In 2006, California passed a disclosure law that requires hospitals to report each time a patient suffers certain adverse events caused by inadequate medical care. As data has become available for a 10 month period beginning in July 2007, more than 1,000 such events have been documented and ten hospitals have been fined $25,000.

Some of the events reported include:

• Too little oxygen being pumped via ventilator hose to a 9-day-old child; the diagram for assembly was drawn backwards.
• Surgeons removed the appendix of the wrong patient when a CT scan was placed into the wrong patient file.
• A 76-year-old woman died when she was given two drugs her doctor never prescribed.
• 466 patients developed bed sores so severe that dead skin formed a crater in the patient’s skin or it rotted entirely through to the patient’s muscle and bone tissue.
• 145 surgical patients left the operating room with foreign objects, including surgical instruments, still in their bodies.

Investigation revealed that these events happen when hospitals do not follow the safety procedures that were developed to prevent them.

Most general anesthetics, which are used to put patients to sleep during surgery, can actually increase the discomfort patients feel when they wake up.

“Noxious” anesthesia drugs — a category which includes most general anesthetics — activate and then sensitize specific receptors on neurons in the peripheral nervous system.

It was already known that general anesthetics cause irritation at the infusion site or in the airways when inhaled, and that they can activate pain-sensing nerve cells in the peripheral nervous system. However, the specific mechanism by which anesthetics affect sensory neurons was not known until now, nor the fact that anesthetics can continue to cause pain and inflammation even as they’re used during surgery.

An Oregon man given less than a year to live experienced a complete remission of advanced melanoma following a treatment that boosted his immune system to fight the tumors.

Melanoma is a cancer of the skin cells that produce tanning pigments. When caught early, melanomas can be easily treated by surgically removing the cancerous patch of skin. But advanced melanoma is often deadly.

About 20 years ago, scientists discovered that immune cells could latch onto and attack skin cancers. For this treatment, researchers drew blood from the patient, extracted special helper immune cells and then grew more of them in the laboratory. They then infused a massive dose of the newly grown cells back into the patient, without using chemotherapy or the other harsh drugs.

High blood pressure, the most commonly diagnosed condition in the United States, is becoming increasingly resistant to drugs that lower it.

The problem is not that the medications have stopped working, but that many blood-pressure patients are sicker to begin with and require more drugs at greater dosages, but to less effect.

This is especially worrisome given recent estimate that one in three Americans have hypertension, an underlying cause of heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease and heart failure.