End (Edge) of life issues –

Sometime back, when I was a trainee, we used to get patients at the end of their life. They would come to us tired and dejected (and angry) after  treatment from premier hospitals all over the country; having tried various form of alternative therapies and charlatans. And we would evaluate them and send them back […]

Lessons from Sharks on reducing infections.

Interesting article in the Wall street journal health blog The ocean is full of slow-swimming creatures covered with algae and barnacles. But some slow-swimming sharks stay pretty clean. A University of Florida researcher thinks that has to do, at least in part, with the microscopic pattern of shark skin, which makes an inhospitable environment for […]

WHO issues a surgical checklist.

A lot has been written about surgical errors during operation including incidents of left behind surgical instruments, wrong site surgery, operating on wrong patients and so on. The WHO has issued a checklist which it hopes will go a long way in reducing such errors by enforcing a ‘time out’ when all personnel participating in […]

Second opinion at a distance

There is an interesting piece of new in todays USA today about taking second opinion for health conditions online from experts. You send your medical records with or without your primary doctor’s help via internet to Experts( places providing paid service) and get their opinion after a week or so. Online second-opinion services offer patients […]

Reversible Vasectomy

At present Vasectomy is the only reliable method of male contraception. While it is relatively simple procedure and quite cheap besides the fact that the government pays you to get it done, yet it is not that popular.  The reasons for that is the irreversibility of the procedure and the perception of loss of ‘manhood’. […]