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Hi,

You just found a (non-US) board-registered physician and anesthesia resident who has used and, where indicated, will use ketamine for the induction and maintenance of general anesthesia in human adults.

For further information on what the FDA, and thus the government of the United States of America believes are the indications for ketamine in humans, please click here.

Looking forward to the retraction of your very own statement...

Actually, Slashdotters are very diverse crowd, many of us are healthcare professionals, work in healthcare IT, and as a sampling of the general population, deal with many health challenges ourselves.

To to original poster: I've taken schizophrenia suppressing medications for it's dopamine suppression effects to help quell migraines. One thing on them - the side effects can be brutal. Make certain your your sister stays on the medication, unless their MD changes the treatment plan. Also, read about your sister's medications and look for side effects. If you're involved in your sister's treatment, be sure to let your doctors know about any negative manifestions. Some of these effects can be permanent - most concerning to me was the chance for tardive dyskinesia, involuntary muscle movements and twitches. It seems that a lifetime of very obvious, constant nervous tics could be almost as bad as the mental problems.

The best advice I can give is to read as much as you can find. Here is a link to the Medscape Schizophrenia Resource Center (free registration required). I've found Medscape to be a very helpful site for healthcare information, and the resource centers have tons of useful information. Since these articles are targeted at doctors, you may need to read with a medical dictionary handy at first, but the information is as up-to-date you will find. It has proven invaluable to me.

I wish you the best of luck - chronic health problems - mental or physical - are difficult for patient, family, and friends. I'll be certain to keep you and your family in my prayers.

I strongly feel this is important... don't get health information from slashdot... Medscape
is a very good source of information which is geared towards a more scientific-oriented crowd than sites such as WebMD. (Although Medscape was recently bought by WebMD, it existed previously as a source of information primarily for health care providers, thus of a more technical nature, and WebMD seems to have left it relatively alone).

That just pisses me off, all the anti-drugs lies. Pot doesn't cause brain damage whatsoever. Getting drunk regularly can cause brain damage

Research also show that the "memory loss" is only short term. "What was I talking about?", that sort of thing. Again, similar effects exist in alcohol. "I got so drunk last night, I can't remember half of what I did"

Don't get me started of alcohol versus weed in a) teenage pregnacy, b) rape, c) violent assaults & murders, d) marital breakdowns. I could go on, but I got high...(another bull anti-drugs message)

Well, well, Osteoarthritis doesn't only attack seniors nowadays, but also a newborn species of space shuttle. Seems that NASA should begin looking for geriatrics experts. :-)

I work for a company that does just what you're asking. Go take a look at www.medscape.com. I'm one of the UNIX Administrators and we offer products right along these lines.

More recently, there was a nice summary of research done over at Medscape which I discussed at my website. Since I'm an oncologist and an electrical engineer, I happen to have a keen interest in the issue from both sides.

If you take a look at my comments on the matter, you may find some food for thought. Basically, this sort of radiation may well pose a threat to our health, but it may do so at such a low rate and take so long to show effects that it may not even matter.

Look at smoking: if you smoke, you have a 7000% increased risk of developing some sort of aerodigestive cancer (oral cavity, larynx, esophagus, lung, etc.) as well as a much higher risk of cervical cancer in women, increased risk of skin cancers, bladder cancer, pancreatic cancer, yadda yadda yadda. That data was easy to find and tease out due to the incredible rarity of these tumors in nonsmokers.

However, now you're talking about much more rare tumors, and not a very large rate of increased risk. You don't even need statistics to see that smoking has a high association with cancer, but when you look at human tumors that only affect 1 in 100,000 people, then try to see if the rate is 2 in 100,000 among those exposed (or, as is more likely, 1.1 in 100,000 among those exposed) you are in a different world. You will need amazingly large populations in order to show a statistically significant difference of even 100% higher risk. And then, even if you do, your research is subject to criticism because you aren't going to be able to do a randomized trial. All retrospective, cohort, or other nonrandomized trials can be picked apart by either the phone manufacturers or consumer interest groups (the two sides, as I see them, in this debate).

In the end, you also have to ask yourself if it matters to you. I know lots of patients who continue to smoke because they just damn like it, and forget trying to get them to quit. They'd literally rather get another cancer than give up their favorite habit. Lots of cell phone (or insert your favorite high tech device here) users will just say to hell with it and continue to use the devices. After all, I still love to ride motorcycles, even after working in an ER. ;-)

I think one cannot look to institutions, commercial or otherwise, to look after one's own interest. To do so is to invite totalitarianism. From a certain point of view, what we are seeing is just natural progression of society from a paternal state to one in which people have to take more personal responsibility for their own well-being.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's acceptable for companies to outright deceive the public - such as the case of rBGH milk. But I think that is a sympton of the fact that we are in a transitional period from a paternal state to a personal society - the counter-acting mechanism is yet to be formed. Some people would say that's what the government/the press are for. But I disagree.

Most people expect their government to look out for their well-being, based on a deep seated belief about what civilized society is all about. But things change, human civilization evolve. What we've been taught to believe is 'right' is just that, a belief. That doesn't make it 'real' or 'right'. The fact of the matter is, the insitutions (government, press, church, etc) we came to rely upon no longer work.

Once we realize that there is no going back to the past, instead of trying to fix these institutions, perhaps we should concentrate on inventing new ways of safeguarding our own lives. After all, what's the point of all the supposed education people get these days if they can't be bothered thinking? According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube. So I don't believe 'busy lifestyle imposed by modern society' is a very good excuse.

Right now, we have more free time and resource than ever before in human history. The average middle-class individual in the Western World now has more power at his/her disposal than ever before. But one cannot have true Freedom and Power without Responsibility. Every social change brings about disruption and sometimes genuine misery. But if one step back and look at the big picture I think it would be obvious that life is good and as a whole, things have never been better.

Medscape is the best professional medical website because

• It's logically organised by subject area,

• It has keyword searching for papers in a wide range of academic journals,
  

• By focussing on continuous professional development they've created a great resource for all types of medical personnel.

• Its search function gives easy access to abstracts and bibliographic data for almost all the journals it indexes.

• It has easy access to the full text articles from the search results (this is free for some of their bought-in content).

Question: Are there any other websites that even come close to beating Medscape? To qualify, a site would need to offer at least free keyword searches, free bibliographic data and abstracts covering a wide range of journals. Full text articles would obviously be chargeable for any website indexing the academic journals.

Medscape out of all the medical websites deserves most to be able to raise money.

When's the Medscape IPO?

Research has shown the cornea can suffer permanent injury following laser surgery in respect of altered immunological function, abnormal cell morphology and (blood) circulatory problems. Not enough is known about these long-term problems since PRK et al are still relatively new treatments. If you don't have access to medical literature, you might consider registering with www.Medscape.com and searching for corneal damage and PRK in the MEDLINE database. Latent corneal damage can take years to become symptomatic, i.e. painful or visually disturbing, and is very hard to treat -- specifically, there is no treatment that artificially thickens the cornea to replace the PRK-ablated endothelial tissue. Before deciding on laser eyesight-correction, you might want to check out the case histories of laser-treated patients whose eyesight has deteriorated years after the surgery. In some cases, patients with superb initial results (correction to 20/20 or better) have quite suddenly begun suffering serious eyesight deterioration more than 5 years after their operations.

Case history:

• A 41-year-old man who had photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) for myopia developed corneal haze. After intensive treatment with topical corticosteroids, he developed elevated intraocular pressure and optic nerve damage. Because of an inadequate response to steroid discontinuation and medical treatment, the patient required a glaucoma filtering procedure. Corticosteroid-induced glaucoma is a possible complication of the treatment often associated with PRK. Careful patient screening and disclosure of this risk are imperative.

It can be secondary to fracture, it can occur with pregnancy due to swelling of the tunnel sheath, is associated with inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. In about 50% of people there's no predisposing cause that can be identified.

Because the median nerve supplies sensation and motor function to skin/muscles around the thumb, index and middle fingers that's where most patients will notice things going on.

typical case is an aching wrist, sometimes worse at night when the arm is warm, together with variable numbness/pins and needles in the fingers I've already mentioned. Prolonged disuse of the affected muscles will lead to wasting in the muscles at the base of the thumb (palm-side) - the thenar muscles.

Disclaimer: Very little in medicine is 'typical' :)

You can also have a feeling of clumsiness or loss of control associated with fine motor movements (eg, sewing, buttoning a shirt) in the affected hand.

It doesn't normally involve the ring or little fingers (which are innervated for sensation mostly by the unaffected ulnar nerve) and it generally doesn't involve sensation on the back of the hand (provided largely by the radial nerve). I can't recall seeing anyone with visible swelling of tendons in association with CTS but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

It's diagnosed by nerve conduction studies, which are electro-mechanical tests. Basically, a small electrical impulse is applied to the median nerve at set points on its course down your arm and the time it takes to evoke a response at standard intervals is measured. As someone said, it can be a little uncomfortable but most people who have actually suffered from CTS will tolerate it pretty well.

Phalen's test is supposed to be a reliable (if not 100% certain) clinical test for CTS. You hold your forearm vertically and let the hand flex forward, palm down. It's positive for suspected CTS if it reproduces the typical symptoms within 1-2 minutes.

CTS is a diagnosis made by exclusion of all other diagnoses which can cause a similar clinical picture - it's the last cab off the rank, so to speak.

There's a few different methods of treatment/management. General approach is to begin with conservative management (decrease use of hand/repetitive stresses that might be aggravating it, wrist splint esp. worn at night) progressing to therapy with anti-inflammatory drugs. If that fails, or if the CTS is severe then carpal tunnel decompression might be suggested.

Surgery can be done through open incision or endoscopically (key-hole surgery). Complications can include damage to nerves supplying some motor function to the thumb and some sensory function to parts of the hand and/or a feeling of 'weakness' of grip that can last several months. Even with the surgery option you can get recurrence of CTS, although I'm not sure how prevalent that repeat episode is.

you might want to take a look at www.medscape.com or any number of offline references on orthopaedics for more information.