Consideration Coffee Breeches and Books
Categories : Blogs, General Practice, Medicine, Obstetrics, books |
Just reading the prestigious medical journal ‘Health+Medicine” in today’s West. A couple of articles have caught my eye. First is a letter written to their medical columnist Dr Terry Costley, complaining about how doctors often run late, and asking that they show more consideration for patients. Dr Costley does a great job of answering the question by saying that it is generally because the doctor is showing consideration for patients that he/she runs behind. Patients often come with more complicated issues and problems that can’t be sorted out in a 10 minute spot, yet they only book a single appointment. This sort of thing invariably leads to the doctor getting behind. And if like me you work in obstetrics where babies tend to decided to be born at inconvenient times (like 3am - more about this later) then that can put you further behind. Having said all that though, I try my hardest to keep on time and find for every 20 minute or longer consultation, there are 2 or 3 that can be managed in 5-8 minutes, thus things usually balance out. I often get people who are surprised at how brief their waiting time has been.
The article on the next page is an interesting one about the relative health benefits of tea and coffee. Research from Curtn University suggests that tea, might be the healthier choice, leading to a reduction in various cancers, but most of this research has been done on Chinese Green Tea, so how applicable it is to your regular Dilmah or Liptons I’m not entirely sure. It then goes on to quote some of the proven benefits of coffee, which lowers the risk of liver cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and other diseases. So I think I’ll stick to my coffee for now… and I desperately need it this morning after being woken at 2:30am to go and deliver a baby, which surprised us by deciding to come out the wrong way…
Breech (bottom first) delieveries are very uncommon nowadays, as they have been shown to have a higher risk of a range of problems. Generally now if a breech is diagnosed early enough in the pregnancy it will be attempted to turn it around to head first (cephalic), and failing that a Caesarean section will be done, as that has fairly conclusively been demonstrated to be safer. Unfortunately this baby tricked us all last night and the first I knew of it was when the ‘head’ I was about to deliver started to defecate all over my gloves. Then came the legs, body, arms, and finally a nervous wait to see if the head would follow (delivery of the after-coming head can be fraught with danger) - fortunately the head came and although the baby needed a little resuscitation, everythng was alright in the end. Twas all a little bit scary though - obstetrics certainly can get the adrenaline flowing at times.
Finally, for the time being I’m going to be trialling adding a ‘Current Book’ field with my current music section. As reported by Mark yesterday, the Allconsuming site which normally tracks my booklist has been hacked and so I’m temporarily uanble to add new books, so I’ll do it like this for now.
