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Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy 572

Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. From the article: "However, a doctor at the hospital said on condition of anonymity that he sees the policy as a money-saving measure that could prove dangerous for patients. 'I was shocked to come in on Sunday and find none of my bloods had been done from the night before because I'd not written "please,"' the doctor said. 'I had no results to guide treatment of patients. Myself and a senior nurse had to take the bloods ourselves, which added hours to our 12-hour shifts. This system puts patients' lives at risk. Doctors are wasting time doing the job of the technicians.'"
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Oldest Human Hair Discovered In Fossilized Poop 50

goran72 writes "A new study has suggested that strands discovered in fossil hyena poop found in a South African cave could be the oldest-known human hairs. According to a report in National Geographic News, researchers discovered the rock-hard hyena dung near the Sterkfontein caves, where many early human ancestor fossils have been found."

Comment Re:Gives you ideas - got to compare it to PUBMED (Score 2, Interesting) 167

As a physician who specializes in difficult cases, maybe I can provide a slightly different perspective: What Google has done with Google Scholar has been to incorporate the PUBMED database (a database of all scholarly journals) as well as the database of OMIM (a database of inherited diseases) into its search protocol. Physicains (including myself) often will use the above two databases for aiding in the diagnosis of specific disease. You will also notice that the proper use of terminology helps (for example, the use of the term "nyctalopia" instead of the more common term "night-blindness") will help eliminate some common misconceptions. As the google search term is based on linkage, it may actually place the truly unusual diagnoses at the bottom of the list - To be fair to the public databases that have been instrumental in advancing American scientific progress (both the above databases are public domain as they are setup and run by the National Library of Medicine), the study cited above would be truly illustrative if it actually did a comparison between Google results and Pubmed results (www.pubmed.org).

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