How to define death.

As technologies advance further and further something that seems so simple as to say if somebody is dead or not becomes more and more complicated. Enter functional-MRI into the picture.
For people who came into my blog though I wrote a little bit more here.

Grand Rounds 101!!

Got my first link ever, and even better from the 101st Grand Rounds!!! A big thanks to Protect the Airway and tune in to the next grand rounds...

Negligence

Today at work, I was forced to report negligence towards an elderly patient. I feel very sorry for this situation. This is the third time I have seen the same patient in a very short period of time. He always comes in a very poor state of hygiene. It is sad. His family doesn't seem to give him any of the medications necessary, they do not follow our orientations, and most of all they refuse to put him into a home.
They say they have to work and cannot watch him during the day, which is why now he is filled with pressure sores from his occipitus down to his ankles, they do not give him his medications that was prescribed because besides the fact that it is expensive, that will make him evacuate more often (which in fact is part of his treatment), and diapers are expensive as well. Today he came in with two diapers, which the nurse explained to me, make them last longer for the contents of one diaper will spill onto the other.
The most outrageous fact of all is that the family always is hard demanding on the whole staff to watch out for this patient: he is so sick, this is absurd, how could the let him go out of the hospital in this state. He always goes home a little bit better, but a few days later comes back a total wreck.
Which is why I made the choice of reporting him. Doesn't this run away from the medical-patient relationship? Should I have confronted the family more before doing this?

Transparency

Great initiative: http://perfil.transparencia.org.br/

Null Votes

In Brazil, with the growing unhappiness derived from the various political scandals that always result in no punishment to the people involved, people more and more want to find a way to vent their frustration.
This has resulted in a campaign for the null vote. While I agree in part, it is not for the reason that is posted in an email circulation brazil defending the null vote. There they state that 50% plus one vote will lead to the voiding of the whole election process. The brazilian electoral code clearly states in article 219-224 that this is not the case, and it is very clear that null votes simply are not considered for the elections. The president is determined by the majority of the valid votes, and null and blank votes are not valid. So if you get an extreme case where 99% of the votes are null or blank, then the president will be elected on the majority of the 1% of votes left.
OBS:In Brazil we vote using an electronic device that is the same throughout the country. To vote null in it, one must type a number that does not belong to a candidate such as 99, and the confirm it.
To the law, a null vote is a misvote, meaning somebody made a mistake while voting, it is not considered a protest.
But the reason I do support the null vote is that even though it will not be considered, an election won with a high number of null votes, will somehow show the general insatisfaction

Positive de-action

Educafro is an organization in Brazil that is promoting the racial quotas to be established in public universities thinking that will solve racial minorities disparities. I cannot begin to believe how somebody can buy this argument! I mean, establishing the necessity that a racial minority such as indians or blacks need their own special quota to get into an university is saying that their are not as mentally able as the other students who don't need quotas! We could begin by asking what is a race, what is it to be black? Is there going to be someone who's going to look at my skin and say I'm black?! No, it seems you can define yourself however you want to. What if somebody wants to take advantage of this, somebody who is just a little tanned and marks himself as black, what then? Genetic studies of races reveal that there is no such think as a black or white race and that the polymorphisms are much greater than that. This quota politic is pure demagogy! It's just to divert attention to the real problem: the lack of a decent public elemantary and high schools that would naturally raise students who would be capable of going through university admission tests just like any other person. Goverments in the past decades have been seriously dismantling the whole public education: giving lousy wages for teachers, students are so badly prepared that sometimes they can get to eighth grade not knowing how to read!!!!!

Self-inflicted diseases

I talked about this a while ago, one in four doctors in the UK are starting to think the same thing: Should we pay for self-inflicted diseases such as lung cancer and cirrhosis... As I mentioned in my post, I think there might be something good out of it if, and only if, you ensure free treatment to whomever is engaged in trying to stop their addiction.
Source: Kevin M.D. weblog