Healthcare Update Satellite – 07-13-2015

Boy bitten by a mouse, mother brings boy and mouse to emergency department, wants rabies testing done. Nurse brings the mouse outside and lets it go. Mom fumes because no one recommended that her son go through rabies shots and that because the animal was released, now she’ll never know if the animal had rabies. She decides to put her son through rabies shots which are paid for by Medicaid. If the shots end up not being covered, she’ll ask the hospital to pay for them. Only problem is that according to the CDC, small rodents “have not been known to transmit rabies to humans”, so the child is going through rabies shots for nothing. On the other hand, larger mammals can transmit rabies. Recently, a feral kitten tested positive for rabies in Maryland. German scientists discovered that people on low-carb diets can lose more weight if they eat a bar of chocolate every day. Actually, German scientists showed how bad many news outlets were at vetting their stories. The whole chocolate bar study was a hoax orchestrated by John Bohannon who holds a PhD in molecular biology, the Washington Examiner, and a German TV reporter named Peter Onneken. They created a fake organization, bogus data, and bogus press releases. Not one organization double checked their research, sought comments from independent experts or questioned inaccuracies in the work. This is a tough issue. I link some studies after reading the abstracts but without fully vetting their merits. Diffic...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Healthcare Update Source Type: blogs