You would think that after years of fancy Doctor school, surgeons would know better then to sew you back up with say, a sponge or other equipment inside of you. These bozos are basically using their patients for mobile storage of their equipment. At least we can now do something about the sponges. The idea is that every single sponge has to be accounted for. You can’t rely on nurses to manually count the sponges before and after an operation. They’re too busy admiring and having sex with Doctor Hunk to give a toss.

Rely instead on the Safety-Sponge system from SurgiCount. It uses special bar codes printed on every sponge that are scanned into a PocketPC computer before and after they’re used. Because every single sponge has a unique bar code, the system even alerts the operating room staff if the same sponge has been scanned twice. So now you know. There is no longer any reason for these quacks to leave sponges inside of you. Other tools are still fair game, though. Like those tweezers in your abdomen.

Loyola University Medical Center will be one of the first hospitals in the US to use a Virtual Reality (VR) game to help aid burn patients in their recovery. The idea is that it will distract patients from their pain as they enter into a virtual ‘polar landscape of gently falling snowflakes, snowmen, penguins, igloos and icy rivers.’

According to the game’s developers the game will cause the mind to ‘block your view of the real world’ while helping you escape from your pain. I guess only time will tell just how well it works and with how many burn patients. While I think that the mind can be distracted, it remains to be seen if you can block out that kind of pain just be tricking the other senses. Then again, in burn cases, any distraction from the pain is a welcome thing and has to help in their recovery.

You might remember Walletex, makers of mp3 players on a super slim card. Now they want to get into the medical records game. The Wallet MediCard is an ultra slim USB flash card that will fit medical documentation on it, and you can even fill out personal health records on the outside of it too.

There’s one big problem with the idea. If you lose this card, you’re loosing valuable medical records and privacy. The concept is enough to make anyone nervous. Obviously they could make the card secure, but even as you lose a totally secure card, it’s still lost, so what is the point?