Nursing Assistant Resources On The Web

There is a growing number of medical and nursing blogs online for folks to check out. Most are authored by doctors and they have very interesting topics and make good reading.

Medpundit
Code Blue: Tales of a Nurse
Bedside Matters
Soap Notes
The Hospice Blog

There are many others, and I will post them next week. Also, there are many LAW blogs as well. These are called BLAWGS-while you might wonder how the law blogs relate to what we do, consider how many times we use the word legal in our work…

Also, of interest, Google has launched it’s Google Scholar search engine. Run a search on nursing assistants and see what you get. This is an excellent resource for medical and nursing students.

Some news articles from around the web:

Antidepressents-Questioning Whether They work:

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Depressed people 75 or older are just as likely to improve after an 8-week course with an inactive, placebo drug as with an antidepressant, new research indicates.

The study shows that after a short course of the antidepressant medication citalopram (Celexa), around one-third of elderly people with depression went into remission — the same improvement rate seen in people taking a placebo drug.

However, study author Dr. Steven P. Roose of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City cautioned that these findings do not suggest that the antidepressant is no better than doing nothing at all.

Dental Plaques Related to Pneumonia?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Bacteria in dental plaque can cause hospital-acquired pneumonia in elderly nursing home residents, according to a report in the medical journal Chest.

“The available evidence suggests that poor oral health, characterized by inadequate hygiene results in the formation of extensive (plaques), promotes oral colonization by potential respiratory (microbes) and increases the risk for serious lower respiratory tract infections in institutionalized subjects,” co-author Dr. Ali A. El-Solh told Reuters Health.

Dr. El-Solh from University of Buffalo, New York, and colleagues investigated the rate of plaque contamination by disease-causing microbes in institutionalized elderly patients. In addition, the researchers sought to determine whether these bugs were related to those recovered from patients who developed pneumonia.

Patti