heck if I know...but you're gonna find out just like I did! Sometimes these doctors give me a diagnosis I'm not familiar with and at the end of my day I go look it up out of curiosity. Don't yuns share my morbid fascination with the human body and all the syndromes that could befall it? There are tons of syndromes and disorders out there, and some I've explored like Alice in Wonderland syndrome; there's always more like head bobbing doll syndrome, blue diaper and bronze baby syndrome to name a few, but today we are exploring the case of "hemineglect."
It has long been known, in case you didn’t know, bloggers, that the left hemisphere of the brain is dominant for language function, and the right hemisphere is important for emotional behavior, speech tasks, and visual perceptual tasks such as facial recognition and spatial attention. If you never paid attention to how the brain functions, you probably won’t have to worry about it unless you have a stroke…then shit hits the fan.
Left hemineglect syndrome is a condition in which the patient tends to ignore the world to his or her left. This condition, which is caused by a lesion (aka blocked artery) to the nondominant hemisphere (typically the right hemisphere), is most often the result of stroke. It results in significant impairment of function. It can be so profound that a patient is unable to recognize that even the left extremities are part of their own body. Can you imagine?
The deficit may be so profound that patients are unaware of large objects, even people, towards their neglected or contralesional side - the side of space opposite brain damage. They may eat from only one side of a plate, write on one side of a page, shave or make-up only the non-neglected or ipsilesional side of their face (same side as brain damage). Their drawings may fail to include items towards the neglected side, for example when placing the numbers in a drawing of a clock they leave out one whole side of numbers, like in that drawing. I guess there could be a plus side to this, in that when painting your house you would only half to paint one side of a room?! hmm…that’s something to ponder.
I suppose instead of all this research I could have just asked Dr. Grumpy!
So, there you have it bloggers, your medical lesson for today!
What Is Hemineglect? and Why should you care?
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found you on erp...unsung hero transcribing all that mumble jumbly that the docs speed talk into the phone. Unsung hero of our industry especially when all those damn records get pulled up in trial.
ReplyDeletesometimes they can't spleak splain for splutterin'! and I'm too tired to care by the afternoon!
ReplyDeleteI knew this, LOL, but why wouldn't I not know this?? even after 30 years of transcribing, every once in awhile I still get something I haven't heard before so I need to google it to learn; fascinating field, isn't it?
ReplyDeletebett
yeah, Betty, why wouldn't we not know this, indeed! ha! some days can be quite fascinating and then turn suddenly frustrating depending on the dictator. I'm,sure you had your share of bad dictators. We had this one cardiologist who I am not kidding you ...mumbled, slurred, and ate...and there was no actual words he said that were intelligible! Finally after much distress he had a template of normals made up, and anything that wasn't normal looked rather holey! LOL
ReplyDeleteWow that's a mouthful. I'm just like you I research things to death. I think that's an occupational hazard of being a blogger !
ReplyDeleteWhat a great post for me, a serious hypochondriac! HA!
ReplyDelete