Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
PULSE OXIMETRY
PULSE OXIMETRY _____ Prologue: All of us know how important oxygen is for our survival. Hypoxia means low oxygen supply and/or utilization by organ or tissue. Hypoxemia means low oxygen content of arterial blood. Hypoxaemia invariably leads to hypoxia but hypoxia can occur even without hypoxaemia. Arterial blood oxygen saturation is now considered the 5th vital sign, joining: temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate and blood pressure. Hypoxemia can be present before recognizable signs of respiratory distress become evident and the traditional sign of circumoral cyanosis is a late indicator of decreased oxygenation. Blood gas analysis was for many years the only available method of detecting hypoxemia in critically ill patients, but this technique is painful, has potential complications, and does not provide immediate or continuous data. Pulse oximetry is an objective estimation of oxygenation, and it is simple, reliable, and accurate when used appropriately. It has the unique advantage of […]
YOGA
YOGA: _ Marilyn Monroe performs dhanurasana (bow pose) in 1948: Indra Devi opened yoga studio in Hollywood in 1948 and discovered ready students among movie stars, who found yoga’s breathing and relaxation techniques useful to their work. Her students included Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson and Marilyn Monroe. ______ Prologue: A considerable number of studies have identified prayer as a frequent and favoured coping method among patients providing each patient with comfort and strength. A variety of studies have attempted to test the efficacy of prayer and found no medical benefit. Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and well-constructed study proved in 2006. The Cochrane Collaboration published a thorough review reaching the same conclusion in 2011 and counselled, “We are not convinced that further trials of this intervention should be undertaken and would prefer to see any resources […]
VACCINE
_____ VACCINE: The figure above shows a victim of smallpox. ______ Prologue: “You let a doctor take a dainty, helpless baby, and put that stuff from a cow, which has been scratched and had dirt rubbed into her wound, into that child. Even, the Jennerians now admit that infant vaccination spreads disease among children. More mites die from vaccination than from the disease they are supposed to be inoculated against.” –George Bernard Shaw, 1929. The world has come a long way since George Bernard Shaw fulminated against vaccination in the 1920s. Small pox was declared eradicated from world in 1980 largely due to small pox vaccine. In 2008, Barack Obama called science on vaccines ‘inconclusive’. But in 2015, the same Barack Obama called science on vaccines “indisputable”. Vaccination was voted by readers of the British Medical Journal in 2007 as one of the four most important developments in medicine of […]
REFRACTIVE ERROR
________________ REFRACTIVE ERROR: ________ Prologue: Way back in 1973 when I was 12 years old and studying in 7th standard, I noticed that I could not read black-board from last bench. Initially I thought that everybody must be finding difficult to read black-board from last bench but it was not the case. Soon I visited eye doctor who found that I have refractive error and he prescribed -4 (minus 4) eyeglasses for me. Since then I have been wearing glasses. Refractive errors are usually present in the childhood and continue in the adult life. Unfortunately, they are not given much importance in our society which is evident from the fact that there is no effective system of pre-school visual examination of children either in the government sector or in the private sector. The earth was formed 4 billion years ago. Society has been around for about twenty thousand years. Spectacles […]
SMARTPHONE
SMARTPHONE: _______ The figure above shows transition of telephone from landline phone to smartphone. _______ Prologue: Alexander Graham Bell’s invention has come a long way since its prototype in 1876. The latest model of telephone requires no external wiring, fits in your pocket, takes dictation, and answers any question in seconds. For most of us, our compulsion to look at that little screen is so powerful that we can’t go for any more than a few minutes without checking it. Smartphones have gained so much significance in our lives that choosing one is a little like choosing a religion. Our preference for either an iPhone or an Android model seems to suggest something fundamental about who we are. Smartphone is a combination phone having computer, web browser, camera, GPS etc and therefore, if you lose your smartphone, you lose everything. There are three screens of the ‘Digital Lifestyle’ in the […]
