It is truly fascinating the amount of trauma and mutilation that one human being can endure. Subdural hematoma, aortic rupture, diabetic ketoacidosis, internal and external blast injuries, acute myocardial infarction, or even third degree burns are no match for modern medicine. In times past, these conditions or injuries were beyond the physicians control and presumed fatal to the individual. However, survival percentages are now higher, and can be attributed to medical advancement and the use of medical checklists. Over the years, the medical practices and research studies from highly acclaimed professionals such as Dr. Atul Gawande, prove that checklists help guide medical professionals to a more precise outcome over medical practices without a checklist involved. Therefore, in order for concise, operative, and reliable medical practice, a checklist guideline is essential as it reduces the margin of error, increases positive prognosis, and prevents situational blindness. In the early 20th century, situational blindness was again a key factor for postponing success in modern medicine when it came to childbirth. In New York City alone, the New York Academy of Medicine’s records showed that 2,041 women died during childbirth in 1933 as recalled in an essay in Dr. Atul Gawande’s book, Better: A Surgeon 's Notes on Performance (Gawande 179). This number has been shocking since in the 19th century, doctors and scientists discovered through works lead by Ignac Semmelweis and
In 2002 he published, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. In this novel he uses real life scenarios that he experience while in residence. This book describes the mishaps that Dr. Gawande encountered as a surgical resident. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science was a National Book Award Finalist. In 2007, Gawande published Better: A Surgeon’s Note on Performance. This book made Amazon’s Top 10 Book list of 2007. Two years later, The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things Right was published. This book focus spoke about checklists in the medical field and how they dramatically raise effectiveness and reduce
Motherhood was an expected part of the wife’s life. Woman would have a large number of babies right after each other although some babies would not survive. “High mortality rates must have overshadowed the experience of motherhood in ways difficult to
She believed that men were at fault for her stillborn children and continued to use the same birthing techniques (Smith 65). For her eleventh pregnancy, she went to a hospital and had a doctor deliver the baby, and for the first time the child lived (Smith 438). Sissy’s abundance of stillbirths may be due to the fact that, “Women who’ve already had one stillbirth have a four times higher risk of having another stillbirth compared to women who’ve had a live birth” (Reinberg par 1). Along with stillbirths, there were also high numbers of infant mortalities in the early 1900s (Louis par 6). Doctors did not know the causes of stillbirths and instead focused on preventing infant mortality (Louis par 6). Due to the lack of knowledge concerning stillbirths, they were a common occurrence (Louis par 7). In 1909, about one hundred seven out every one thousand children died (Pryce par 1). Researchers now know that the leading causes of stillbirths and infant mortality and the turn of the twentieth century were poor environment, diet, and hygiene due to poverty (Pryce par 2). Sissy’s poverty and previous stillbirths provide evidence that Betty Smith accurately described infant mortality and stillbirth in the early twentieth century in A Tree Grows in
The Blind Side depicts the story of Michael Oher, a seventeen year old African American homeless boy from a broken home, taken in by Leigh Anne Tuohy, a wife and mom of two living in a well to-do neighborhood. Repeatedly running away from the group home after group home, he was placed in after he was taken from him drug addicted mother, he happens to run into the exceedingly accepting family. Only after the catholic high school football coach sees his size and agility he is accepted to the privet school, despite a 0.7 GPA and lack of a place to sleep Leigh Anne Touhy, along with only one of his teachers, take a special interest in him. The families give him
Giving birth to a baby is the most amazing and miraculous experiences for parents and their loved ones. Every woman’s birth story is different and full of joy. Furthermore, the process from the moment a woman knows that she’s pregnant to being in the delivering room is very critical to both her and the newborn baby. Prenatal care is extremely important and it can impact greatly the quality of life of the baby. In this paper, the topic of giving birth will be discussed thoroughly by describing the stories of two mothers who gave birth in different decades and see how their prenatal cares are different from each other with correlation of the advancement of modern medicine between four decades.
Robin Yates’s paper, “Pregnancy and Childbirth, The 1800’s vs. Now: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting,” was filled with many clear points on the advancement of labor and medicine since the 1800s. This essay was filled with interesting and grabbing facts; however, the structure of the essay needs more support.
What does it mean when one is described as being blind? Many people would answer that it can be defined as a person who lacks the gift of sight either as a cause of an accident or nature. However, in the case of Native Son, the scenario is different because the characters are blind as a result of a history entailing the common practice of mistreatment. Bigger Thomas is blind in his perception of white society and its reality. In the same sense, the white society is blind of blacks and their lifestyle. What each perceives of the other is actually false. Richard Wright argues, through the character of Max, that Mary Dalton’s murder was the effect of a cause that has been occurring for decades. The cause is the maltreatment of blacks and
In the mid 1930’s childbirth was extremely dangerous and high percentages of women and their babies died sooner or later after birth. As people took notice, medicine took a lot of steps to lower the mortality rates. A lot of deliveries moved from the homes of people to the hospitals with more safer conditions of birth. Throughout the years, hosptials worked on getting their public sanitation, public nutrition and better control of some deadly chronic diseases. By the 1940s medicines surgical techniques and antibodies improved so much that it made the hospital that much more safer for people to deliver children. Medical Doctor, Elizabeth Eden, stated “By the 1950s, routine maternity care, originally designed to improve safety, had become almost too rigid. For example, the fear of infection, a major killer of mothers and babies, led to such practices as taking away all a woman's personal belongings when she entered the hospital; administering large, uncomfortable enemas; prohibiting fathers and other loved ones from entering the maternity area; keeping babies in nurseries, away from their mothers; and handling babies as little as possible. At the time, bottle-feeding was believed to be more sanitary and superior in almost every way to breast-feeding.” Medical Doctor, Elizabeth Eden also stated “The 1960s was a time when national and international organizations were founded to
In a controlled experiment he found that having obstetricians wash their hands in a chlorinated-lime solution dropped maternal mortality from 10% to below 1%. He, too, was derided by the medical establishment and, for him personally, the result was tragic. Semmelweis lost his hospital position, was forced to move from Vienna to Budapest and when he wrote angry letters accusing European obstetricians of being irresponsible murderers, he was said to be insane (even his wife agreed.) No doubt he was unbalanced to a degree and in 1865 the forty-seven year old physician was forcibly committed to an asylum. He died there two weeks later, possibly as a result of injuries sustained when beaten by guards, and it wasn’t for nearly another three decades as a result of Pasteur’s work that Ignatz Semmelweis’s findings gained acceptance. In our time, reference sometimes is made to a so-called “Semmelweis Reflex” or “Semmelweiss Effect” which refers to a tendency to automatically reject new knowledge that contradicts established beliefs – in effect, “zombie
DeFilippo, one of Gawande’s past patients, was a resident of Everett, Massachusetts. DeFilippo was a forty-eight-year-old man who was a limousine driver. In the book, The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande describes DeFilippo’s medical journey from his point of view, almost resulting in death multiple times. While at a community hospital for a hernia and gallstone surgery, DeFilippo began to hemorrhage. The surgeon stopped the bleeding; however, DeFilippo’s liver was damaged. When DeFilippo was transferred to Gawande’s care, DeFilippo had low oxygen, a fever, and shock, resulting in DeFilippo being incoherent. The test showed DeFilippo’s liver and kidneys were failing and he had a high white blood cell count, meaning there could be an infection in
The distractions of driving are a popular area of research. Recent studies have looked at what distracts drivers and what other failures of awareness may contribute to traffic accidents. The goal of this paper is to look at research and explain how change blindness can possibly effect driving.
Checklists are good to use to enhance safety. Errors within the clinical tasks which would consist of attentional behavior- for instance diagnostic or handoff errors- this would include solutions that are more geared towards additional training, supervision, and decision support instead of standardizing behavior. The achievement and effectiveness of checklists is avoiding central line infections and enhancing surgical safety “resulted from the strong evidence base supporting each of the individual items in the checklist, and therefore checklists may not be successful in areas where the "gold standard" safety practices have yet to be determined (Checklists,
Through collecting the description from these women, the clinical encounters when the examination detects defects in the fetus are reappeared. Some examples demonstrate the significance of responses from sonographers affecting the experience of pregnant women. Sara was told that the fetus lacked several organs vital for a life. She asked to see more of the profile, which leads to detailed explanation. This case indicates that the time dimension and patience of the medical personnel therefore became very important. While Sara embraced the fact about the fetus, a totally different case was also reported. Reidun whose fetus was defective similarly rejected it deliberately and perceived it as a serious burden. Listening to the sonographer for her was not consolation, but torture. “We knew there wasn’t much hope. He has five fingers and five toes. And forget about that, it’s not important.”. In Reidun’s case, the sonographer increased the vulnerability for Reidun. These evidence reveal immediate effects of sonographers on pregnant
Changes in our surroundings are happening every minute and if we started noticing every minute detail about a scene then our visual system will be over whelmed in no time (Rensink, 2000). We are limited in our capacity to encode, retain and compare visual information from one glance to the other. Our awareness of our visual surroundings is far lesser than what most people believe intuitively.
The first modern caesarean section was performed by German gynaecologist Ferdinand Adolf Kehrer in 1881.(1) Probably the very first documented evidence of caesarean birth is a legal text dating to theera of Hammurabi (1795-1750 BC), describing the birth of a male child “pulled out of the womb” of a deceased woman (7).