It’s been a number of years since I thumbed thru a PDR, but don’t they still have a section of color plates that show the appearance of various pharmaceuticals? Why is House in the pharmacy looking for “small round yellow” colchicine tablets, similar to the “cold medicine”. Wouldn’t it have been much simpler to sit at his desk to look?

All the ones I’ve seen are tiny round white pills… and, from my limited pharmacy tech experience, hard to mistake for anything else.

I can’t stress enough how our common CPR method still refuses to distinguise between different heart treatments. That is: heart rythm trouble and heart stopping trouble.
For lets say: heart attack-, overdosis-, and drowning victims.

If blood is still circulating through the body, (which means the brain is still getting oxigen), the CPR treatment should focus far less on mouth-to-mouth breathing.
Too much time is spend on senselessly trying to get more oxigen into the victim while it takes at least 2 minutes for a human body to use up too much of the oxigen that’s already present within the bloodstream.

Why would you try to start a heart that never stopped working?
Shocks can be applied to reboot the heart so it beats properly again, but heart massages and mouth-to-mouth are useless if the blood is still flowing.
Even if the heart is just beating in an irregular rythm, CPR should focus on buying time for the victim and on the prevention of brain damage.
This could in fact increase the survivalrate of all heartinfarct victims twothird and extend the survival of the everage CPR revival victim by at least 4 to 7 minutes.

ps. my first language isn’t English so please don’t get sand in your vegina about my grammar or spelling.

For the public, it’s simple. Flatline is bad. Shocking is good. So we shock flatline! Easy (but wrong).

The other thing I kind of have enjoyed watching over the years is the various ways that the actors react when they are apparently ‘defibrillated’. Sometimes they arch their back and hold it for a few seconds, sometimes they kind of spas out all their limbs. I even saw a guy moan once. Makes you think he might not have been dead!

Still it’s fun.

Although cough medicines are more common as syrups than as pills, they still work by acting on the brain, not on the throat. The whole “liquid” thing is just a marketing gimmick. Furthermore, you can get cough meds in pill form without a prescription.

“And I recently read in the BBC website that the US is probably the only country where they actually advertise prescription drugs on television. No offence to any Americans, but it sounds to me like drugs are too commercialised over there.”

You obviously haven’t seen the ads in question. For every minute-long ad, about 15 seconds will be advertising and the other 45 will be explaining the possible side effects and interactions (”taking X with alcohol may cause severe complications, like seizures or death, so talk to your doctor…”).

“Several times watching, I have seen patients “heart stop” i.e. asystole on the cardiac monitors and “the team” debrillates them back to NSR. This is sorta … wrong … debrillation is exactly what it means, it is to stop fibrillation NOT jump start a heart that is dead, no pulse… meds are given to “jump start the heart” in addition to CPR.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of TV and movies. You obviously haven’t seen ER, Scrubs, or any other show or movie in which defibrillators are used… ever.

Several times watching, I have seen patients “heart stop” i.e. asystole on the cardiac monitors and “the team” debrillates them back to NSR. This is sorta … wrong … debrillation is exactly what it means, it is to stop fibrillation NOT jump start a heart that is dead, no pulse… meds are given to “jump start the heart” in addition to CPR.
I have looked for a site that lists the “medical errors” on the show but i haven’t found it yet so I post here.

On this episode, the “jump started” a heart in asystole and they keep saying “cc” instead of mg (milligrams)… cc or ml is a fluid amount of medication, has nothing to do with how much medication is given. In other words… 1 cc of epinephrine can contain 1 mg of the medication or 10mg of the medication or even 100mg. So when it was said “i gave her a cc of epi” doesn’t tell us anything except it was 1 millilter of fluid….

thanks for listening

What Occam’s Razor certainly is not is the (utterly silly) claim: the simplest explanation is always the correct one. (As Chase seems to think.) It is not even the much less silly version you obtain by substituting ‘often’ for ‘always’.

That being said: great show, love it.

“people here seem to know better than not to follow the doctor’s instructions”

Your logic is as vapid as it is narcissistic.