Finally Friday!

I'm particularly excited because I'm taking Monday off -- I'll have two 3-day week-ends in a row!  YAY!  But first, the news.

Should Lance Armstrong have given up his fight to prove that he wasn't doping?  He'll be stripped of all titles, medals, even prize money.  I want to believe that he's given up because the process was flawed, and not because he knew the evidence against him was overwhelming.  He's been an inspiration to many patients.  I read one opinion piece saying he'd have kept fighting if he was really innocent.  Very sad, either way.

A man walks into a hospital and puts a gun to his ailing wife's head and pulls the trigger.  Murder -- or mercy killing?  If it was a mercy killing, then I'm very sorry this man will spend the rest of his life in prison.  Married for 48 years, I can easily see how he thought he was doing the right thing, out of love.  What do you think?

The ever-wonderful Dr. Pauline Chen writes about doctor burn-out.  I get complaints all the time from patients whose doctors can't be bothered taking their inexplicable complaints seriously. I wonder if any of that has to do with the doctor's mental and physical status rather than simply not caring.  Burn-out affects primary care providers more than specialists -- doctors on the front lines, bombarded by demands on their time.  When they're burned out, they make mistakes, become detached, lose sight of why they wanted to be a doctor in the first place.  But what I want to know is what's a patient to do?

There was an outbreak of a deadly bug at the NIH hospital.  Six people died.  Eventually, the NIH figured out what it was and where it came from -- but while people were getting sick and dying, they didn't tell anybody.  Other patients in the hospital were exposed without their knowledge.  I think that's outrageous.

With the rise of West Nile virus, you should know what signs to look for.  Here's the low down.

Tattoo ink can be hazardous to your health.  Apparently, tattoo ink isn't required to be sterile, and several people have come down with nasty infections from it.  So if you're going to get inked, make sure it's in a shop that takes sterility seriously.

And that's it for this Friday morning.  Have a great day and a great week-end.  Jennifer