to perform a study to figure out things like:

Young doctors make far fewer mistakes when their hours are restricted to let them get enough sleep, according to the first study to directly examine the issue.
The study of 24 student doctors caring for seriously ill patients in a hospital found that those who were restricted to working no more than 16 hours without a break made about one-third fewer serious errors that could harm patients.
Anyone who has pulled an all nighter knows this.
David Leach, Executive Director of the group that oversees medical residency hides from the obvious:
“I cannot emphasize enough that this situation is more complicated than just one variable. I don’t know if it’s as simple as reducing hours,” Leach said. “We could end up doing more harm than good.”
From this quote I was going to jump into a diatribe about just who was going to be harmed the most. But, heck, Megan McCardle and Jonathan Wilde are already all over this.
Perhaps a series of tort awards based on malpractice due to resident’s poor work conditions will bring a more rapid change. Is this another reason that the medical profession wants tort limits: to protect their government sponsored monopoly. Because, to cut back on resident’s hours the medical education system will have to produce more residents which ultimately means more doctors serving patients.
NB: I do wish that Megan would cross post her Instapundit guest posts at Asymetrical Information. Her stuff is really too good for Instapundit and it does kind of irk me to have to go there to find her material.