With more than half a million medical assistants on the job, medical assisting is one of the fastest growing professions in the United States. Given the high demand, you’d think MA jobs are falling out of trees, but chances are you will have to go searching, and here are some strategies for finding them, based on surveys conducted by the American Association of Medical Assistants (AAMA) that provide an interesting snapshot of the profession on a national level. Continue reading →
Over the past few decades, the trend in pubic hair length has gone from bushy to barely there, but very few people think of there being actual medical consequences to shaving their privates. Before you pick up that razor, here’s a rundown of some of the benefits and dangers. Continue reading →
The next time you complain about your doctor, thank your lucky stars that at least you’re not a patient of Virginia Helena Soares de Souza, a 56-year-old physician in Curitiba, Brazil who is accused of killing at least seven terminally ill people in order to free up beds in her hospital. Even scarier is the fact that she convinced seven (SEVEN!) other medical professionals — three doctors, three nurses and a physiotherapist — in the Evangelical Hospital to help her carry out the fiendish plot.
The group allegedly killed the victims using a two-pronged approach: first, using a “drug cocktail” of painkillers, sedatives and anesthetics to increase the patients’ reliance on respirators, and then by restricting the oxygen levels in those ventilation devices, causing them to die from asphyxiation. De Souza was the head of the intensive care unit (ICU) at the hospital and was quoted in recorded telephone conversations as stating that the crowded conditions in the ICU were making her “itch” and that she wanted to clean up the “clutter.”
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Medical assistants’ duties are as varied as the medical professionals they support. Some MAs’ responsibilities may be mostly clinical in nature, while others may be more administrative/clerical, but typically there’s a mix of the two. Before entering some fields, medical assistants may have the option of taking classes to earn certificates in their specialties, thus proving their knowledge and competency in their areas. Here’s a rundown of some of the specialist positions that medical assistants might want to explore. Continue reading →
In this all-access information age, some people don’t seem to realize that there are some things better left un-shared. Case in point: Twitter user @Grawly, who recently found himself in the prickly position of not being able to retrieve a vibrating dildo he’d inserted into his rectum. Most people would be hesitant to admit this to their friends, and many would do all they could to avoid visiting a hospital to remedy it, but Grawly did both in the most public way imaginable: by live-tweeting the entire incident. Continue reading →
