Word: traumas
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...several years, as studies have shown a disturbing spike in heart attacks--as much as 25%--and even deaths in patients who have received blood, usually within a month after the transfusion. The problem may occur to some degree in almost every group of critically ill patients, from trauma cases in the E.R. to anemics in the icu. Since doctors know how to safeguard the blood supply from infectious diseases and keep allergic reactions from transfusions to a minimum, the heart-attack problem doesn't seem to be related to either of those risks...
...problem that doctors have been wrestling with for several years, as study after study shows a disturbing spike in heart disease and death in patients receiving transfusions. The trend affects almost every group of critically ill patients - from trauma sufferers in the ER to heart attack victims, patients with anemia and those undergoing chemotherapy. This increase in death and heart disease, doctors say, is unrelated to infectious blood-borne diseases or allergic reactions that often follow transfusions. "After you control for sickness and all sorts of things, patients who receive transfusions still have more heart attacks. It makes no sense...
...this day no complete public database listing the survivors, partly due to privacy concerns. For the same reason, it is not easy to confirm that a person has received medical attention at a hospital. Still, I could have been less credulous. I wanted, like most reporters interviewing victims of trauma, to get what I needed, without making things worse...
...poorest people in America who had been so betrayed by their government - to build the system they've always wanted, to build the housing projects that they've always wanted, and to heal from this shock by being a participant in the reconstruction. Instead of that, the trauma was actively exploited and the fact that people had been spread all over the country and separated from their families and their roots and their communities was taken advantage of, in order to turn New Orleans into this Petri dish for ideas that live in think tanks...
...have to explain those events. So the sort of deeper reason why I wrote the book is because I believe that when we understand those tactics we become more shock resistant. That the mere act of sort of unpacking and looking at how we regress in moments of trauma is the best form of resistance against that very regression when the next shock hits. So even though much of the material in the book is despairing, my hope is that the overall effect of it is empowering...