Pumpkin-spice Latte for Dogs?
There is now pumpkin-spice lattes for dogs. It's non-GMO and uses American-made goat’s-milk. It's made by "Honest Kitchen," a company that is not actually a kitchen and is not transparently honest.
Have you noticed that some of the younger vets are stapling more than sewing? It may be because they are really bad at basic hand work skills. It's happening with human surgeons too.
This Is How It Ended
An Antarctic scientist stabbed a colleague who kept telling him the endings of the books he was reading.
What Happened to the Men?
About 7,000 years ago, and extending over the next two millennia, the genetic diversity of men -- specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes -- collapsed. This collapse was so extreme it was as if there were only one man left to mate for every 17 women. What caused it? Apparently, it was driven by war between patrilineal clans.
Let God Sort It Out
The phrase "Kill them all and let God sort it out," come from the 1209 Massacre at Béziers when Pope Pope Innocent III gave this directive after his Crusaders asked him how they were to tell the Catholics from the heretics who were mingled among them in the town of Béziers in southern France.
Go Where the Money Is
Wrigley’s was originally a soap company that gifted baking powder with their soap. The baking powder became more popular than the soap so they switched to selling baking powder with chewing gum as a gift. The gum became more popular than the baking powder, so the company switched to selling gum.
Pretty Fukang Old
The Fukang meteorite was found in the mountains near Fukang, China in 2000, and is a beautiful pallasite—a type of stony–iron meteorite with olivine crystals. The meteorite is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old.
It Ain't the Straws
An analysis of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a floating, France-sized gyre of oceanic plastic - found at least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch, by weight, comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest of the patch. Straws accounted for just .03 percent of the total.
A Muslim Invented Science
The scientific method of hypothesis tested by rigorous testing, which is the foundation upon which all modern science rests, was developed by Ibn al-Haytham, a Muslim.
Good News from Nepal, Bad New From China
Nepal is on track to become the first country in the world to double its wild tiger population since 2010. This good news from Nepal may be very temporary, however, as China has just reversed its tiger- and rhino-products ban.
7 comments:
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was credited with the science of taxonomy. He was a very active falconer as well.
vet here. your post on suturing vs stapling is really disappointing. please try understanding the problems, issues and techniques before casting blame.
FYI:
there is a time and place for both. all vets who perform surgery have to be able to do both. some of the great reasons for stapling: no matter how good at suturing one is (and i'm good, and fast, and therefore feel qualified to say) it is never as fast as stapling, which is lightning speed; hence a great scenario to use it is in closing skin on a patient who is high risk and needs to be out of anesthesia as quickly as possible. a second scenario: a pet who has allergic skin condition. sutures and glues and so forth, can be super inflammatory; staples, being made of metal rarely ever cause reaction. when staples are used internally (this is a special kind of staple, not the same as the skin staple used externally), it is often to permanently close large vessels or hollow structures that are at high risk if they were to open. internal sutures are more fragile than staples, and again, can cause inflammation and sometimes these qualities can cause breakage and high risk bleed-outs and infection. staples again, are more permanent, rarely inflammatory, and rarely break or slip.
one other interesting application of (skin) staples is based on the fact that they don't hurt much at all when applied. this is very useful, for example, in treating shelter dogs from off the street with superficial wounds and such. vets are not allowed to use anesthesia on patients without owner's permission, and the owners are almost never known in animals brought to the shelter. therefore when a street dog comes in with a gash that needs to be treated, we are able to clean it up and treat it, and staple the skin shut if necessary, with no anesthesia needed. pretty cool. that is the best outcome for all concerned, IMO. (anesthesia has risk, and let's not forget it is a drug and has effects on the body that are not always desired.)
in conclusion: the staple is really just a tool. it has a lot of pros, not a lot of cons.
i think the main con i can think of in it's use externally, is that it doesn't have quite the holding power that most suturing has, in for example a very large or tight (not a lot of skin to work with) wound; it must be said in both cases, however, that **the tissues that the wound MOST depends on for holding-together-power are the subcutaneous skin tissues, not the external skin layer**. these subcutaneous tissues are almost always sutured with suture, not staples. so whether the external skin is stapled or sutured is not really as important. kind of a non-issue, really.
The article is from the BBC -- something I do not yet control. The article begins: "A professor of surgery says students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients."
That is one of the problems with students not practicing surgery on real animals anymore, dead or alive, as learning tools in vet schools.
In *real life* practice however, things are different.
No one can’t control the BBC. However there are are two issues brought up in your post that are confused. One is a STUDENT issue; the other is your suggestive transference of that into real life vet practice.
Further, your own comment that (practicing) vets might be using staples because they are“really bad at basic hand work skills” does throw unnecessary shade, without due diligence.
If a less hand-skilled vet student becomes a practicing surgeon, they will have HAD to develop the hand skills required (not only to suture, but to handle tissues effectively) to pass their surgery internships and so forth.
So in real life vet practice, whether the external skin is stapled or not, is mostly a non-issue and kind of irrelevant. It’s the least important part of the surgery, if the subcutaneous layer is closed well.
If it makes the surgery quicker and less anesthesia and gas time is used, so much the better for all concerned.
Again, I am summarizing the BBC post.
The observation is from Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, who might be right. I applauded a vet for excellent sewing a while back -- but it was the first time I had reason to applaud in quite a few years.
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