this is scary stuff.

[gategrrl]

Fascinating article about how the ICU treatments may actually be harming the patients they're supposed to helping by over medicating narcotics and sedatives and not allowing the patients contact with reality, for weeks at a time. Even a short stay of a few days can devastate a person years later.

Comments

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is kind of scary. I think there's a lot that is pretty common in medicine in which the treatment is much worse than the actual problem it's supposedly curing.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

You would have thought that the treatments that happen in hospitals would have some FOLLOW-UP, you know? So that hospitals could understand how sometimes the treatment for one person/condition is NOT best for another person/condition.

The waters are muddied because, hey, these are very ill people...but common sense would tell you that keeping anyone drugged on powerful, disturbing narcotics is not a good thing. The human mind needs reality to keep it on an even keel.