Medical News

Hospital Update

I had a chance to talk to one of the people in medical records while I was at work today. She tells me that two thirds of our COVID patients have been vaccinated, and with about the same percentage of Florida’s residents being vaccinated, I wonder if this vaccine isn’t really doing anything for COVID at all. I know that data isn’t the plural of anecdotes, but I wonder of we aren’t being lied to again.

In my last post on COVID, PapaSierra wants to know:

Why are patients being allowed to needlessly suffer, and perhaps die, when ivermectin is available? Are the doctors and administrator that afraid of the lefties?

Now I obviously haven’t talked to every doctor and patient involved, but after more than thirty years in the medical field, I have a couple of thoughts:

  • Since Ivermectin isn’t approved for use on COVID, many insurance companies aren’t going to pay for it
  • Ivermectin or not, some COVID patients will die. There are billboards all over Central Florida that look like this:

If a Doctor isn’t doing what everyone else is doing with regards to treating COVID, he or she can expect to hear from one of those ambulance chasers. The deposition will look like this:

Lawyer: “Has the Federal Government approved Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID? Please remember that you are under oath.”

Doctor: “No, it hasn’t, but…”

Lawyer: “And isn’t it also true that the US Food and Drug Administration recommends against the use of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID?”

For that reason, no one wants to be the doctor who is the first or only one that is doing this. It’s the nail that sticks up that most often gets hammered down.

  • Not only that, but there is a law in the State of Florida that says any doctor who is successfully sued three times for malpractice will have his or her license to practice medicine permanently revoked. For that reason, doctors don’t go to court. They settle. The Doctor’s malpractice insurer surely knows this, and they will drop any doctor who is following that course of treatment.

I have seen this time and again. Years ago, I went to the state EMS convention and asked the Board of the Florida College of Emergency Physicians why they weren’t recommending a particular procedure, especially in light of some very convincing studies supporting it. The above answers were the very same ones I was given then.

By Divemedic, ago

COVID news

The hospital where I work has a large number of COVID cases. I had to call the head nurse this morning and tell them that there was no more room for new patients this morning. At that point, we began discharging any patients that we could, so that we could make room for the 57 COVID patients who were being held in the ED, waiting for a bed.

Today, we had six different patients who were COVID positive die. Three of them were directly related to COVID, one was indirectly related, and two died of other causes, but were COVID positive, meaning that they will likely be classified as COVID deaths. In all six cases, the patients were at least 70 years old. Four of the six patients were more than 80 years old, with two of them being more than 85 years old. I do not know their vaccination status.

The patients on the COVID floor are being treated with donor plasma, as well as vitamins C and D, and high flow oxygen. I do not know what else they are receiving, because I am not in the COVID unit.

That is what I know.

By Divemedic, ago

COVID update

When I left work on Tuesday, the hospital where I work had more than 30 COVID patients admitted. I was off for two days and returned to find that the COVID totals had more than doubled to 84 patients. So an entire wing of one floor is now occupied by COVID patients, and they are putting them two in a room, which hospitals don’t like doing because of Obamacare and its reliance on Press-Ganey scores.

As far as I know, we have not had any fatalities due to COVID lately. The ICU is now full, with more than half of the patients in it being COVID patients.

That’s all I know for now.

By Divemedic, ago

So what?

The hospital where I work was once down to only two COVID patients. The specialized COVID floor was shut down and reduced to a single wing weeks ago. Then the wing was reduced to a single hallway. Two weeks ago, there was not even a hallway- there were only two rooms with COVID patients. The hospital relaxed many COVID protocols- where we were once testing every single patient for COVID no matter why they were being seen, patients were being tested for COVID only if they had symptoms. It seemed that COVID was over.

When I last left work yesterday evening, there were more than thirty COVID patients. What caused the big change? Well for starters, the hospital began testing every patient again. Many patients who are COVID positive are there for other reasons and have no COVID symptoms. Many, but not all.

In the ICU, more than half of the patients there are COVID patients. We had a COVID fatality on Saturday. Every ICU patient with COVID is unvaccinated, and most of the other COVID positive patients are as well.

So what?

If people choose to be unvaccinated, that is their choice. I have chosen to get the vaccine. If someone else reviews the facts and doesn’t want it, that is up to them. What they choose doesn’t affect you.

By Divemedic, ago

Blinding speed

It took 14 months to go from “Fourteen days to Flatten the Curve” to the government going door to door demanding to see your papers. If someone in July of 2019 had told you that all of this was going to happen within the next two years, what would you have said to them?

By Divemedic, ago

Facts, not propaganda

A comment on this morning’s post will make a good post for today.

Cannabis has no LD50 (no lethal overdose) 

ANY substance has an LD50 dose: Aspirin, Tylenol, salt, sugar, Nicotine, even water. Contrary to what stoners would have you believe, there is a way to overdose on marijuana. The people who advocate for weed are either making money from it, getting high from it, or are just plain uninformed on the subject, and will claim that it is harmless. While marijuana is safer than most other recreational drugs, there is still a risk there.

Before we begin, in the interest of full disclosure: I feel that the war on drugs does more harm than good, and I think that marijuana should be legal. I also think that people who smoke weed now are mostly inconsiderate assholes who force those of us who choose NOT to use marijuana to put up with that horrible smell AND their juvenile antics.

Let’s begin with a point that is almost never talked about: smoking marijuana carries all of the risks of smoking: lung cancer, emphysema, etc. The lungs aren’t helped by deliberately inhaling large quantities of smoke. This makes smoking marijuana more dangerous than ingesting it.

How about the reason why people smoke: the THC?

Years ago, I was the first paramedic to treat a patient who had overdosed on what the patient referred to as “legal weed,” which later turned out to contain a synthetic form of THC called “Spice,” which is 40 times more potent than natural THC. It caused me to do a lot of research on marijuana and the possibility of overdose.

Let’s start with a discussion of the lethal dose for various common substances.

Benno Hartung et al. (2014) report that the lethal half dose (LD50) for THC in humans is estimated to be around 30 mg/kg. This means that approximately 2 grams (.07 ounces) of pure THC has a 50% chance of killing a 150 pound man. This is the amount of THC found in 10 grams (.35 ounces) of high grade weed with 20% THC content. Moreover, the DEA reports that concentrated THC derivatives known variously as “wax,” “dabs,” or “butane hash oil” consisting of up to 80% THC are now available on the streets; one tenth of an ounce of these would contain a lethal half dose of 2 grams of THC. Robert Gable (2004) also reports that the lethal half dose of marijuana is about 15 grams or one half ounce; however, he does not specify the THC percentage of the marijuana.

The reason why marijuana gets this reputation for being impossible to OD on is the relationship between the amount of THC it takes reach intoxication, versus the amount it takes for a fatal dose.

The issue here is not so much the total lethal dose, but how close you must be to the lethal dose in order to get the effect you are looking for. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (often called “ecstasy”) and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or “roofies”) and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. This makes marijuana safer than alcohol, MDMA, and other drugs, but it is not proper to say that there is NO risk.

I’ve found no published cases in the that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. Smoking marijuana is less risky than eating it from an overdose perspective because not all of the marijuana smoked is absorbed.

So now you know.

However, whenever I have posted about weed in the past, I always get tons of uninformed pro weed stoners coming by to tell me how wrong I am. I am not interested in that debate, so comments on this post and the earlier one will be closed. It just isn’t something that I want to debate, nor do i want this blog to become a blog about the risks and benefits of marijuana.

By Divemedic, ago

Laugh of the year

This news story is right in line with what happened in my family. I got a panicked phone call from my brother. It seems that his son, who still lives with his parents, has a medical marijuana card. He heard his mother say that she was stressed out, so he decided to use some of his weed to make her some brownies.

She ate five of them before her son told her to slow down and confessed to what was in them.

She began freaking out.

So now my brother is calling because she is worried that she is going to overdose. I explained to him that the best thing that they can do is wait for it to wear off. He asked if they should go to the hospital and I advised them that there is nothing they can do for her at the hospital.

They decided to go anyway. Soooo, after a $1,000 copay and 6 hours in the emergency room, she was again sober. They didn’t do a thing for her apart from letting her sit in the waiting room while the effects wore off.

I got a good laugh out of it.

By Divemedic, ago

Figures don’t lie

but liars figure, as the old adage goes. It seems that the number of COVID cases is WAY down. Why is that? The vaccine? Nope. The cycle threshold.

Just before the election, the Ct was 40.

An hour after the inauguration, the CDC changed the Ct to 30, which reduced the number of positive test results by 68%.

Then on May 4 it was reduced for any test of a vaccinated individual to 28. This will mean that positives will be lower for anyone vaccinated. Along with that, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “COVID cases.”

One year ago, nearly to the day, I proposed that COVID was being used to influence the election. I also predicted that COVID would disappear right after the inauguration. I almost nailed it.

On a side note, my hospital has four COVID patients being cared for by a single nurse. The “COVID hall” has 28 rooms with a possible capacity of 56 patients at double occupancy. There are FOUR patients in there.

By Divemedic, ago