Many Kids With Head Injuries May Not Need CT Scans

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/05/09/136148430/many-kids-with-head-injuries-may-not-need-ct-scans?ps=sh_sthdl

Using CT scans to diagnose head injuries in children may needlessly expose them to radiation. And the scans also don't catch minor injuries any better than observing the child, according to a new study in the latest issue of Pediatrics.

But good luck getting your local emergency room to back off of them. They've become the go-to test for quickly diagnosing soft-tissue injuries, like bleeding on the brain, that won't show up in an X-ray.

And half of all children who go to an emergency room with a head injury now get CT scans, according to Lise Nigrovic, an attending physician in the emergency room at Children's Hospital Boston who led the study.

She asked ER doctors at 25 hospitals to record whether they observed a child with a head injury first rather than ordering up a CT. The children who were observed for four to six hours were half as likely to have a CT, compared to children who were not observed for symptoms.


I thought I remember reading somewhere that CT scans are serious cash cows for hospitals.

suspect there will be major lawsuits against the doctor and the hospital

that parents are anxious, and hospitals anxious to comfort them.

is to keep from being sued. The main reason they would rather NOT do them is to save money.

Neither of these reasons is in the best interest of the patient.

In the old days, keeping a patient overnight in the hospital to observe for serious head injuries was the standard of care. Nowadays, shooting an XRay and turfing them to the house seems to satisfy the legal requirements to keep someone from getting sued.

Now, they will have to manufacture a standard of care that includes someone being a responsible caregiver to watch over the patient so that they can reduce costs and maybe only lose an acceptable norm of 1 in 1000 kids to a head injury that could have prevented to satisfy cost cutting measures and stamp it with the endorsement of a couple of groups that have past reputations of caring for patients but have become nothing but lobbying interests for various monied interests these days.

And in the end, the citizens (especially the poor) will suffer because you can bet YOUR last dollar to a dime that if the standards are allowed to change, that a kid with the last name of Rodriguez on Medicaid will NOT have an XRay done but a kid with the last name of Rockefeller with private insurance will.