Drug Medical Information

GOODBYE" BYPASS -"HELLO' CIIEIATION! A HOSPITAL IS NOT A PLACE TO GET WELL - SOME 'BUGS' IN THE HOSPITAL SYSTEM

There are some 'bugs' in the hospital system - real ones. Of the roughly 35 million Americans hospitalized annually, two million or more get sicker instead of better, according to the Center for Disease Control data. Hospitals are not as zealous about cleanliness as one might presume. Even operating rooms are often not as sterile as required and personnel frequently put patients in jeopardy. There are no fewer than 100,000 hospital-originated infection-relateddeathsannuallyinAmerica and some insiders think that's a super-conservative figure reflecting less than one third of the fatalities. This is what we do know: twenty percent of hospital patients leave with a condition they didn't have when they entered the hospital. None of the above includes the "freak" accidents: surgeons operating on the 'wrong' organ or on the wrong person. Just last year, a 90-year old man burned to death while undergoing ultraviolet light therapy in a hospital treatment room. "They put him in there and forgot to take him out," witnesses testified at the ensuing malpractice trial. Something else to take into consideration is this: if you have a choice, don't have surgery in July! A long-standing joke in medical circles turns out to be not so funny, because teaching hospitals routinely bring in new interns and residents during the summer. A study at the VA Medical Center in Denver recently found that surgical procedure complications escalate from twenty percent in June to fifty percent in July.

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