PhysioProf Guest Blogging At Feministe

I will be guest blogging at Feministe for the next two weeks, so expect few if any posts from me in that interval. I’m sure DrugMonkey will hold down the fort here just fine without me.

Like A Death in the Family

It is a hard thing when somebody is lost from your subfield. We talk a lot about competition, scooping and limited funding resources but in the vast majority of cases, the interactions with your fellow scientists are just plain enjoyable. Oftentimes, you may have a limited subset of a dozen or fewer science homies that are practically like family. These individuals understand, really, the esoterica that totally charge you up about your subfield. They wax excited about your latest TotallyKewl result as if they were in your lab themselves. You can’t wait to hear about what they have been doing lately. You meet at conferences and talk late into the after-sessions hours over a very obscure dataset, plot collaborative projects and TotalWorldDomination of your sub-sub-sub-field with your brilliance. You edit special journal issues with this one and focused conference sessions with that one. Trade trainees. Oh, it’s high times, scientifically.
…and then, one day, one of them is gone.

Drug Addiction in the Hospitalized Patient: A Blindspot for Medical Professionals?

A story I recently heard from an correspondent who works as a medical professional in a general surgery practice reminds me of the distance we have yet to travel in understanding even the seemingly obvious implications of drug abuse. My correspondent’s practice sees a breadth of cases, including a diversity of acute trauma cases which are severe enough to require a surgery consult. Some cases will require immediate surgery and a lengthy hospitalization for recovery; several weeks may be required when someone has suffered severe trauma. Other cases might involve a little wait-and-see to determine if surgical intervention is going to be required; a several day observation window would not be uncommon. One of these latter cases resulted in an interesting story.
Agent: “We had a guy check himself out against medical advice while we were waiting to see if he was going to get better or require surgery. The patient was apparently really ticked off that they wouldn’t let him out to smoke. He was found a couple of hours later lying in the street.”
YHN: “So what happened, you mean he bled out or something?”
Agent: “Oh, no. In the Emergency Department they hit him with [the opiate antagonist] Narcan and he woke right up”