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

[jomadge.livejournal.com]

The only thing that bugs me about that article is that it suggests over and over that the ICU stays were unquestioningly the cause of all these patient's post-ICU problems. What about the grave conditions that put them in the ICU in the first place?

I'm not saying the article is wrong. Clearly it raises some very good questions that need to be answered.

[jomadge.livejournal.com]

Hey, I used the word "that" four times in one sentence. THAT takes talent! *g*

Going to BED now.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

That was mentioned in the article.

I think that's where further study (immediately) should be done. It would be difficult to separate out the two, but when it's *across the board* in people who suffered from different conditions, for differing lengths of time, and those people are all suffering from the same debilitating weakness, you have to wonder what the common problem is--and that would be how the ICU keeps people under constant sedation and in bed for minimum amounts of trouble to the staff.

I'd also like to point out that it's still a practice (don't know how common it is) that operating on infants without anesthesia happens today. For years it was a commonly held belief in the medical community (at least with doctors) that infants don't remember pain, therefore don't FEEl pain, and it's okay to operate on them in highly complex, lengthy operations without anesthesia.

Bullshit. They're now discovering that infants DO feel pain, and their brains are affected by it.

And in another front, a couple decades ago, the technology and know-how was there to operate on infants and children with heart problems (major ones). Now, many of those children survived (yay!) HOWEVER the medical community did not follow-up on these children, who are now suffering from the after affects of surviving the surgery.

The AMA and doctors have a very bad habit of not following up in a methodical, scientific manner on the results of their treatments, especially on the formerly helpless, like the ICU and pediatric patients.