Dr oz is no wizard but no quack either

[KittyWampus]

8. The doctor who championed hand washing & briefly saved women's lives.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives


This is the story of a man whose ideas could have saved a lot of lives and spared countless numbers of women and newborns' feverish and agonizing deaths.

You'll notice I said "could have."

The year was 1846, and our would-be hero was a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis.
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He studied two maternity wards in the hospital. One was staffed by all male doctors and medical students, and the other was staffed by female midwives. And he counted the number of deaths on each ward.

When Semmelweis crunched the numbers, he discovered that women in the clinic staffed by doctors and medical students died at a rate nearly five times higher than women in the midwives' clinic.

But why?
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"The big difference between the doctors' ward and the midwives' ward is that the doctors were doing autopsies and the midwives weren't," she says.

So Semmelweis hypothesized that there were cadaverous particles, little pieces of corpse, that students were getting on their hands from the cadavers they dissected. And when they delivered the babies, these particles would get inside the women who would develop the disease and die.

If Semmelweis' hypothesis was correct, getting rid of those cadaverous particles should cut down on the death rate from childbed fever.

So he ordered his medical staff to start cleaning their hands and instruments not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. Chlorine, as we know today, is about the best disinfectant there is. Semmelweis didn't know anything about germs. He chose the chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by those little bits of corpse.

And when he imposed this, the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically.

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You'd think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren't thrilled.

For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women.