Apparently, some boffin in a lab has worked out that patients who clench and unclench their fists a lot when getting blood taken can have falsely raised potassium (K+) levels.
Fucking brilliant. She only had to look at 200,000 patients to work this out.
Let's make this very simple for the boffins:
1. We've known this for decades.
2. We only ask people to clench and unclench when we can't get a sample any other way.
3. Patients who we can't get a sample out of usually also have the tourniquet on for ages (raising K+) and have more bruising from the difficult attempt (raising K+).
4. You don't get a choice between taking blood with clenching/unclenching and taking blood without. In these patients, you get a choice of getting blood with clenching/unclenching or not getting blood at all.
5. K+ is not the only think we are testing for.
6. Don't you have something better to do with your time?
7. Er....
8. Actually, that's it.
9. No. Really.
Still, the author did manage to get one fabulous quote out:
"It seems to be hit or miss whether they get trained to avoid using this procedure."
Hit and miss? Taking blood? Nice one, Vanessa. What's next, following 200,000 bears into the woods to see if they shit?
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Actually the biggest factor in potassium levels in our patients is the transfer to the lab. Samples are taken from the practice in a little van that then trundles around town for a bit visiting other practices until it gets to the hospital. Transit time and temperature are very significant. I have a nice little graph of the changes in level by the month of the year.
If you want someone who has done it properly just read Transport and temperature effects on measurement of serum and plasma potassium. from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
You forgot to mention the effect that leaving the sample lying around on cells for hours has on the K+, sooo many tests get repeated for this reason, inconveniencing all concerned.
Hold on though, if a standard of no more than 1hr were introduced then there would have to be a bean-counting manager to oversee said target!
Whatever next - boffins warning us that spurious streptococcal infections can arise following operator contamination obtaining blood cultures ?
...........it's why we have to pay them the big money.
I'm afraid this is another classic piece of Mainstream Media Bullshit Agenda Syndrome.
They have decided that doctors/nurses/anyone working in the NHS is shit at their jobs and not trained properly.
So any old crap piece of amateur research that fits with this picture is published.
Think 'MMR sells papers'.
You might as well kill babies, skin them, make paper from their skin, then print money on the paper.
As a member of the public I am goiung to stop reading this blog as I suspect it is bad for my blood pressure. I wouldn't want anyone to get a false reading.
just fucking all leave the nhs
send out direct debit forms to the public
cut out the middleman politicans
provide a decent service
http://notdrrant.blogspot.com/
The death of Dr Rant?
No posts for over a week - has frank finally done it? Is this how it ends - not with a roar but a whimper - a last gasp? I just wonder, the great thing about this blog was always it's sense of irony and humour. Just look though at what the govt. has done - set Dr's against patients and patients against Dr's. There should be no "sides" but there are and both are to blame. Too many of my colleagues no longer give a shit or are burned out - too many patients abuse the system and have entirely unreasonable expectations of a system which has been serially fucked with for nothing more than headlines which disguise the manifest problems which beset the UK.
All I ever wanted to do was to help my patients and be the best Dr I could be but I'm made to tick fucking boxes and be an apologist for Gordon fucking Brown and his smoke and mirrors approach to running our country.
I read franks blog, I read the notdrrant blog. It is all beyond farce. How can frank carry on when the govt. releases blatant lies about what is happening and what people want? How can you lampoon a system that already lampoons itself? I mean the article quoted here - it's old old news - and it's just a smoke screen for a bad Iraq story or the fact Halifax shares just tanked! Feed the publics obsession with health and frighten the fuck out of them - it'll stop them thinking! I think no- one has kind of summed it up - just shut the doors and duck the NHS. Maybe in a private system I'll get to do the very privilaged job of being as good a dr as I can be without the goal posts changing every month - the folk that come to see me will want to do so and together hopefully we get make lives better. Emigration has never, ever seemed a better idea.
Goodbye Frank you were the last howl of a mortally wounded beast.
Actually I think we just happen to be taking a break at the same time.
Usually at least one member of the team remains at the helm at any one time, but none of us could be arsed the last couple of weeks.
Sorry.
Do the phlebotomists know this? I have amazing veins but they always get me to 'clench' unclench', perhaps they are talking pelvic floor.
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