By Kris B. Mamula
Pittsburgh Business Times
Updated: 8:00 p.m. ET May 15, 2005
He's a slender, unshaven pizza maker who helped load ceramic tile into his brother's car yesterday afternoon. Now, his back is killing him.
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The man gingerly leans forward in a hospital bed as Dr. Ted Delbridge works his fingers down the man's spine, feeling for anything out of place. The patient, who is 38 years old, lies back in the emergency department exam room. Dr. Delbridge asks him to lift each leg. The man complies slowly, wincing.
The pizza man is one of 49,000 people who will seek medical care this year in the emergency room at UPMC-Presbyterian Hospital in Oakland. In deciding how to treat patients, doctors like the 42-year-old Dr. Delbridge are mostly guided by experience and what they learned in medical school.
But that's quickly changing.
Read more...MSNBC
Posted by gruwell at May 16, 2005 7:25 PM | TrackBack