Monday, June 15, 2009
Medical news of the obvious
It should be obvious but ... That's what researchers at King's College London predicted when they embarked on a study to find out if the average person's knowledge of anatomy has improved over the past 40 years. But upon being shown pictures of the male or female body with certain areas shaded, fewer than half of the 722 study participants correctly identified the heart and almost 70% were wrong about the location of the lungs -- even if they were currently receiving treatment involving the organ in question. The findings were published in BMC Family Practice. Researchers astutely point out that their findings bode ill for doctor-patient communication. No doubt everyone is more satisfied with the encounter when they're on the same page about which body parts are being discussed.
Labels: medical news of the obvious
posted by Janet Colwell at
9:00 AM
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- Medical news of the obvious
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3 Comments:
It might seem obvious, but if you take into account dextrocardia with complete situs inversus (all internal organs reversed, i.e., mirror image) then those who identified the organs on the opposite side would also be correct. That would probably reduce the percentage of people who were incorrect.
Anon, I'm hoping that you're kidding, but you didn't leave any type of indication that was the case, so ...
I'm sure that the study subjects who pointed to the organs on the wrong side of the body were really having an internal debate whether the outlines presented to them represented a patient with a developmental anomaly occurring in 1 in 20,000 individuals. The study authors were idiots for leaving that possibility out of the equation. I suggest you write to the BMC Family Practice journal to complain immediately.
In fact, I heard that right after they were finished participating in the study, many of the subjects then went off to Washington to show Obama how to solve the budget deficit and to counsel all the numbskulls at MD Anderson on how to cure cancer.
Sadly, the study is real. You can't make up this stuff.
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