For The San Diego Union-Tribune
Bloody hot
New research indicates that when temperatures climb above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, heat can cause restricted blood flow and boost heart attack risk.
In a study, volunteers wore special suits that slowly raised the surrounding temperature. All of the participants experienced increased blood flow with more heat, a sign that their hearts were working harder, in part to cool their bodies.
Blood flow increased twice as much in the youngest, healthiest group compared with the oldest, least healthy group. One-third of that oldest, least healthy group — 7 out of 20 volunteers — had blood flow blockages, despite feeling no angina symptoms during the experiment.
“Our hypothesis was that the reason why heat exposure might be bad is because it makes the heart work harder,” study author Daniel Gagnon told STAT. “We didn’t know to what extent does it work harder, and does it work sufficiently hard to think that it could lead to something, especially something like a heart attack.”
Get me that. Stat!
In a newly published report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it said roughly 1.4 million unhoused people visited hospital emergency departments annually between 2016 and 2021. Most were middle-aged, between ages 26 and 64. Housed ED visitors tended to be older or younger.
More unhoused people arrived at EDs by ambulance (42 percent) compared with others (16 percent).
For more than half of unhoused people in the ED, Medicaid was the primary payer for care; less than 5 percent had private insurance. Medicaid was still the top source of payment for others, at 34 percent, but 25 percent had private insurance.
Stories for the waiting room
For reasons of necessity (usually no medical help available), these folks all performed major surgery on themselves. Some possessed medical training, some did not. Sometimes, things worked out; sometimes, not so much.
1. Soviet explorer Leonid Rogozov successfully performed a self-appendectomy in 1961.
2. Australian veterinarian Robert Kerr McLaren did the same in a Philippines jungle in the 1940s — without anesthesia.
3. U.S. founding father Gouverneur Morris (1753-1816) was suffering from a painful urinary blockage. He took a sliver of whalebone and attempted to physically clear the obstruction. A fatal penile infection resulted.
4. Kurtis Kaser was a Nebraska farmer whose leg got caught in 2019 in a grain auger, a sort of spiral conveyor device. The auger began consuming his leg. Kaser used a pocketknife to sever the remains of his lower leg, then crawled to a telephone to call for help. He survived.
5. Ines Ramirez Perez was a 40-year-old pregnant woman living in a remote part of southern Mexico. In 2000, she went into labor. The nearest clinic was 50 miles away. After 12 hours of labor, Perez downed some hard liquor and used a 6-inch knife to perform a C-section on herself. Both she and the baby survived.
Best medicine
A patient was asked to fill out a form before seeing the doctor.
After name and address, the form asked for “Nearest Relative.”
The patient wrote, “walking distance.”
Hypochondriac’s guide
Jargon aphasia is a type of language disorder in which an individual’s speech is incomprehensible, but it appears to make sense to them. Expected words are replaced by illogical substitutes that may sound the same or by random sounds.
It is usually the result of traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative disease and a penchant for running for political office.
Observation
“I was surprised when I started getting old. I always thought it was one of those things that would happen to someone else.”
— American comedian George Carlin (1937-2008)
Medical history
This week in 1955, Ian Donald made his first investigation of the use of ultrasound in medical diagnosis. Working in the research department of the boiler makers Babcock and Wilcox at Renfrew, Scotland, Donald used an industrial ultrasonic metal flaw detector to image tumors from human organs.
He was familiar with sonar from his service in World War II, and he considered this to be a similar use of reflected sound to image the internal structure of the sample tissues. With other engineers, Donald refined the idea for clinical application and, in 1958, used ultrasound to diagnose a huge, easily removable ovarian cyst in a woman whom doctors had concluded had inoperable stomach cancer.
Med school
Q: What is dyscrhonometria?
A: A brain dysfunction in which affected individuals cannot accurate estimate how much time has ed, also called distorted time perception. It is similar to other forms of dyslexia.
LaFee is vice president of communications for the Sanford Burnham Prebys research institute.
