WCN

A couple of interesting articles from the White Coat Notes web site.

One is a report of a study wherein discharged hospital patients were surveyed to determine how incident-free their stay had been. Come to find out that they reported twice as many complications as appeared in the official hospital record. The good news is, life-threatening or serious complications did appear in the records; the bad news is, hospitals thought that was the only source of useful information regarding outcomes, and were judging their effectiveness accordingly.

The other reports the surprising conclusion that breast self-exams might not actually do all that much good. They're not going so far as to recommend not doing it, but the finding is that BSEs tend to lead to a increase in the number of benign biopsies without a corresponding reduction in the cancer rate - and its possible that the biopsies, themselves, are actually harmful (though, compared to the cancer, at a significantly lower level).