We have all submitted our bodies to Crash Care, even though you may not have heard this term before. Crash Care is another way of talking about emergency care, or urgent care. Crash care is largely what the TV medical shows are based upon. One day the person is fine. The next day he gets deathly ill. In comes Dr. House, makes his observations, runs his tests, applies his treatment, saves his patient. That is the formula for crash care. Some crash care is unavoidable. You are in a car accident, fall off a ladder, run your bike into a fire hydrant or a parked car or a moving car (I did all three), trip down some stairs, shoot yourself in the foot with a pellet gun assuming that it is unloaded and that there is no CO2 in it and that the safety is on while walking upstairs in the house and bleeding all over the carpet (my son did this many years ago…needless to say he lost his pellet gun…but his foot is fine). Anyway, these are all examples of choice times when you need and perhaps even appreciate crash care. It can save your life. But it can also take your life, and that is the theme of the rest of this article. How can crash care take your life in ways you have perhaps not thought of? And then briefly what can you do to avoid that!
OOPS! While having surgery the doctor leaves a sponge in your abdomen. He cuts out the wrong organ. He cuts off the wrong limb. He doesn’t rerun a bad lab test. His hand slips during a procedure. He got the diagnosis wrong. He applied the wrong treatment. He didn’t check for drug interactions. He’s looking at the wrong file. He doesn’t speak your language. Accidents like these and many more result in the death of 120,000 Americans every year.
NOSOCOMIAL! A nosocomial infection is the $20 word for a disease that you get in the hospital while you are there being treated for something else. The problem with nosocomial infections is that the germs that hang around hospitals have to be pretty nasty buggers to survive in that “sterile” environment. They are often antibiotic resistant. They often are much more serious and severe than the reason why you might have gone to the hospital in the first place. The proof of this is that they result in the death of 90,000 Americans every year.
MEDICATIONS! We all take drugs. We were trained from an early age when you don’t feel right there is a drug for that. One in perhaps six TV ads is for a drug. It is in the culture. Drug use can range from an occasional Advil to treat too much Saturday night all the way to chemotherapy in which poison that would eventually kill the patient if used long enough is used to hopefully kill the cancer cells first. There are thousands of different drugs in the medical pharmacopeia. They have all been approved for the treatment of certain conditions and then they are often used for conditions for which they have yet to be approved. In the end, however, either some of us are too sensitive or some of them are too strong or both. 100,000 Americans die every year from a reaction to drugs that were properly prescribed to treat a correct diagnosis.
TOTALS! The above three categories do not overlap. That means that Crash Medical Care results in the death of 310,000 Americans every year, thereby making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. Only cancer and heart disease kill more people than Crash Medical Care. How do you inoculate yourself against this risk? The answer is simple in concept but very hard in practice.
You need to avoid the Crash Care system as much as you can. Exercise, eat well, maintain your weight, get adjusted, keep flexible, etc. You know the drill. An ounce of prevention may be worth 310,000 pounds of cure.
OOPS! While having surgery the doctor leaves a sponge in your abdomen. He cuts out the wrong organ. He cuts off the wrong limb. He doesn’t rerun a bad lab test. His hand slips during a procedure. He got the diagnosis wrong. He applied the wrong treatment. He didn’t check for drug interactions. He’s looking at the wrong file. He doesn’t speak your language. Accidents like these and many more result in the death of 120,000 Americans every year.
NOSOCOMIAL! A nosocomial infection is the $20 word for a disease that you get in the hospital while you are there being treated for something else. The problem with nosocomial infections is that the germs that hang around hospitals have to be pretty nasty buggers to survive in that “sterile” environment. They are often antibiotic resistant. They often are much more serious and severe than the reason why you might have gone to the hospital in the first place. The proof of this is that they result in the death of 90,000 Americans every year.
MEDICATIONS! We all take drugs. We were trained from an early age when you don’t feel right there is a drug for that. One in perhaps six TV ads is for a drug. It is in the culture. Drug use can range from an occasional Advil to treat too much Saturday night all the way to chemotherapy in which poison that would eventually kill the patient if used long enough is used to hopefully kill the cancer cells first. There are thousands of different drugs in the medical pharmacopeia. They have all been approved for the treatment of certain conditions and then they are often used for conditions for which they have yet to be approved. In the end, however, either some of us are too sensitive or some of them are too strong or both. 100,000 Americans die every year from a reaction to drugs that were properly prescribed to treat a correct diagnosis.
TOTALS! The above three categories do not overlap. That means that Crash Medical Care results in the death of 310,000 Americans every year, thereby making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. Only cancer and heart disease kill more people than Crash Medical Care. How do you inoculate yourself against this risk? The answer is simple in concept but very hard in practice.
You need to avoid the Crash Care system as much as you can. Exercise, eat well, maintain your weight, get adjusted, keep flexible, etc. You know the drill. An ounce of prevention may be worth 310,000 pounds of cure.