Posts Tagged ‘doctor’

Doctors Cure Patients With Vodka in Australia

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

Doctors in Australia revealed Wednesday they saved an Italian tourist’s life by drip-feeding him steady doses of vodka over three days. The patient was given three standard drinks an hour over the period while he was in intensive care unit.

The 24-year old unidentified man was brought to Mackay Base Hospital in north Queensland two months ago after a failed suicide attempt. He had swallowed huge quantities of ethylene glycol, a poison commonly found in anti-freeze.

In order to reverse the effect of the poison, doctors decided to give him pharmaceutical-grade alcohol, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). However, when they ran out of alcohol supplies, they ordered in crates of vodka in order to setup this unconventional drip.

AFP quotes Dr Pascal Gelperowicz who looked after the patient as saying, “we quickly used all the available vials of 100 percent alcohol and decided the next best way to get alcohol into the man’s system was by feeding him spirits through a nasal-gastric tube.”

According to BBC News, another doctor, Dr Todd Fraser, said in a statement, “The patient was drip-fed about three standard drinks an hour for three days in the intensive care unit. Fortunately for him he was in a medically induced coma for a good portion of that. By the time he woke up I think his hangover would have well and truly gone.”

The patient made full recovery and was discharged after 20 days.

Source: WayOdd

Maggots inside man`s head!

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

It’s the stuff nightmares and horror movies are made of.

A holidaymaker got a nasty shock when he learned that the strange bleeding bumps on his head were not bites or shingles, but live maggots.

Aaron Dallas, from Colorado, looked for medical help when the unusual lumps appeared on his scalp after a holiday to Belize during the summer.

One doctor thought they might have been caused by a gnat bite. Another believed his problem was shingles.

But then the bumps took on a life of their own and began to move.

A doctor discovered five bot fly larvae living inside Aaron Dallas’s head, near the top of his skull. This was a few weeks after a mosquito had apparently placed them there.

“I’d put my hand back there and feel them moving. I thought it was blood coursing through my head. I could hear them. I actually thought I was going crazy,” said Dallas, of Carbondale.

Bot flies rely on mosquitoes, stable flies, and other insects to carry their eggs to a host – and in this case the host was Dallas.

“It was weird and traumatic,” he said. “I would get this pain that would drop me to my knees.”

After their discovery the parasites were removed by a doctor. Dallas’s wife teased him about it afterwards, but didn’t find the experience funny.

“It’s much funnier to everyone else. It makes my stomach turn over. It was cruel,” he said.

Bot fly infections are fairly routine in parts of Central and South America.