# 3180
When I was a young medic, many eons ago, it was still permissible to mark charts and and patient assessment forms with acronyms that you never would dare to write today.
Most of the time (I hope) we were smart enough just to use these terms as verbal medical slang out of earshot of our patients, and not commit them to paper.
Some, I’m sure, still exist and are legitimate.
FUO, for instance, was Fever of Undetermined Origin.
Pretty innocuous, and unlikely to come back and bite you in a court of law.
I suspect it is still used most places.
Others are far less PC (but a lot funnier!), and would no doubt prove `problematic’ in any legal review of a patient’s chart.
Some of the more famous ones include:
GOMER - Get Out of My Emergency Room (reserved for nuisance patients, often `frequent flyers’)
CTD - Circling The Drain (Patients near death, not expected to survive)
DFO - Done Fell Out (anything from fainting to cardiac arrest)
ETOH- Abbreviation for Ethanol (but can also stand for Extremely Trashed Or Hammered – i.e. Drunk)
FDGB – Fall Down, Go Boom (same as DFO, but usually elderly)
FLK- Funny looking kid
Positive `O’ Sign – Comatose, mouth wide open
Positive `Q’ Sign – Comatose , mouth wide open, tongue protruding.
PITA – Pain In The Ass
And perhaps the most famous of all;
GOK – God Only Knows (perplexing symptoms)
And my personal favorite, a sign of exasperation when all conventional treatment fails;
TEETH – Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy
Which brings me to the actual point of this blog.
I recently came across an extraordinary claim regarding homeopathy and the Spanish Flu, that is being widely reprinted on the Internet.
I’ll just reprint a snippet.
Was homeopathy successful in treating the flu epidemic of 1918?
Yes.
While the mortality rate of people treated with traditional medicine and drugs was 30 percent, those treated by homeopathic physicians had mortality rate of 1.05 percent.
Of the fifteen hundred cases reported at the Homeopathic Medical Society of the District of Columbia there were only fifteen deaths.
The article then goes on to say that homeopathy was 98% successful in the treatment of Spanish Flu during the epidemic of 1918.
I be really impressed if it weren’t for one inconvenient fact:
The mortality rate during the Spanish Flu in the US averaged just over 2% . . . not 30% as suggested by this report.
So the survival rate averaged 98% in the US.
Or just about what the authors of this report claim for those receiving homeopathic treatment.
And since the mortality rate varied around the country, and in different populations, a survival rate of 1.05 percent among a small cohort of patients wouldn’t be surprising – regardless of the treatment received.
Whether you believe in homeopathy (to call me skeptical would be an understatement), or not, whenever you see a mangling (or if we want to be kind, a `cherry picking’) of statistics such as the one above, alarm bells should go off.
I’m not anti all alternative medicine, and in fact, have been known to use supplements and non-traditional treatments for myself in the past.
While I don’t advocate their use in this blog, I do believe in keeping an open mind about such things; just not so open that my brains fall out.
If someone has faith in homeopathy, and wants to try it to treat their influenza, I’ve no problem with that. I’m less thrilled when it comes to pushing the idea on other people, however.
A lot of nontraditional things will be tried during a pandemic, often out of desperation.
Maybe we’ll learn something.
Some, in fact, may prove useful.
Most will have little or no benefit, and some may even be harmful.
Sounds a lot like traditional medicine, doesn’t it?
If there is anything positive to come out of a pandemic, perhaps our knowledge base on alternative and traditional treatments will grow.
Wars and pandemics often help spark advances in medical knowledge.
Although they are awfully hard ways to accrue knowledge.
Over the coming months I expect to see a great many `cures’ and `preventions’ for the flu advocated or advertised on the Internet .
More than ever, the caution of Caveat Emptor applies.
Already the FDA has notified a number of Internet sites that they are making unlawful claims about their products.
You can visit their site, and see the growing list of products and websites that the FDA considers fraudulent, here:
