Doctors recommend prostate cancer screening for all men between the ages of 40 and 75, and Prostate Cancer Awareness Month in September is designed to remind people of the importance of this procedure. Medical studies have shown that black men are more likely to be...
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Year: 2015
The prevalence of wrong diagnoses examined
Oregon residents may be interested to learn that the National Academy of Medicine has been working on a new study that examines misdiagnosis as a serious cause of medical error that harms patients. In one prominent case from 2014, a Liberian man in Texas was given...
New group aims to lower diagnosis error rate
Many Oregon residents suffer complications due to physicians' misdiagnoses yearly, and one study conducted in 2014 indicated that approximately 5 percent of all diagnoses issued annually across the country are erroneous. The problem has been difficult to overcome in...
Diagnosing pneumonia leads to proper treatment
As many Oregon residents may know, pneumonia may initially present as an upper respiratory infection. However, unlike such an infection, the symptoms may worsen. Health care professionals use a series of diagnostic tests to determine whether pneumonia is present....
Installing cameras into operating rooms
Oregon residents may be interested in learning more about the push for implementing cameras into operating rooms to better document surgical procedures. Trailing only cancer and heart disease, medical errors is the third-leading cause of death in the country, killing...
Lack of sleep may not affect surgical outcome
As some Oregon residents know, sleep deprivation may affect job performance. A new study looks at whether a lack of sleep affects a surgeon's performance the next day. Since some health care advocates are calling for regulation requiring a surgeon to disclose to...
Fine line exists between diagnosis and overdiagnosis
As Oregon residents may know, health care professionals use a myriad of tools to arrive at a proper diagnosis. Today, the contents of that tool chest have expanded to include neuroimaging and other sophisticated techniques. Defining disease such a traumatic brain...
Understanding more about MELAS
Oregon residents may benefit from understanding more about the challenges physicians face when attempting to diagnose a unique medical condition like mitochondrial myopathy, lactic acidosis, encephalopathy and stroke-like episodes. Otherwise referred to as MELAS, this...
Electronic fetal monitoring devices may cause harm
In Oregon and around the country, obstetricians often use electronic fetal monitoring devices on pregnant patients. Large-scale trials using continuous EFM were done in the late 1980s, and it became clear that EFM was not lowering risks during birth. More research in...
Can Toyota make hospitals safer?
As patient volumes increase in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, some public hospitals are turning to a surprising source to help them keep pace: Toyota. By adapting the Japanese automaker's production system to health care, hospital administrators have been able...