This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 6:04 pm and is filed under All Posts, Family and Parenthood, Usability and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Unequal Access
Reported today on MedPage:
“The morbidly obese may be missing out on essential diagnostic imaging.
“Consider that a heart attack patient weighing 350 pounds is too fat to undergo angiography because the standard table cannot support that much weight.
“Consider that 475-pound patients with severe abdominal pain are too big for CT to diagnose the cause, necessitating exploratory surgery as the most likely alternative.”
I have heard of cases of this before, but anecdotally, not formally. People weighed on veterinary equipment, because the hospital’s could not accommodate them. I’m not sure that the humiliation isn’t worse than the treatment limitations. Isn’t that reason enough to justify manufacturing appropriate equipment?
To add to the weight of the argument (sorry), with one in three Americans obese, don’t the statistics demand a wider range of weight specifications for the imaging products, even granting that “obese” does not equal “morbidly obese”?
The Talmud says that shaming a person (literally, causing the blood to drain from his face) publicly is like killing him.
