Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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When you watch a medical drama on television, the main characters are generally doctors, nurses and patients. We rarely learn about the many extras in the background. In an actual hospital, patients are cared for by their doctors and nurses, along with a large supporting cast and crew. Many of these people on stage and behind the scenes rarely get their name in lights. I would like to introduce them now. Before a patient arrives at the hospital, we often rely on emergency medical technicians...
Imagine a condition with symptoms that present differently in each person who has it and no currently-approved lab test can definitively confirm the diagnosis. Imagine that the symptoms can flare up and then mysteriously disappear, including fatigue, low-grade fevers, joint pain and mouth sores. All these symptoms overlap with multiple other conditions, further complicating a diagnosis. Imagine the best available method for diagnosing this ailment is a manual checklist of 11 criteria and, if...
Daylight savings time has just ended and now everyone has had the chance to "fall back" to standard time. While many people enjoy that extra hour of sleep that comes each fall, 63 percent of Americans say that they would support the elimination of seasonal time changes and there are some health issues to consider. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine also supports this stance due to the sleep disruption that occurs related to this biannual change. Our body has its own internal clock called...
When we think of Henry VIII, most of us envision an oversized man with multiple wives, a bitter personality and a propensity for beheading his enemies. A lesser-known fact is that he suffered with chronic leg sores the last twenty years of his life. Living in a time before antibiotics, anesthesia and proper wound care, this king endured excruciating ulcers with no cure available. Would history have been different if his sores could have been treated with today's advanced wound care? As a young...
The kidneys may be called the Rodney Dangerfield of the body, as they often "don't get no respect." The National Kidney Foundation estimates that one in three adult Americans are at risk for kidney disease, yet these organs are mostly ignored unless they develop stones or stop working. When healthy, kidneys work continuously at their main job of filtering blood to remove unwanted products and help produce urine. Kidneys clean approximately 200 liters of blood each day, removing up to two liters...
JILL KRUSE, D.O. I was sitting in my beach chair on vacation soaking up the sun when I overheard the couple next to me sounding concerned. They were throwing out lots of big medical terms but were very confused and said that they did not understand anything that they read on this MRI report. I turned to them, apologized for eavesdropping and introduced myself as a physician. I offered to "translate" what the radiologist report said and they gladly accepted. Their problem was not a lack of...
