The abx script really makes me think they just wanted this guy gone from the ER. Every time I've taken one of my four kids on with a high fever (highest being 105, and I don't scare easy but that had me on edge) they do NOT run a CAT scan and send them home with abx. It's always run some blood tests, get the fever down a bum it and monitor them an hour or so, push fluids, then say it's viral. No scripts given. Go home and follow the usual tepid baths/fever reducer for comfort if necessary/push more fluids, wait it out.
IME having worked in healthcare settings docs WILL often give a script for amoxicillin and send the patient home. It makes the patient feel like something has been done and gives them something concrete they can do to feel like they will get better. Most times, the patient will not be back - not because the abx worked, but because whatever virus it is will have just run it's course naturally.
What perplexes me so much is the reliance on the patient for 100% accurate info when taking history. Anyone with any experience at all knows that patients are not always forthcoming about every detail. So even though Duncan supposedly said he did not have contact with anyone who was sick, he DID disclose that he had recently arrived from Liberia/west Africa. That plus the fever should have had him isolated immediately. That they did not tells me that this hospital/health district has NOT been paying attention to CDC bulletins and preparing for the inevitable. That they sent him home with antibiotics tells me they were tryin to get him out the door and betting (and 9/10 times they'd have been right) that he wouldn't return.
That, according to some reports, they have him a cat scan, is just odd.
hoh:
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