Greedy Trial Lawyer
It's Not The Spiders, Stupid!
Category: In Your Face
A rather large number of doctors have obviously concluded that brown spiders have commenced a coordinated assault upon homo sapiens. They have reached this conclusion without the benefit of any scientific evidence and in the face of overwhelming evidence in the medical literature that what they are treating as spider bites (sometimes multiple spider bites) is actually a life-threatening staph infection, MRSA. It would be comical if it were not deadly for some of the misdiagnosed patients.
A news article from St. Louis:
Cases of a virulent form of staph infection are not only skyrocketing in the St. Louis region and elsewhere, but some local doctors are allowing its spread by misdiagnosing the bacterial infection as spider bites.
The superbug is called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. It can be dangerous because it doesn't respond to some of the standard antibiotic treatment...
A severe case of untreated staph can become life-threatening, causing pneumonia or bone, joint or bloodstream infections....
In August, a 4-year-old boy died at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital from antibiotic-resistant staph that had spread into his bloodstream, bones and lungs....
"It seems to be spreading willy-nilly through the population for reasons we don't understand," said Dr. R. William Burmeister, an infectious-disease specialist with a private practice in south St. Louis County....
"It's been escalating astronomically," said Burmeister, who is also an epidemiologist at Jefferson Memorial Hospital. "The biggest problem is the level of knowledge among doctors. They are looking at it and saying it looks like a brown spider bite and then they don't treat it in an appropriate manner."
One of his patients, a woman from Waterloo who didn't want her name published, was misdiagnosed several times, suffering from large, painful boils for a year before she was successfully treated. The boils spread across her abdomen, back and upper legs.
"A doctor in the emergency room told me it was a spider bite, not to worry about it," she said. "He absolutely wouldn't treat it as anything other than a spider bite. I was furious when I left the hospital."
Her husband, who also got infected, had to be hospitalized. He, too, initially had been diagnosed with a spider bite.
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