Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Teach Patients How to Communicate Symptoms Better

For stroke this is  wrong, wrong, wrong. Lots of young stroke survivors are misdiagnosed in the ER. What we need is fast objective diagnosis with no neurologist input needed. 
Start figuring out an objective test. Maybe  this;
1. Star Trek-style 'tricorder' invention offered $10m prize
2. Strokefinder quickly differentiates bleeding strokes from clot-induced strokes
3.  One of these 17 ways still need to be be proven for fast and objective diagnosis.
You're not even attempting to solve the problem the right way. You take the human subjectivity out of the equation. I really do wonder if anyone has two functioning neurons they are rubbing together. 
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PracticeManagement/PracticeManagement/53833
Helping patients communicate their symptoms clearly could go a long way toward making an accurate diagnosis, John Ely, MD, MPH, said at the annual meeting of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.
Ely, a family physician who is retired from the University of Iowa in Iowa City and has been a patient himself recently, said he "got to thinking about what a good patient would do." One of the things professors teach medical students is the eight characteristics of a symptom.

"Patients don't know what these eight things are, I don't think," but there's no reason they shouldn't know, Ely said during a session at the meeting about how to get patients more involved in getting an accurate diagnosis.
The eight characteristics listed by Ely included:
  • Where is your pain or numbness? This obviously wouldn't work for more generalized symptoms like fatigue or shortness of breath.
  • How long have you had the symptom? If it's something intermittent -- like a spell of chest pain -- how often does it happen and how long does it last? Is it gradually getting worse? Getting better? Staying the same?
  • What were you doing when you first noticed the symptom? Were you just sitting there? Arguing with someone? This is particularly important if the patient is having dizziness, Ely noted.
  • Are any other symptoms associated with this one -- for example, light-headedness or shortness of breath?
  • What is the "quality" of the symptom -- what does it feel like? "Patients sometimes say to me, 'What do you mean? It's just a pain, doc.' Well, is it like an elephant stepping on your chest, a fire in your chest, someone stabbing you with an ice pick, or what? I want to stay open-ended as long as possible, so [I usually say] 'Just tell me ... what it feels like,'" said Ely.
  • What is the "quantity" of the symptom -- for example, how bad is it on a scale of 1 to 10?
  • What aggravates the symptom?
  • What alleviates the symptom?
Basically, physicians want to know a patient's chief complaint, "and then we want a paragraph -- not six paragraphs and not a novel -- and in that paragraph you need to tell the doctor these eight things," he said.


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