Specialty Focus 9/20/22: Handing the surgeon’s scalpel to a robot + A discussion of palliative care

September 20, 2022 | Volume XI | Issue 38

4 out of 5 pregnancy-related deaths in the US are preventable, CDC finds

Deidre McPhillips reports for CNN Health:

The vast majority of deaths among pregnant women and new mothers in the United States are preventable, according to a new report.

For more than 4 out of 5 women who died during pregnancy, during delivery or up to a year postpartum – more than 84% – death could have been avoided with “reasonable changes” by health care providers, the community, the patient or others.

The data, published Monday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is based on detailed assessments of more than 1,000 pregnancy-related deaths between 2017 and 2019.

Handing the surgeon’s scalpel to a robot

James Gaines

After decades of merely assisting doctors, are sophisticated machines ready to take charge?

In 2004, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) dangled a $1 million prize for any group that could design an autonomous car that could drive itself through 142 miles of rough terrain from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Thirteen years later, the Department of Defense announced another award — not for a robot car this time, but for autonomous, robotic doctors.

Robots have been found in the operating suite since the 1980s for things like holding a patient’s limbs in place, and later for laparoscopic surgery, in which surgeons can use remote-controlled robot arms to operate on the human body through tiny holes instead of huge cuts. But for the most part these robots have been, in essence, just very fancy versions of the scalpels and forceps...

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A discussion of palliative care, death with dignity and MAID laws

Katherine Hobbs reports for WJCT News via Health News Florida:

Palliative care is the rare specialty of medicine that seeks to find peace between the body and the mind. It is also rapidly growing in the United States.

Since 2000, the percentage of U.S. hospitals with 50 or more beds and a palliative care program has more than tripled. As of 2019, more than 81% of those hospitals had a palliative care team.

Despite that growth, there is a lot of confusion as to what exactly palliative medicine is.

STD Cases Keep Rising in the U.S. Here’s Why

In the Loop

Christian Bryant explores the consistent rise in STD/STI transmission in the U.S., including how the pandemic might have made numbers even worse.

Public Health has been top of mind for many of us for the last couple of years but now there's a growing public health problem that has largely flown under the radar a growing rate of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. The number of STD and STI cases among Americans have been rising steadily...

Watch the video HERE.

Inside

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