If you like watching ER you’ll love reading The Surgeon’s Blog. It’s fast paced, intense, dramatic, thoughtful, on the edge of gut-wrenching, funny… I’m running out of adjectives.

For sheer speed, you cut between the ribs and then, at the end near the sternum, where cartilage takes the place of bone, you turn the knife northward and chunk through a few of those soft ends. It makes an ugly, L-shaped scar, but it’s quick, and you can reach in as if through a trapdoor. It eliminates the need for finding, opening, inserting, and cranking a rib-spreader, breaking a couple of ribs in the process.

[snip]

…to get blood circulating you hold that heart and work it, even as it’s still beating. And you can feel the engorgement, the ventricles filling more of your hand, the more powerful squirt in response to your grasp as the blood volume is restored. Carefully, with hope, you can begin to relax your grip, keeping your hand near, sensing the more effective beats; and finally, extract your hand from the chest, while realizing for the first time how awkwardly it’s been bent, reaching in from the side of the patient, through a small, tight, and bony hole. As circulation returns to the patient (at least his upper body!), so it does to your hand.

[snip]

It’s not over. Even with the aorta clamped, opening the belly releases the bled blood, and it gushes out under pressure as the belly deflates.

Like I said, this one will keep you on the edge of your seat. Very entertaining. Often funny. You’re going to like Dr. Sid Schwab’s writing style.

He’s definitely one of my new favorites.

While you’re there, be sure to leave a comment to let Dr. Schwab know you stopped by.

- Dean

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Grand Rounds is up at Vitum Medicinus and as usual there are some very interesting posts for medblog enthusiasts including one from yours truly. Yes, this is my first submission to the medblog carnival and I consider it quite a privilege to have my post listed alongside such an illustrious collection of talented bloggers.

Be sure to check it out… just don’t tell ‘em I’m not a doctor.
(They let you in?)
(Yeah… go figure.)

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There is little question that medicine in America has its problems. Pick up any newspaper or turn on any television newscast and there’s sure to be a story focused on the healthcare industry.

The purpose of this post is not to rehash those problems. The purpose of this post is to point you to an article by Panda Bear, MD that I believe you’ll find interesting. He titled his post, Socialized Medicine: Survival of the Fittest. Here are a few select passages:

(My mother, who is an avid reader of my blog, is a native of Greece and while a fierce partisan of that country is never-the-less perplexed at the love so many of my readers have for socialized medicine of the kind which is the rule of life over there. I offer this brief description of a typical socialized system in a modern European country.-PB)

[snip]

The public hospitals are so understaffed that you need to pay extra to secure the services of a trained nurse who will watch over you or your relative while the low-paid government nurses do whatever it is they do for their small salary, a salary which is just enough to convince them to come to work but not enough to actually get them to do anything.

[snip]

In Greece on the other hand, enjoying as it does the bounty of socialized medicine, there is a three tiered system. In the first tier are the private hospitals which are the equal of anything we have in the United States. Unlike our hospitals however, they are in no way charity institutions and only cater to the wealthy. In the second tier is the public hospital system where those who can afford it bribe doctors and nurses and even hire maids to clean their relative’s otherwise filthy rooms. In the third and bottom tier are the poor who lay in cots in the hallways of the crowded public hospitals relying on their relatives for the basics of life and nursing care.

Following a firestorm of comments both pro and con to his initial posting Panda offered the following equally controversial second post:

See, you folks don’t get it. If all you expect the government to provide is crappy and relatively inexpensive primary care and would be content to eschew the expensive, admittedly low-yield technological and labor intensive medical care that we currently waste on the elderly, the terminally ill, and those with extremely complicated health problems like they do in most of the Socialist Freeloader Kingdoms… if this is what you want then why do you need the government to provide medical care? After all, in the big scheme of things a visit to your family doctor two or three times a year is not going to bankrupt the large majority of Americans. Surely even most of my poor patients could but give up their cell phones and instantly have the wherewithal to afford to take their children to a pediatrician now and then.

Needless to say, Panda’s articles have stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy and debate.

But what do you think?

Do you feel that the answer lies in a national healthcare system? Should we scrap the present system and switch to socialized medicine? Or should we work to improve the system already in place?

Head on over to Panda’s blog and let us know your opinion.

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