Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 003

• Spontaneous intracranial hypotension (SIH) or Schaltenbrand syndrome
• Spontaneous intracranial hypotension is caused by spontaneous spinal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leaks and is known for causing orthostatic headaches. It is an important cause of new headaches in young and middle-aged individuals, but initial misdiagnosis is common (reference)
• These postural headaches are most often referred to as SIH or SCSFLS (spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leak syndrome)
• The term Schaltenbrand syndrome has fallen out of favour as a result of it’s association with the man who originally described the condition in 1938 – German neurologist Dr. Georg Schaltenbrand. Schaltenbrand was associated with unethical medical experimentation on humans in Nazi Germany.

..flawed horror of Schaltenbrandt’s experiments. This made instructive, if harrowing, reading. Schaltenbrand felt that the risks of this study, though low, were such that he could use only “verblodete menschen” (literally “demented individuals”). In all, 45 patients were subjected to intracisternal and intravenous injection of cerebrospinal fluid or serum taken from humans or monkeys. At least one of the subjects was a child with learning difficulties.

• More recently the condition has been described when the former Australian opposition leader, and current United States ambassador designate Kim Beazley was diagnosed with the condition.

• Medical Residents (in India)
  

CONCLUSION: Sleeping on foam mattress is associated with the appearance of backache in medical residents which is reproducible and gets relieved after using regular cotton mattresses.

• The foam mattress-back syndrome

• A double-blind randomised controlled trial.
• The DBRCT definition of ‘two orthopaedic surgeons trying to read an electrocardiogram‘ has been attributed to the late Nick J. Taffinder (1965-2003), a British colorectal and general surgeon. His moving account of how he diagnosed a nurse with rectal cancer while he was an inpatient awaiting an operation on his own malignancy is well worth reading.

• The inability to identify which part of the body has been touched.
• Topagnosis is a symptom of disease in the parietal lobe of the brain.
• It is the parietal lobe which guides the movement of the body in space, coordinating body movement while running, walking, skipping, or climbing over obstacles.
• The parietal lobe are also considered a “lobe of the hand” and receives sensory sensations from the bones, tendons, muscles, and skin of the hand, and guides the movement of the hand in visual-space. Therefore, the ability to reach for and manipulate a tool, open and remove the cap from a bottle and pour the contents into a glass, are made possible by the parietal lobe in association with the frontal motor areas and the visual cortex.

• Testing the reflexes; it is a tendon hammer