Free post #5: Cigarettes

Everyone knows that cigarettes are bad for you and it makes sense that people should not smoke them, but in reality the demand for cigarettes is very high. While looking through the medical new today I found an article relating to cigarettes and that they are thinking about modifying them.The goal is to change the nicotine content level in cigarettes as well as modifying the filtration and size of the product. Overall these modifications are leading to a delcine in overall consumption of tobacco products which is a good thing. The question to be asked in this situation is what is making consumers stop smoking cigarettes. It could be the modifications being made to the product or for reasons regarding health directives and personal safety. It is true that smoking is terrible for your body and can destroy ones lungs and lead to more serious health problems. It is interesting that people know that they will kill them one day but still continue to smoke. It could be because they are used as a stress relief or just because people made it part of their daily  routine. It is a strange phenomena that people will do something that directly makes your health worse. over a billion people in the world smoke and  I think this is an interesting thing to contemplate.. Human nature is a funny thing and as a nursing major I concern myself with other peoples safety. I read through the article and learned that cigarrete consumption had been declining which I found to be a good thing. Source

Prompted post 5: Nursing Student Association

Here at Michigan State University there is an organization called the Nursing Student Association. This club can be extremely helpful to nursing students at the university. It is actually required to be a member of this club once you are excepted into the nursing school here.  This club has monthly meetings and i attended the one on February 18th this month.

I did not end up joining the club at the end of the meeting only because it costs 10 dollars to become a legit member and i did not have any money on me at the time. But it is basically just a meeting for all the nursing students where they go over different things about the medical field. They touch on subjects regarding procedures and most importantly different opportunities for students to volunteer at different hospitals. This is a really great way for nursing students to get experience in their field and also to get some volunteer hours for their nursing applications. They also had a guest speaker come in and explain a little about what he does on an average day at work. This is also interesting because it brings in someone who has real world experience to explain what actually goes down to those who have never worked in a hospital setting. I had my internship before so I knew some of the stuff that they were talking about but I also learned some things about being a nurse practitioner as well. This isn't the field of nursing that I am trying to join but i thought it was interesting listening to a professional talk about his career.

The main purpose of this student organization is to get nursing students volunteer hours and to help pre-nursing students with applications. They also put on different community service opportunities that are not necessarily related to nursing such as events at nursing homes and things of that nature. I enjoyed the experience because it also gave me a chance to see what kind of people are in the nursing program and also to meet other people with the same major as me. Its always really nice to meet people that have a lot of the same classes as you so you are able to study with people and learn the material better. It also kind of scared me because there were a lot of people there and all the pre-nursing students are in competition with each other so that was a little nerve wrecking. Other than that I thought it was beneficial to attend the meetings and i will definitely join this club not only because it is required but also because they provide a lot of great opportunities for working in a hospital.  I also found that it represented the truth of the nursing field very well by supplying those real world experiences and also providing so many opportunities to get real time experience. The NSA is a really awesome club here at Michigan State and if you are a medical student at all I would recommend looking into it.

Open Blog Post #4: Prosthetic

I am currently writing a paper about Microsoft's involvement in prosthetics . It is actually a rather interesting topic considering how much of a breakthrough technology prosthetic limbs really are. If you think about it its pretty crazy that we can make a fake body part that functions almost the same as the original. I think it is really awesome technology and it has helped thousands of people in the world. I'm writing my paper based of Microsoft's commercial at the Superbowl about Braylon O'Neill. It is about a young boy that was born without the bones in his legs therefore he has been using prosthetics for his entire life. The commercial in my opinion is very powerful and uplifting because it shows the young boy playing sports and running like any other kid that age which is really awesome. Microsoft's role in helping with this technology comes with tracking the gait mechanics of people being fitted for prostheses. They use the Kinect system (similar to the one used with Xbox one)to track the patients movements so they can judge how to create the arm or leg or whatever body part they are making at the time. The Kinect system will create  a 3-D structure of the human body and use this to analyze the patients motions to properly adjust for that persons specific gait mechanics. It is relatively simple and cheap technology which is a breakthrough in of itself because prior to the Microsoft Kinect gait tracking was expensive and rare. Plus the equipment itself was large and clunky, the Kinect method is a whole lot more efficient. It is true that they still have a ways to go until it is a foolproof system but for now the Kinect system is helping thousands around the world be fitted for prostetics. Its giving people a chance to experience things that they thought they might never again, which is why I think this is such a great breakthrough. I never knew that this was how prosthetic's were fitted for patients so it was definitely interesting to look into.

Prompted post #4: Professional vs non- professional

There are some vast differences in the audience of a professional article and a non professional article. In my search I found two articles both written by people with PhD's but the difference lies in where they posted their articles. One of them is posted on a medical journal site called JAMA, which stands for the Journal of the American Medical Association. Anyone can find this website so the audience here is pretty broad, but really only includes educated people. A common civilian probably would not be reading an article about ethical guidelines that a doctor should follow. Although this article is definitely easier to find online i believe that  it is still a pretty professional article. It touches on issues concerning the origin of medical practice and also the ways that is should be practiced now. The language in this first article is relatively simple to read, the writting is not written in a way that makes it overly complex and if you were to come across it, you might be able to read it rather effortlessly. The article itself is pretty lengthy but it is laid out nicely and the paragraphs run smoothly. This is is why I am labeling this as a non professional article even though it is on a medical site and written by a doctor it still seems like the point of this paper is to inform the general public about medical practices.

The other article I am comparing this too was actually something from my biology class. IN class we had to look over a medical journal entry about prions, and it was really complex. It was written in a Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery article, so this tells me that the audience was for people performing surgeries. The entire entry is really complex and half the words are too difficult to even pronounce correctly. The papers main focus is to provide insight about M232R prion disorders, and the causes and effects of it. There are pictures of the brain throughout the article and different x- rays that were taken during the case. It is talking about an actual surgery that took place on a women from Japan, which means that only doctors are really looking at this paper. (And lost kids in biology classes). Based on the language and what the paper talks about it is easy to see that this one is a lot more complex and therefor more professional in my opinion. It is explaining a surgery so that other doctors can know how to approach a rare disease like any type of prion malfunctioning. SO by looking at the language and the point of writing you can see that these are both scholarly articles but one is far more professional than the other. 

Article 1

Article 2

(If the second link doesn't work its because it goes to d2l)

Open post #3:Disease Spreading

The nursing community posts articles on line about how to better practice nursing and to keep procedures up to date. Today I read an interesting article about how infections spread in hospitals. According to research conducted by the Center for Disease Control(CDC), there is a significant amount of patients that contract diseases while at a hospital. About 1 out of every 25 people conduct some sort of   infection while already in a hospital. The most common ways for this to happen "include central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), surgical site infections (SSIs), Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infections, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteremia bloodstream infections" (nursezone.com). I never knew that in hospital infections were such a prominent thing and it is pretty scary to think that 1/25 people contract something. A hospital is supposed to be where you get better now contract more diseases. According to the article the RN is the first line of defense against spreading disease, and the best way to do this is by always checking up on patients and using the cleanliest way of doing everything. Always using fresh equipment and gloves and  cleaning off any surface that you are injecting or cutting thoroughly. Hopefully as technology in the medical field advances this will become less of a problem, and hospitals can get back to help instead of infecting.

link

Prompted Post #3:Interview with an Registered Nurse

When I was working at St. Johns Providence hospital I worked under an RN named Shay, and I decided to do my interview with her. I conducted the interview via phone because she obviously does not live in East Lansing. I had prepared a series of questions for her including things like if she liked her job, what she had to do to get there and how long she had been doing it, along with the required questions about the misconceptions in her field.

I started off the interview by asking if she enjoyed the job that she did. She works in occupational health at the moment and she stated that she enjoys occupational health because it is not as intense as the work she was doing in urgent care, or the emergency room. She continued on to say that when she was working in those more intense areas of the hospital she was younger and more willing to put in the long, late hours, but now that she is older and in her last year before retirement she really does like to work her structured hours in a less intense environment. Considering that occupational health is usually people that need physicals for work or drug tests, its a pretty lax department. I then asked her what she had to do to become a registered nurse. She explained that when she was becoming a nurse it was a lot less intense of a process. She said that back in her day she didn't even go to college she just went straight to nursing school for 2-3 years(her exact words)and came out a nurse. This made me a little upset just because here at Michigan State the nursing program is extremely competitive and becoming an RN is no easy feat anymore. I then went  on to ask her about the common misconceptions of the job. She stated that a lot of people think that being a nurse is an easy job but most of the time the nurses do more work in a hospital than anyone. Also she said that people often think that working at a hospital means that everyone that walks through the door has some sort of deadly disease or something but most of the time its only for check-ups or minor issues. She said that people watch to many shows like "House" and "ER" but that is not actually how a hospital works.

My next question had to do with how communication is important in a hospital. Shay said that it is one of the most important things in a hospital setting. She talked about how if the RN's do not communicate well with the patients than it could be hard to find out what is wrong with the person. Also if the nurse does not communicate what the patient said to the doctor than it could cause confusion. On top of that since she works in occupational health she always has to communicate the results of drug tests and physicals to whatever job sent the patient to get the tests. Overall she said that without communication a hospital would not run smoothly at all. That was the last question I asked her because I was not exactly sure what the "ask her what they write and how they write it" question meant. I learned that becoming a nurse is a lot more difficult now than it was back when Shay was starting off , but that just means that I need to work harder to achieve my goals.

Open Post #2: Injury Prevention for Inpatients

While scrolling the internet I came across and interesting article about different things that registered nurses have observed help inpatients from falling and injuring themselves even more. Most inpatients have declining health issues so support from hospital staff is what keeps them going. The nurses cannot be with the patient for their entire stay though, so a study was conducted at 5 hospitals to identify ways to prevent in hospital injuries. The study was done in the general area of the hospital and in the surgical area of the hospital. The researcher found that the number one best thing to do to stop inpatient injury is to always keep the brakes on their beds locked. If a patient is injured and cannot move and their bed starts rolling it can potentially rip I.V's out, hurt other patients and or themselves. It is also mentioned that keeping heavy equipment out of the patients way and removing clutter are good ways to avoid injury. Also the study said that doing a mental capacity test daily will keep patients that are just sitting in their bed all day on their toes and mentally aware of what is going on. Keeping non-slip foot wear on patients is also an extremely good idea, something like slippers that are soft on the inside but padded for grip on the bottom are the optimal choice for inpatients. It is actually very easy for inpatients to hurt themselves that is why having handrails in a hospital helps people that are still weak on their feet to get around. Making sure that their beds are low to the ground is also smart for two reasons, the first is so that they can easily get into the bed, the second is if they manage to fall off the bed it will not be a far drop. This particular statistic was mentioned by both the surgical team and the medical team, so even something simple like the height of a bed can be important in helping patients. I personally did not know these types of things were important before looking at this study, so I find that pretty interesting. I never thought about how hard it is for people with declining health to move around so it makes sense that these things need to be done to prevent further injuries. If you want to see the statistics of this study the link is hyperlinked here.