The hospital environment has always, and will continue to be, a very toxic and risk laden environment especially for the very young and very old patient. The dictum, “The longer you stay in the hospital, the greater the chance of you not leaving alive” remains today as true as it was 100 years ago.

We Americans often think of “medical services” (I wont dignify what our US system serves up as real “health care”) as a means to postpone death, the threat of which horrifies many patients (excluding those seeking narcotics) presenting during the night to the emergency rooms.

The sad reality is that we physicians can do very little to postpone death for especially the frail elderly. What is tragic is that our nation is spending our grandchildren’s money chasing this folly. They will have to foot the bill when the Medicare Trust fund dries up, spent by us baby boomers who will demand everything. //

American Medicine is not so good, not so available and not so effective as we think. It now costs ten times as much for half the result. I think statistics have been used to baffle us. I think the new diseases are actually word games, like Obama waffling on about what is a tax. Normal human aging is a disease nowadays, so it is a free for all for the plutocrats. It has nothing to do with health.

My dad was killed by a hospital bureaucracy, by a blood clot six days after emergency back surgery, and about 20 minutes after getting back from a die injection. He was supposed to be brought back flat on his back on a gurney, but was mistakenly brought back upright sitting in a wheelchair.

When my sister dragged a nurse in to get one to look at Dad, and the nurse recognized the problem, she called a nurse at the desk to call code blue. That nurse said she was busy. A scream the second time got her calling.

Dad was worth $54,000 to the hospital for the harvesting and handling of the tissues they were able to harvest in spite of the blood clots and radioactive dye. The bill for just the hospital was $11,000. He was an iatrogenic casualty at the least.

A single security guard with no relatives, I once met where my cousin works, disappeared after going to the same hospital for a hernia surgery. Six weeks later his place of employment got a notice of his death. I would not be surprised if that poor guy signed the organ donor card, or that it even made a difference if he did.

Pneumonia is one of the most common forms of infection to occur among patients who are hospitalized as a result of inpatient surgery. Hospitalized patients are in a weakened state possibly from the illness or injury that required their confinement and/or possibly from the surgery itself. When a patients resistence is low, they are prime candidates for infection. This is especially true of the elderly and of chronically ill patients. Think of the number of non-patients there are in a hospital on any given day, doctors and nurses to be sure, but what about the visitors? Family members and friends who come to visit hospitalized patients often come into close proximity to confined patients, bringing with them any number of germs.

Doctors want to get post-surgical patients on their feet as soon as posssible following surgery to prevent fluids from building up in the lungs, precisely because such patients are susceptable to infection, which can easily turn into pneumonia. Hospitals are eager to keep their facilities sanitized and germ free to the greatest extent possible.

Yes, both doctors, nurses and hospital facilities can do better in keeping themselves sanitary and maintaining a grem-free environment. But I don't believe it's fair to saythese professionals don't care.

Many patients are