No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Finally, everything was back. Everything was normal. The patient, having had his morphine almost 4 hours earlier, was still comfortable. A reexamination again revealed no suspicion of a surgical or serious problem.
''Then what is wrong with him, doctor?'' the woman questioned, this time politely with a tone suggestive of concern rather than anger.
''Nothing serious shows up on our tests,'' I replied. ''Is there something in particular you are worried about?''
If she said ''cancer,'' I would explain that cancer symptoms do not come on suddenly. If she was worried about appendicitis, I could point out his soft abdomen and normal CBC. If she said ''heart attack,'' I could refer to the normal ECG. I would not try to explain that any of these conditions were still possible, but I was confident that the findings did not suggest them.
The woman's reply to my question surprised me, not only by what she said, but also in the way she said it. ''Is he going to die, doctor?'' she asked softly. I thought I saw a small tear in the corner of her eye. Now I realized why she had acted so aggressively. She had been afraid. In some parts of the world, people become ill and die, and their relatives never understand why. Medical care is not easy to access. Testing is limited. An explanation or
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
or 3.8%. However, when just the clinically significant ECGs are considered, there was a discordance rate of 27%. The majority of these clinically significant discordant ECG interpretations were underread by the pediatric emergency physician and have the potential of being lost to cardiology follow-u
right people to learn the right material repeatedly, live it and use it constantly, and have it at their fingertips because ''it is just what we do.'' And, if what we should do is not what we do now, we must examine our disaster plans and change them to reflect and rely on reality. Those truly criti