DiversityNursing Blog

By LIZ NEPORENT

A 7-year-old boy is one of the first people in the country to receive a potent form of medical marijuana as part of an “extended use” clinical trial to reduce seizures.

Preston Weaver, who lives in Athens, Georgia, has Lennox-Gastaut syndrome which is a severe form of epilepsy. He experiences up to 100 seizures a day, although many are confined to his brain and aren’t noticeable to an observer. There is no known cure for the condition.

“Today’s the day, buddy. We’re not going to have any more of those,” his mom Valarie Weaver, 36, said she told her son as the headed to his first treatment Tuesday.

Her son can't see, walk or talk, Weaver said. Although he's 7, his behavior is more like that of a 2-month-old. But he lights up when he goes in the water and he seems to love the feel of the sun and the wind, Weaver said.

"Our hope is that this treatment will calm down his brain enough so that he will start communicating with us," she said.

Many of the drugs available to treat the syndrome don’t work long term, especially for children. Even with more than a dozen medications Weaver has had no relief.

The active ingredient in Epidiolex, the experimental drug that Weaver and one other child are receiving, is called cannabidiol. It’s also the main active ingredient in marijuana though it doesn’t produce a high.

Dr. Michael Diamond, the interim senior vice president of research for Georgia Regent University said the drug is not legal or approved for use by use by the Food and Drug Administration. The university’s current study, one of only a handful of trials for compassionate use being held around the country, will expand to include 50 children over the next few weeks.

“We are hopeful the drug will reduce the frequency and severity of seizures within a month, but we know it will not work for every child,” he said.

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal approved the trials in April. It took some time to get additional clearance at the federal level, Diamond said.

“No one with a heart could hear the stories of these children and their parents and not want to exhaust every possibility to provide them with the treatment they need to combat this debilitating condition,” said Deal

Weaver told ABC News that she was grateful her son was accepted into the trial though she was disappointed the state legislature had narrowly failed to pass a bill that would have legalized the drug for use with sick children. But, she said, she’s not giving up.

"Even though Preston is on it, Preston and I are still going to fight for all the other ones too, we will be at the capital every single time, we need to be there until this becomes legal and every child in the state has the option for this treatment if they need it," Weaver said.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

Fifty-one years ago, Arthur Lampitt of Granite City, Illinois, smashed his 1963 Thunderbird into a truck. This week during surgery in suburban St. Louis, a 7-inch turn signal lever from that T-Bird was removed from his left arm.

Dr. Timothy Lang removed the lever Wednesday during a 45-minute operation. Lampitt, now 75, is recovering at home.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ( http://bit.ly/1EOtGa6 ) reports that the accident broke Lampitt's hip, drawing attention away from the arm, which healed.

A decade or so ago, his arm set off a metal detector at a courthouse. An X-ray showed a slender object the length of a pencil, but since it caused no pain or hardship, Lampitt was told to let it be.

He was moving concrete blocks a few weeks ago when the arm began to hurt for the first time.

"Everything was fine until it started to get bigger," Lampitt's wife, Betty, said. "The arm started bulging."

Lampitt decided to have surgery. He initially wasn't sure what was in the arm. He wondered if perhaps a medical instrument had been left during the emergency room visit in 1963.

He unearthed a collection of old photos of the mangled Thunderbird taken by a friend at the scene. He noticed the metal blinker lever was missing from the left side of the steering column. He figured that was it, and surgery at City Place Surgery Center in Creve Coeur, Missouri, confirmed it.

"Seven inches long," Lang told Betty.

"Oh, my God," Betty said.

Lang said a protective pocket grew around the lever.

"We see all kinds of foreign objects like nails or pellets, but usually not this large, usually not a turn signal from a 1963 T-Bird," Lang said. "Something this large often gets infected."

Lampitt wasn't sure what he'd do with the lever ? maybe make a key chain out of it.

"We'll figure out something, I am sure," he said.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

Jenna Birch

While cancer can strike anyone — young or old, unhealthy and healthy — we do have some idea of what can affect risk. Genetics often play a role, for instance, as do lifestyle habits. But according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University researchers, much of cancer risk may actually be due to mere chance.

Cancer develops when stem cells of a given tissue make random mistakes, mutating unchecked after one chemical letter of DNA is incorrectly swapped for another — the equivalent of a cell “oops.” It happens without warning, like the body’s roll of the die. 

For the new study, published in the journal Science, researchers wanted to see how much of overall cancer risk was due to these unpreventable random mutations, independent of other factors like heredity and lifestyle. 

“There is this question that is fundamental in cancer research: How much of cancer is due to environmental factors, and how much is due to inherited factors?” Cristian Tomasetti, PhD, a biomathematician and assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells Yahoo Health. “To answer that question, however, the idea came that it would be important to determine first how much of cancer was simply due to ‘replicative chance.’"

To measure this, the researchers plotted the number of stem cell divisions in 31 types of tissues over the course of a lifetime against the lifetime risk of developing cancer in the given tissue. From this chart, the scientists were able to see the correlation between number of divisions and cancer risk — and from that correlation, researchers were able to determine the incidence of cancer in a given tissue due to replicative chance.

Ultimately, researchers found that roughly two-thirds of the cancer incidence was due to this replicative chance, or simply “bad luck.” (However, it’s worth noting researchers did not examine some cancers, such as breast and prostate cancers, because of lack of reliable stem-cell turnover information.)

But don’t assume you’re simply doomed to the hand fate deals you. After additional analysis, researchers found that of the 31 cancers examined, 22 could be explained by “bad luck” — but for the other nine, there was another factor aside from simple chance that likely contributed to the cancer.

This is presumably because environmental and hereditary factors play a role in development. “There are many cancers where primary prevention has huge positive effects, such as vaccines against infectious agents, quitting smoking or other altered lifestyles,” says Tomasetti. 

Incidentally, the cancers where risk could be lowered by primary preventive practices were ones you may expect — diseases like skin cancer, where limiting sun exposure can lower your risk, as well as lung cancer, where avoiding smoking is key. 

Source: www.yahoo.com

By Ronnie Cohen

Millions of people could be trying to measure their blood pressure with untested, inaccurate and potentially dangerous smartphone applications, or apps, a new study finds.

Researchers analyzed the top 107 apps for "hypertension" and "high blood pressure" that are available for download on the Google Play store and Apple iTunes and found that nearly three-quarters offered useful tools for tracking medical data.

But they also found seven Android apps that claimed users needed only to press their fingers onto phone screens or cameras to get blood-pressure readings - claims that scientists say are bogus.

"This technology is really in its nascent stages, and it's not quite ready for prime time," lead author Dr. Nilay Kumar told Reuters Health.

Kumar, an attending physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Harvard Medical School instructor, was surprised to learn that apps marketed as turning smartphones into blood pressure measuring devices had been downloaded at least 900,000 times and as many as 2.4 million times.

"That's concerning that such a small number of apps have been downloaded so many times," he said. "We were surprised by the popularity."

He wasn't sure how the technology supposedly works but said the phone camera appears to read a finger pulse.

"It's really in a research-and-development stage. It's not ready for clinical use. For now, we need to be careful that we are not using things that are inaccurate and could be potentially dangerous," he said.

Apps that inaccurately measure blood pressure could lead to false alarms and possibly fatal false assurances, Kumar said.

About one in three American adults has high blood pressure, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also known as hypertension, the condition has been called the silent killer because it often shows no warning symptoms but increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, two leading causes of death.

A growing number of hypertension patients use mobile-health technologies to track and manage their conditions, the authors write in the Journal of the American Society of Hypertension.

The study, conducted earlier this year, in general found good news about blood pressure apps. The majority, or 72 percent, of the most popular apps allowed consumers to keep track of their medical data. About a quarter could directly export recorded information to physicians' offices. And nearly a quarter included tools to enhance medication adherence.

But healthcare agencies, such as universities, helped develop only a tiny fraction of the apps, 2.8 percent, the study found.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates medical devices, has not approved any of the blood pressure apps, the authors write.

The study's findings raise "serious concerns about patient safety" and reveal an "urgent need for greater regulation and oversight in medical app development," the authors say.

Dr. Karen Margolis, an internist and director of clinical research at HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research in Minneapolis, would also like to see more oversight.

"The idea that you're going to be able to stick your finger on the camera of your smartphone and get an accurate blood pressure reading is pretty farfetched right now," she told Reuters Health.

Margolis has studied devices to measure blood pressure but was not involved in the current study.

"There is virtually no information at all about how accurate these apps are," she said. "It doesn't sound to me like it's ready for routine use in any way that medical decisions could be based on."

Regulatory authority over smartphone apps that can be turned into medical devices remains unclear, Kumar said.

Writing earlier this year in The New England Journal of Medicine, a group of three lawyers, led by Nathan G. Cortez of the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas, warned that mobile health, or mHealth, poses a challenge for the FDA.

"Many members of Congress and industry believe that regulation will stifle mHealth innovation," the lawyers wrote. "The true challenge, however, is creating a regulatory framework that encourages high-value innovation while also preventing the market from being overcome with products that are ineffective or unsafe."

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

By LIZ NEPORENT

Adopting a stray dog while in the midst of battling a disease that was deemed incurable hardly seems like the best timing, yet that’s exactly what Bill Hogencamp and his wife Kathy decided to do.

They believe that decision helped save his life.

Hogencamp, an 84-year-old semi-retired architect from Phenix, Alabama, was diagnosed with incurable cancer of the gall bladder, liver, colon and the lining of his abdomen back in May. Doctors told him he wouldn’t live to see Christmas.

“I have seven children and I’ve traveled all around the world,” Hogencamp said. “I thought if this is it, then this is it.”

Hogencamp chose to undergo treatment even though his doctor told him there was no hope, he recalled. In October, he had an operation to remove three large tumors.

Eleven days after his surgery, his wife was on her way to pick him up from a rehabilitation facility when she spotted a small white dog wandering down the middle of the road, in danger of being hit by a car. Although she was in a rush, she said something compelled her to stop and rescue the pup.

“He walked past six other cars right up to the side of my car and put his paws up on the door,” she recalled.

While his wife was hooked on the cute little dog right away, Hogencamp needed some convincing.

“I hadn’t had a dog in twenty years and I had no desire to have a dog,” he said. “I kept saying we need to find his owner.”

Despite an extensive search and nearly a dozen false leads, the Hogencamps were never able to track down the dog’s owner. They learned from a vet they visited during their search that he was a Maltese, probably around 6 years old, fixed but not chipped.

Besides, the dog very quickly won Hogencamp over. They soon became inseparable.

Whenever Hogencamp sat down, the dog -- who they named Mahjong after Kathy’s favorite card game -- would jump in his lap. Whenever Hogencamp napped, Mahjong would curl up next to him. When Hogencamp returned home after being out, Mahjong would hop onto his hind legs and dance with joy.

As he and his wife settled into life with a dog, Hogencamp underwent chemotherapy. Just before the holiday he received some miraculous news: Tests showed that he was now cancer free.

The doctors are at a loss to explain this amazing turn of events, Hogencamp’s wife said. But she said the family believes that Mahjong has played a huge part in her husband’s recovery.

“The dog seemed to know right away that Bill was sick and it was his job to take care of him -- and Bill knew it was his job to take care of the dog,” she said.

Hogencamp agreed. He said their relationship gave both him and the dog a sense of purpose. Although he knows he owes much of his cure to great medical care and a lot of luck, he said that he is convinced the little white dog was sent to him to help him get better.

As they celebrate Christmas, Hogencamp said he has two final chemotherapy treatments. He said he’s spending the day with friends, family and of course, Mahjong.

“My life has been a miracle,” Hogencamp said. “And now Mahjong is part of that miracle.”

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

By Eun Kyung Kim

Even before she had a groom in mind, Katie Breland Hughes knew she wanted to walk down the aisle at her wedding on her own two feet.

It became one of her initial goals after a horrific car accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. But first, she needed to survive her injuries.

“Honestly, I had so many skin graft surgeries and so many burns, my first goal was just to sit up in the bed," said Hughes, now 27. "I was literally at rock bottom."

In October 2011, the Louisiana personal trainer and physical therapy assistant missed a stop sign while driving home from an appointment with a client. A truck hit her vehicle broadside, and Hughes went flying through her windshield. She landed in a ditch and, seconds later, her burning car landed on top of her, searing her back.

Conscious throughout the ordeal, Hughes knew she was either paralyzed or that her legs were amputated because she couldn’t feel either one.

“Immediately, I started asking myself all the physical therapy questions. Is my spinal cord severed? What kind of injury is this? How far up? How low down?” she recalled for TODAY.com. 

At the hospital, doctors told Hughes that she would never walk again. But during a nine-hour surgery to insert rods and plates along her spine to stabilize it, they learned that Hughes' spinal cord wasn’t severed as they originally thought. 

“That was all I needed to hear to keep pushing forward,” she said. “That was kind of my prayer.”

After her 100-day hospital stay, Hughes went home and immediately started training. An athlete all her life —she was supposed to run a marathon the week after her crash — exercise had always given Hughes an emotional outlet. After the accident, her love of exercise proved critical to her recovery, and to attaining the new goal she had created for herself.

“I told my sister from the beginning, I will not get married — whoever it be to, or whenever it happens — I will not do it until I can walk down the aisle. I just won’t be in a wheelchair,” she said. “So that was always a goal. I didn’t know the next year it would actually happen.”

Hughes heard about a Michigan trainer who had worked with other paraplegics. She reached out to him and flew to Michigan to begin training.

“The first time I talked to her on the telephone, she was like, ‘Look, I don’t want to be in this chair forever. I understand what happened to me, but I want to work hard and see where I can get,’” said Mike Barwis, a strength and conditioning coach who frequently works with Olympic and professional athletes. 

It was during a session with Barwis that Hughes moved her legs for the first time since the accident. 

Meanwhile, Hughes had reconnected with a former acquaintance, Odie Hughes. She initially worried about meeting him again now that she was in a wheelchair.

“I didn’t know how he would accept that, or how he would feel about that,” she recalled. “But it was like he never even saw the chair, he just saw me. He believed everything with me. If I told him, ‘I think I can do this. I want to try this,’ then he would be my biggest cheerleader.”

Within three months, they were engaged. Hughes started the clock: She had nine months to get on her feet. Barwis said he had no doubts they could make it happen.

“Katie is a vibrant person. She has an amazing personality and she’s very driven,” he said. “Her mentality has been one of absolute determination.”

But while working to build up the strength in her legs, Hughes also had to plan a wedding. She also opened a gym she started in her community of Bogalusa, about 70 miles north of New Orleans. 

There was also the issue of finding a wedding gown. 

“I actually bought three dresses. I didn’t like any of them,” she said. After getting ready to settle on one of them, she received a call from the cable network TLC, asking if she wanted to be featured on the show, “Say Yes to the Dress.” Hughes flew to the Atlanta bridal store featured on show (the episode airs Jan. 2) and finally found a gown she was happy with.

“Everything about it was perfect,” she said.

Except she never practiced walking in it until the day of her wedding. "I didn’t want anybody to see the real one," she explained. So instead, she practiced using one of the other gowns. She started in a full-body brace, then with a walker before moving on to two canes. Finally, she used two leg braces that went up from her feet to just above the knees, all while holding on to a person on each side of her.

On her wedding day, Sept. 20, Hughes walked down the aisle, on her own two feet, holding the hands of the two men giving her away: Her dad, who stood to her right, and Barwis, on her left. 

As excited as she was, Hughes said she never anticipated the nerves she experienced as she stared down the aisle at her guests.

“I felt like this was everybody’s fairytale ending. This was the story they had been following for so long and this was the ending they were waiting to see,” she said. “So I felt like there was a lot of pressure but there was no greater reward than getting to the end of that aisle, for sure.”

Waiting for her there with a huge smile was her fiance.

"When her foot caught that slip my heart stopped. But she just held it together like a champ," said Odie Hughes. "I had complete faith in her."

He said he never for a second doubted the woman he considers "the most stubborn person I know" 

"When she said she was gonna do it, it was a done deal," he said. "Never one doubt in my mind she'd not only make it down the aisle but she'd do it in dramatic fashion. That's my Katie." 

Months later, Katie is back at work, keeping busy with her physical therapy patients and running her gym, Katie's Shed, where she teaches various cardio and full-body workout classes.

She enjoys newlywed life and said it helps to have a partner who is familiar with life-altering injuries: Her husband once broke his neck during a car accident that left him with metal rods in his legs.

“Me and him both just really understand how quick this life is and how short it can be made,” she said. “We really value each other and the time we have together and with our family. We know first hand how quickly it can be taken from you, so we try to make the best of that.”

Hughes still uses her braces, alternating between them and her wheelchair, depending on the circumstances.

She speaks at local and regional events about her accident and hopes her story will inspire others to reach beyond traditional expectations.

“A lot of people would say, ‘Okay, I did it and now I’m going to be content with my progress right now.’ But I think contentment is our worst enemy a lot of times, just being content with where you are,” she said. “You should always try to excel forward and move forward and continue to reach goals and set new ones.”

Source: www.today.com

Gay men who've abstained from sex for one year would be able to donate blood in 2015, ending a lifetime ban for the gay community, under a proposed FDA policy change unveiled Tuesday.

The current lifetime ban by U.S. Food and Drug Administration states dates back to 1983 and forbids men who have had sex with men from becoming blood donors because the group is "at increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and certain other infections that can be transmitted by transfusion," the FDA has ruled.

But the FDA is now seeking a change in that policy and would allow such blood donations based on an independent expert advisory panel's recommendation, the agency said.

The proposed change would align the one-year deferral period "with that of other men and women at increased risk for HIV infection," the FDA said.

The agency will be gathering public comments on the proposed change.

"We encourage all stakeholders to take this opportunity to provide any information the agency should consider, and look forward to receiving and reviewing these comments," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said in a statement.

The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and the FDA would monitor a national blood surveillance system to see any effects of the proposed policy change and to ensure the continued safety of the blood supply, Hamburg said.

"A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an increased risk for exposure to and transmission of certain infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes AIDS," the FDA said. Men who have had sex with other men represent approximately 2% of the U.S. population, yet are the population most severely affected by HIV, according to the FDA.

In 2010, male-to-male sex accounted for at least 61% of all new HIV infections in the United States, and "an estimated 77% of diagnosed HIV infections among males were attributed to male-to-male sexual contact," the FDA said.

Source: www.cnn.com

By Rebecca Riffkin

In 2014, Americans say nurses have the highest honesty and ethical standards. Members of Congress and car salespeople were given the worst ratings among the 11 professions included in this year's poll. Eighty percent of Americans say nurses have "very high" or "high" standards of honesty and ethics, compared with a 7% rating for members of Congress and 8% for car salespeople.

Americans have been asked to rate the honesty and ethics of various professions annually since 1990, and periodically since 1976. Nurses have topped the list each year since they were first included in 1999, with the exception of 2001 when firefighters were included in response to their work during and after the 9/11 attacks. Since 2005, at least 80% of Americans have said nurses have high ethics and honesty. Two other medical professions -- medical doctors and pharmacists -- tie this year for second place at 65%, with police officers and clergy approaching 50%.

Historically, honesty and ethics ratings for members of Congress have generally not been positive, with the highest rating reaching 25% in 2001. Since 2009, Congress has ranked at or near the bottom of the list, usually tied with other poorly viewed professions like car salespeople and -- when they have been included -- lobbyists, telemarketers, HMO managers, stockbrokers and advertising practitioners.

Although members of Congress and car salespeople have similar percentages rating their honesty and ethics as "very high" or "high," members of Congress are much more likely to receive "low" or "very low" ratings (61%), compared with 45% for car salespeople. Last year, 66% of Americans rated Congress' honesty and ethics "low" or "very low," the worst Gallup has measured for any profession historically.

Other relatively poorly rated professions, including advertising practitioners, lawyers, business executives and bankers are more likely to receive "average" than "low" honesty and ethical ratings. So while several of these professions rank about as low as members of Congress in terms of having high ethics, they are less likely than members of Congress to be viewed as having low ethics.

No Professions Improved in Ratings of High Honesty, Ethics Since 2013

Since 2013, all professions either dropped or stayed the same in the percentage of Americans who said they have high honesty and ethics. The only profession to show a small increase was lawyers, and this rise was small (one percentage point) and within the margin of error. The largest drops were among police officers, pharmacists and business executives. But medical doctors, bankers and advertising practitioners also saw drops.

Honesty and ethics ratings of police dropped six percentage points since last year, driven down by many fewer nonwhite Americans saying the police have high honesty and ethical standards. The clergy's 47% rating last year marked the first year that less than 50% of Americans said the clergy had high ethical and honesty standards -- and the current 46% rating is, by one percentage point, the lowest Gallup has measured for that profession to date.

Bottom Line

Americans continue to rate those in medical professions as having higher honesty and ethical standards than those in most other professions. Nurses have consistently been the top-rated profession -- although doctors and pharmacists also receive high ratings, despite the drops since 2013 in the percentage of Americans who say they have high ethics. The high ratings of medical professions this year is significant after the Ebola outbreak which infected a number of medical professionals both in the U.S. and in West Africa.

At the other end of the spectrum, in recent years, members of Congress have sunk to the same depths as car salespeople and advertising practitioners. However, in one respect, Congress is even worse, given the historically high percentages rating its members' honesty and ethics as being "low" or "very low." And although November's midterm elections did produce a significant change in membership for the new Congress that begins in January, there were also major shakeups in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections with little improvement in the way Americans viewed the members who serve in that institution.

Previously in 2014, Gallup found that Americans continue to have low confidence in banks, and while Americans continue to have confidence in small businesses, big businesses do not earn a lot of confidence. This may be the result of Americans' views that bankers and business executives do not have high honesty and ethical standards, and the fact that their ratings dropped since last year.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 8-11, 2014, with a random sample of 805 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.

Source: www.gallup.com

By KELLI DUNHAM

I'm a proud nurse from a proud family of nurses, yet I would never claim that a layperson would enjoy watching mainstream medical dramas with us. We end up yelling at the screen: "There is nothing about that sexy get-up that remotely resembles a nursing uniform," and "Doctors don't fire nurses, nurse managers fire nurses," and "No emergency room nurse would ever have to be told by a doctor to start CPR!"

So when the Baymax, the nurse/robot in the hit Disney movie Big Hero Six turned out to be reasonable, competent and not dressed in fishnet stockings, I was thrilled.

You know your profession has an image problem when you point to a balloonish animated robot doll and say, "Yes, that's good. That accurately reflects what I do on a daily basis. More representations like that, please."

Baymax might not look like any nurses you know, but unlike most nurse characters in the media he actually provides nursing care. He assesses the health condition of his charge, the boy-genius Hiro, makes recommendations related to his health and teaches him about his neurochemical processes.

Once Hiro reprograms Baymax with fighting capabilities, Baymax becomes Hiro's terrifying defender. If you've ever heard a nurse on the phone with an insurance company insisting that a patient get needed care paid for, you know this is not a misplaced metaphor.

Contrast this with the Nurse Dawn character in the HBO comedy Getting On. She has sex with a new nurse manager within hours of meeting him; doesn't seem to notice when a patient dies; cowers submissively in front of even the most incompetent doctors and never seems to provide any actual nursing care because she is too busy with self-created drama and paperwork.

Or the Nurse Beverly character in Fox's comedy The Mindy Project. She is fired from an office medical practice for incompetence, breaks a doctor's nose in angry response, and when she is rehired in a clerical position expresses relief that she finally has a job where she doesn't have to wash her hands.

Or the nurses in the Fox medical drama House. Rather than being sexually inappropriate or incompetent, these nurses all seem to be on a series-long coffee break. It is the doctors who are shown providing nursing care: starting IVs, doing patient teaching, negotiating complicated family dynamics at the bedside.

Even when nurses are shown to be competent, compassionate patient-focused experts like Jackie Peyton, the main character in Showtime's Nurse Jackie, the creators aren't satisfied with the life-and-death drama of a high-level trauma center in a huge city. The nurse character has to be an unethical, lying, stealing, not quite-in-recovery drug addict as well.

The argument could be made that it's the job of Hollywood to create fiction of all the professions, and that popular culture gets everything about health care wrong.

Certainly examples of this exist: the new Fox teen drama Red Band Society is populated by exceedingly healthy looking, extremely attractive gravely ill teenagers who live for months in hospital rooms the size of two-bedroom apartments for no other apparent reason than to make it more convenient for them to kiss each other.

Any scenes in which the dying but randy teens are portrayed interacting with medical care (one patient is shown receiving dialysis for liver failure) are so ludicrous that it makes you wonder if the procedure for the show's writers is to ask their medical adviser how something might accurately be conveyed and then write the exact opposite.

But even though this is just entertainment, the stakes for the future of nursing are high. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that Americans believe what TV shows say about medical care and health policy.

For 13 years the non-profit advocacy organization Truth About Nursing has been researching and documenting nurse representations in popular culture and has come to the conclusion that "the vast gap between what skilled nurses really do and what the public thinks they do is a fundamental factor underlying most of the more immediate apparent causes of the [nursing] shortage [including], understaffing, poor work conditions, [and] inadequate resources for nursing research and education."

This is bad news for nurses, but worse news for patients. Nurses make the difference in good health care; increased RN staffing decreases the overall patient death rate as well as the rate of hospital acquired pneumonia, falls, pressure ulcers and blood clots after surgery. When nurses show more signs of burnout related to understaffing, postsurgical infections increase.

And there's the hard-to-quantify but essential benefit of being cared for. When I was in the hospital this past January after a life-threatening complication of knee-replacement surgery, I woke up one night in pain and unable to figure out how to move within the many drains, tubes and wires attached to, or inserted in, my body. I muttered an expletive and from around the corner a nurse appeared.

"I'm right here," she said. Even before she started to untangle my IV and troubleshoot better pain management, my panic was instantly calmed.

Baymax's programming won't allow him to disengage until the patient has answered, "Are you satisfied with your care?" in the affirmative. This is inconvenient for the characters in an action adventure movie, but it's a good question to ask in a hospital. If you're satisfied with your care, you may well have a nurse to thank.

Source: www.npr.org